Chapter 30
The games began after the noon meal, and Olivia discovered that she had never in her life seen anything like a Highlander determined to prove himself in front of the woman he could not have.
She had not meant to watch him. She had meant to do precisely what she had promised—to walk the festival ground at his side and be seen and be gracious and let both clans grow used to the strange new sight of an Arran and a Crawford standing peaceably in the sun.
She had managed half of it.
She had admired the booths and praised the village women’s baking, allowing a shy Cairn child to press a fistful of wilting heather into her hand.
Then the men shed their shirts for the caber toss, and Ragnall stepped up to the large peeled trunk with his sleeves rolled back and his forearms corded, and she completely forgot what gracious was.
Stop it. Stop watchin’ him like a starvin’ woman at a baker’s window. Every soul here can see ye doin’ it, and half of them already think ye bewitched the man. Look at the river. Look at the bannocks. Look at anythin’ on God’s green earth that isnae the way his back moves when he… Oh, daenae.
He hefted the caber upright, all sixteen feet of it balanced against his shoulder, took three running strides, and threw.
The great trunk turned end over end and landed dead center, and a roar erupted from both banks, Cairn and Blythe together, because a caber thrown that well was a feat no matter whose blood threw it.
“He’s showin’ off,” Anne observed, materializing at Olivia’s elbow with a Scotch pie in each hand. “For you. It’s quite shameless. I find I rather like him.”
“He isnae showin’ off. He’s the Laird. He has to compete; it’s expected of him.”
“Mm. And the bit just now where he looked straight at ye before he threw?” Anne handed her a pie. “Expected of him as well, was it nae?”
Olivia ate the pie rather than answering, which was a tactical error, because it was a very good pie, and it left her nothing to do with her treacherous eyes but watch her husband win the hammer throw, too.
The afternoon unspooled gold, loud, and astonishing.
Tug o’ war, with a Cairn team and a Blythe team hauling each other through a muddy patch by the water until both sides collapsed laughing into the muck, the old hatred drowned for an hour in shared ridiculousness.
A foot race won by a Blythe shepherd so fleet that even the Cairn folk cheered him on.
Maisie held court on a cushioned chair beneath an awning, pretending to doze and waking sharply to fleece passing clansmen of their coin at a game of chance she very plainly understood far better than they did.
And everywhere, underfoot and overjoyed, was Tattie, who had decided the festival had been built for his benefit alone, and went from trestle to trestle, accepting tribute with the dignity of a visiting king.
Then they brought out the archery targets, and something in Olivia woke up.
She had been skilled with a bow once. Before her mother gently took her by the wrist and led her away from the training yard toward the embroidery and gardens, and all the soft, small cages a girl was meant to be grateful for.
Her hands remembered, even if the rest of her had been taught to forget, and she stood watching the men loose their arrows with an ache in her fingers she had not felt in years.
“Ye want to try,” said a low voice at her shoulder. Ragnall. He was close, and warm, and smelled of clean sweat and river water and the unique scent of him she had spent a month failing to forget. “I can see it on yer face, lassie. Ye’re a poor liar; I’ve told ye so.”
“Women daenae shoot at the games.”
“Cairn women do as they please. It’s a great failin’ in our breedin’.” The scar tugged at his scarred lip. “Go on. Put one in the gold and watch yer braither’s councilmen swallow their tongues. I daenae think there’s a pleasure on this earth ye’d enjoy more.”
She should not have. It was unladylike and improper and exactly the wrong way for a peace-weaving lady to behave, and the festival ground had gone watchful, and her brother’s solemn councilmen were watching, and somewhere among them, though she did not yet know it, a patient hand was watching too.
She took the bow.
A hush fell over the festival ground as she stepped up to the line, an enemy bride in a borrowed plaid lifting a Cairn bow with the easy familiarity her hands had never truly forgotten. She felt Ragnall go still behind her. She felt the glen hold its breath.
She nocked the arrow and drew, and the old strength came back into her shoulder like a friend long missed. She looked down the shaft at the distant gold and let herself, for one bright reckless moment, be exactly who she was.
She loosed the arrow.
And in the half-instant before it struck, in the perfect waiting silence of three hundred souls, a man’s voice rang out across the festival ground, raw with fury, pointed straight at her.
“There! Ye see it with yer own eyes! The Blythe witch takes up arms in the very heart of Cairn, and our Laird stands by and smiles. How many more of us should die afore ye ken what she is?”
The arrow hit the gold dead center.
Olivia heard it strike, a clean, hard thock in the waiting silence, and for half a breath, nobody moved at all. Faces turned from the target to her and back again, and the heckler’s words hung over the festival ground like smoke.
“The Blythe witch takes up arms in the heart of Cairn.”
She felt Ragnall stiffen beside her, felt him draw breath to answer it, to put the full cold weight of the Laird between her and the crowd the way he had done at the wedding, the way he would do until it got him killed.
She put her hand flat on his chest.
“Nay,” she whispered. “Nae this time. Ye cannae kill yer way to peace, Ragnall. Let me.”
She did not wait for his leave. She handed the bow back to the gaping Cairn man she had borrowed it from, and she walked out into the open space before the targets where both clans could see her, a woman alone between two clans and belonging to neither one of them, and she pitched her voice to carry as her father had taught her in the years before he gave up and taught her brothers instead.
“Aye, I took up a bow,” she called. “I willnae deny it. Me maither spent twenty years tryin’ to make a lady out of me.
” She found Elspeth’s face in the Blythe crowd without meaning to.
“She’s stood right there, if any of ye want a look at her, and she’ll tell ye herself what a poor job she made of it. ”
“A shockin’ job,” Elspeth called back, without moving from where she stood, and did not so much as blink.
Laughter rose around both banks at once, Cairn and Blythe together, and Olivia felt the ground shift slightly beneath her feet.
“Ye want to ken what I am? I will tell ye plainly. Since the man’s so keen, the whole glen should hear it.”
She turned slowly, taking them all in, both banks, both clans.
“I am the woman somebody tried to murder in her bed a month ago. I am the woman whose festival fire was burned in the night and whose colors were hung up to take the blame for it. I am the woman who’s stood here the whole day, a Blythe in a borrowed plaid, and watched yer two clans toss the caber together and haul each other through the mud and cheer a shepherd’s quick feet without a care for whose blood ran through his veins. ”
“Ye want to ken what I am.” Her voice cracked and held. “I’ll tell ye what I am. I’m the only soul standin’ at this ford that has wept at both ends of it.”
Nobody laughed now.
“I buried me faither and me braither in Blythe ground, and there are Cairn men here who were happy about it. I ken yer faces, and I’ll ken them till the day I die.
” She let that land, and she did not soften it.
“I sat up in Cairn Castle with a lass whose bones me own braither broke. I held the bairn he’d have stolen.
I watched Cairn women weep at gravesides for men that Blythe steel put in the ground, and I stood there in the middle of it with me own kin’s blood on me name, and nae one soul under that roof would look at me. ”
Her hands were shaking. She did not hide them.
“There’s nae a person at this river who’s had both.
Only me. So I’m the only one here who can tell ye the thing none of ye will believe.
” She looked from bank to bank. “It’s the same weeping.
It’s the very same. A Cairn widow and a Blythe widow make the same sounds, and I have heard both of them, and I couldnae tell ye which was which if ye put a blade to me throat. ”
The fire crackled in the silence.
“Somebody’s been feedin’ this. Aye. Yer Laird’s told ye so, and he’s right.
But I’ll nae stand here and pretend that a wicked man is the whole reason, for he isnae.
He only sparked it. We’ve been the ones feedin’ it for fifty years with our own hands and callin’ it honor while we did it.
” Her chin lifted. “I’m done. I’ve nothing left to put in that fire. I’ve nothing left to burn.”
The silence held a moment longer, taut as a drawn string.
It was not a man who broke it. It was a woman on the Cairn bank, gray-headed, with her arms folded, who had buried a husband at this river eleven years ago and had not spoken a civil word to a Blythe in all that time.
“Then put another in the gold, lass,” she called, “and let the whole glen watch ye do it.”
The festival ground erupted in a roar, both banks at once. The heckler’s voice was lost in it, and Olivia saw two of her brother’s men quietly take the man by the arms and draw him back out of the crowd.
She put another arrow in the gold. Of course she did. And the cheer that went up shook the birds out of the alders along the river.
When she walked back to Ragnall, her knees had weakened, the whole reckless courage of it draining out of her at once. The look on his face almost undid her right there in front of the entire glen.
Daenae look at me like that, ye great fool of a man. Ye will undo both of us. I can feel every eye in this place, and half of them already think I bewitched ye. But the truth is so much worse. The truth is ye’ve gone and bewitched me, and I rode the whole way here swearin’ I’d nae let ye.
“Ye were right,” he murmured. “About what ye said. I’d have been a fool to waste it.”
The light went long and gold and then rose over the hills, and the gloaming came down soft on the river, and they lit the fire.
The entire glen built it, and the entire glen lit it, Cairn and Blythe shoulder to shoulder, and it roared up into the violet dark sky in a great fountain of sparks while the piper played and the fiddles caught the tune and the smell of roasting meat, black bun, and Scotch broth drifted over the water.
Olivia ate too much and laughed too loud and danced the reels with shy Cairn lads and her brother’s grinning men.
She watched Kate dance with Alastair, the two of them lit like a pair of lanterns, pretending fiercely that they were not.
She watched Maisie teach Lucas’s stiffest councilman a game of chance that would cost him his dignity and likely his purse.
And in the long, bright evening, she did not dance with Ragnall.
She felt him the way she always felt him—a banked fire at her back wherever she went. She caught his eyes across the flames a dozen times and looked away a dozen more.
For to dance with him was to take his hand, and to take his hand was to break the one rule she had left, the rule that had kept her safe and wretched for a month, and she did not trust herself, with the firelight and the music and the whole bewitching night of it, to stop at a hand.
The fire had burned down to a deep red glow, and the music had gone slow and sweet when at last he crossed the trampled grass toward her. The crowd seemed to part for him. He stopped in front of her and said not a word. He only held out his hand, palm up in the firelight, and waited.
“Ye ken I cannae,” she whispered. “Ragnall, ye ken what happens if I take yer hand.”
“Aye,” he said. “I ken exactly what happens.” The scar tugged. His hand did not move, open and steady and waiting between them. “Take it anyway, lassie.”
And Olivia, who had defied a council and a clan and her own treacherous heart at every turn for a month, looked at her husband’s open hand in the dying firelight and stopped defying the one thing she had wanted since the bend in the road took Cairn out of her sight.
She took his hand.