Chapter 35
She found Lucas at the water’s edge in the bright light, scrubbing the blood from his hands as if he intended to wash away the very skin with it.
“He used me,” he said, not looking up from the red water running off his knuckles.
His young voice had gone hollow and raw.
“Every council meeting I attended since they put the chain on me, he was there at me elbow, soft as ye like, steerin’ me where he wanted me to go and lettin’ me think the steps were mine. I nearly killed a man last night.”
“Lucas…”
“Nay, I nearly put the match to the war that would finish both our clans for good, and I’d have done it certain.
I’d have swung and never stopped if ye hadnae thrown yerself between us—” He broke off and scrubbed harder.
“I am nae fit for this. Faither kent it well. The Elders kent it well. It’s how an auld serpent like Noah found me such soft and willin’ clay to work. ”
“Lucas, stop.” Olivia waded into the cold water to her ankles and caught his wet, red hands in both of hers and made him lift his head and look at her.
“Ye laid down yer sword last night, Lucas. In the sight of yer whole clan, with a dead man at yer feet and every drop of blood in yer body screamin’ at ye to swing it.
Do ye ken how few men who draw breath would do such a thing?
Faither couldnae have done it. Magnus would never in his life have so much as thought to try.
” She squeezed his hands. “Ye’re nae soft clay, Braither.
Ye’re the first laird this glen has seen in three generations with the spine to choose the harder road with his own kin watchin’.
Now, go and dry yer hands and away and be him. ”
He went to Ragnall an hour after, in the broad light, before both gathered and grieving clans, and Olivia thought that it was the single bravest thing she had watched a frightened young man do.
“Laird Cairn.” Lucas’s voice carried steady enough across the hush, which cost him.
She could see what it cost him. “Ye took a blade meant for an old Cairn woman last night who should have never been threatened in the first place. Ye laid yer sword in the dirt when ye had every right under heaven to use it, and to use it on me. And ye killed with yer own hand the man who’s been bleedin’ both our clans white since long afore either of us drew breath. ”
He swallowed, and his jaw tightened. “I’ve nae made me peace yet with what happened to me faither, nor to me braither, and I honestly daenae ken if I ever will.
But I ken now, past all doubt, that the man who told me ye were the root of all our griefs was himself the root of every last one.
And I willnae carry his war on for him a single day longer than this.
” He put out his hand into the air between them.
“The feud ends here. Truly, this time, and for good. Ye have me word on it as the Laird of Clan Blythe.”
Ragnall looked down at the proffered hand for a long moment, his own wounded arm wrapped dark and stiff at his side. Then he took it and gripped it tightly to show that he meant it.
The two clans stood and watched their Lairds clasp hands over the cold, gray ashes of the festival fire. Then a sound went up from both banks of the water that Olivia had never heard in all her life.
It was no war cry. It was a ragged, exhausted, half-disbelieving cheer, the sound of both clans setting down a weight at last that their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had died beneath. But Ragnall, even in the grip of her brother’s hand, was not looking at her brother.
He was looking at her, across the whole trampled width of the festival ground, the way he had looked at her across the ford and across the nursery and across the breadth of every room the two of them had ever stood in together, as if no number of bodies set between them had ever once made the least difference to him.
He let go of Lucas’s hand, then slowly crossed the ground toward her, his arm bound and the new sun at his back.
He stopped before her and said in a voice pitched low for her ears only, “I think it’s long past time the two of us talked, lassie. Truly talked. With nay edict, and nay enemies, and nay rule left for either of us to duck behind.” His dark eyes moved over her bruised and weary face. “Will ye come?”
“Aye,” Olivia said, before her pride or her fear could get so much as a word in edgewise. “I will come.”
She looked past him to the south road, the one that ran home to Cairn, and lifted her chin.
“Let’s go to our castle. It’s the closer of the two.” She heard herself say our, plain as anything, in front of both the gathered clans, and she did not take it back.
She had said it without once thinking to stop herself, as if it were the most natural word to set between them, as if it had not taken a dead man and a burned festival and a blade driven clean through his arm to bring the two of them to a place where she could say it to him at all.
And Olivia, who had ridden away from Cairn a month past, swearing on her father’s grave that she would never once call it home, felt the small word settle into the hollow place beneath her ribs and lie there easily, as if it had been cut and shaped to fit her the whole while.
They rode for Cairn through the thin gold light of the morning after, and Ragnall could not, for the whole length of that road, find the beginning of what he needed to say to her.
He had killed a man at dawn, and bled into the grass, and held a fragile peace together with nothing but his two bare hands and his breaking voice, and not one moment of all that black weight had frightened him the way the woman riding silent at his side now did.
She had borrowed a horse from her brother instead of riding home in a cart this time, and she sat astride it easily, her red hair loose and wild from the long night. Every mile she did not speak was a mile he spent building and tearing down a hundred broken confessions in his mind.
Say it plainly, ye great coward. Ye stood down two clans last night with yer sword in the mud and yer voice the one weapon left to ye, and held them. Ye can surely stand down a red-haired lass.
Tell her the thing ye should have told her in the nursery, the truth ye lied through yer teeth about to keep both of ye safe.
Noah’s in the cold ground, the feud’s over, and the edict’s served.
There’s nothin’ left standin’ between the two of ye now but the plain truth, and ye are too afraid of it to say the words. Some laird ye are this mornin’.
Cairn appeared gray and familiar on its high green hill, and the entire castle spilled out into the yard to greet them.
For a long time, there was no conversation at all. Kate was crying and laughing at the same time and could not seem to stop either.
Rosie let out a shriek of pure joy from her aunt’s arms that nearly shook the slats off the gatehouse roof.
Tattie came down the steps like a landslide of devoted hound and nearly knocked Olivia off her feet in the helpless ecstasy of his welcome.
She dropped to her knees in the muck of the yard, laughing, and let the big, goofy creature wash her bruised face raw while she cradled the baby against her other side.
Ragnall stood back from the whole bright tangle of it and watched his wife laugh in the mud of his courtyard with his niece and his dog in her arms, and felt the last of his careful defenses give quietly way beneath him.
Old Tavish was there at the edge of the yard, leaning on his stick. He looked at Olivia, with the bairn on her hip and the dog at her heel, and then he gave one slow nod, grave and deliberate, and turned away and went in to his supper without a word to anybody.
It was the first thing he had given her in a year, and it was everything he had.
Even Isla’s husband stood by the well with his bonnet in his hands when Olivia passed, and ducked his head to her and said, “Me Lady,” rough and shy.
The word had changed its weight in their mouths overnight. They had all stood on that ground in the dark and watched their Lady throw herself between two lairds to stop the killing, and a clan did not forget a thing it had seen with its own eyes.
“Well?” said his grandmother at his elbow, who had risen from her bed of a near-murder with an energy that frankly alarmed him and was watching him watch his wife with bright, pitiless eyes.
She had buried people and outlived a war, and very little in this life got past her.
“Are ye goin’ to stand here in the muck of yer yard till ye are as auld and as daft as me, grandson, or are ye goin’ to tell yer wife the thing ye’ve been chokin’ on since the night of yer weddin’?”
“I daenae ken how, Grandmaither.”
“Ye open yer great stubborn mouth,” said Maisie, unmoved, “and ye let the truth fall plain out of it, the way ye’ve let every blunt and graceless thing fall out of it yer whole life.
She willnae be needin’ it pretty, that one.
She will only be needin’ it true.” She thumped him square on his good arm with the head of her stick.
“Away with ye, now. Afore I die of waitin’, which at me age is nay idle threat. ”