Epilogue
Six months on, Cairn Castle had never in its long, grim history seen a fuss made like the one it made over the first birthday of a bairn nobody had even troubled to name for the first month of her life.
Olivia stood in the middle of the Great Hall with that same bairn on her hip and looked at what half a year had wrought, and thought her heart might not be big enough for the size of it.
The hall was hung with greenery, and the last of the autumn brambles and swags of Crawford green and Blythe blue twisted together the whole length of the beams.
There were bannocks stacked in towers, and a great pot of Scotch broth going at the fire, and black bun cut in dark, rich slabs, and a wee honey cake in the middle of it all that Cook had guarded from the hound with her life since the gray of the forenoon.
A fiddler and a piper had struck up together in the corner, and Blythe and Cairn folk danced the reel between the tables with no more thought to it than if they had done so their whole lives.
On the high wall, the two clans’ colors hung side by side, where a year past, there had hung only Crawford green above a barred and watchful gate.
Her mother had come, and Lucas, riding openly under Blythe colors to a Cairn feast, which would have been madness a year ago and was only a homecoming now.
Anne had also arrived, wearing her spectacles, her sharp eyes missing nothing and her quiet mouth curved in the small private smile she reserved for those she loved.
She had taken one look at Olivia among the Cairn folk, who now called her their Lady without a hint of hesitation, squeezed her hand tightly, and said nothing—yet, in her own way, saying everything.
Her mother found her in the thick of it, the way she always could. She pressed a warm, dry kiss to Olivia’s cheek and stood a moment at her side, taking in the two colors twined the length of the beams and the Cairn wife laughing at some jest of Lucas’s over the broth.
“I told ye once,” she said softly, “that things happen for the reasons they happen, and ye nearly bit me head off for sayin’ it, as I recall.” There was no reproach in it, only the deep, settled calm of a woman who had buried a husband and a son and gone on believing in kindness all the same.
“I willnae say I am glad of the road that carried ye here, lass. Some roads are too dear-bought to be glad of, and I will grieve yer faither and yer braither for the rest of me days. But I am glad beyond any tellin’ of the place it set ye down.”
Olivia had no answer to that. She only leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder, there in the middle of the loud, bright hall, and let herself be held like a girl again.
And then Kate came through the crowd toward them with the birthday girl on her hip, Olivia taking Rosie in her own arms as soon as they reached her.
Elspeth did not let go of Olivia, but Olivia felt her arm tighten and then go still.
“She willnae come to me at all now,” Kate laughed, holding out her arms and getting a decided turn of a chubby shoulder for her trouble.
Rosie buried her rosy face in Olivia’s neck and gripped a fistful of Olivia’s bodice and made her opinion of being handed off perfectly plain.
“A year I’ve spent healin’, and the wee traitor’s decided in that same year she’d liefer have her auntie than her own ma.”
“She kens fine who sneaks her honey cakes,” Olivia quipped.
Her mother had not spoken.
Olivia turned her head. Elspeth was looking at the baby in her arms with an expression Olivia had never once seen on her face in all her life, and could not read, and did not want to.
Then it was gone, and her mother was smiling and reaching out to let the wee one grip her finger.
“She’s a bonnie thing,” Elspeth cooed. “She has yer eyes, lass.”
“Aye,” Olivia said. Her mouth had gone entirely dry. “She does.”
Kate smiled at that.
She had come back to herself by inches, the way spring comes back, arguing over nothing and stealing the last bannock and teasing her brother till he reddened, and somewhere in the middle of it, she had picked up her own daughter off the nursery floor and not set her down since, except to sleep.
Tattie, the great daft hound, wove between their legs with his tail going like a flail, following Olivia and the baby step for step around the hall in the hope of falling cake, and every soul he near upended only laughed and let him by, for the beast had long since appointed himself Olivia’s shadow, and there was no arguing him out of the post.
Maisie watched it all from her chair by the fire with a cup of something she was not by rights meant to have, her old eyes bright and pitiless and pleased, missing nothing, as she never had in her long life.
When the wee honey cake was brought in at last, Cook carrying it high and fierce through a gauntlet of grasping small hands and one hopeful hound, it was Maisie they called upon for the blessing, as the eldest soul beneath the roof.
She heaved herself up on her stick and fixed the whole company with a gimlet eye until the hall went quiet for her.
“To the bairn,” she said, lifting her cup, “who came into this world in the black middle of a feud and has spent her first year teachin’ these two thrawn clans how to sit at one board without reachin’ for a dirk.
There’s nae a general in all of Scotland who has done more for the peace than this wee dumplin’ here.
” She raised her cup higher, and her old voice cracked with the effort of it. “To yer health, lass. Slàinte mhath!”
Three hundred cups went up, and the hall roared it back at her in one voice, Cairn and Blythe together, “Slàinte mhath!”
Rosie, delighted past bearing by the noise she had caused, banged both fat fists on Olivia’s shoulders and crowed.
Ragnall came through the press of dancers toward them, and even now, half a year from the night the two of them had truly become man and wife, the sight of him crossing a room toward her still did something foolish to her breathing.
He set his hand on the small of her back and pressed his mouth to Rosie’s dark curls and then to Olivia’s temple, and Maisie cackled aloud by the fire at whatever she read in the pair of them.
“A letter came this mornin’,” he said low, for her ear only, so as not to trouble the day with it.
“From the religious house at Kilmory. Brigid’s taken the veil there.
” She went still against him. “She wrote me a while back, when the whole black business with Noah came out into the light. The auld man had been in her ear for a long while, feedin’ the bitterness in her, turnin’ what she’d once felt into somethin’ he could put to his own use.
She was ashamed of it, and I think, for the first time, afraid of what she’d let herself become.
She sent word of a thing or two of his doings that helped us be certain of the shape of it, and then she informed me that she planned to leave Laird Munro’s castle and go somewhere quiet and be done with the world of men entirely. ”
“Ye showed her mercy,” Olivia said.
“I showed her a door that wasnae a grave.” He looked down at her, and the old scar caught the candlelight. “I’ve grown right fond of doors that arenae graves this past year. A red-haired woman taught me the way of them, when I’d nearly forgotten there was such a thing.”
Before she could find an answer to that, Alastair stepped up on the low dais at the hall’s end and called for quiet, red to the ears and grinning like a raw lad, and the fiddle and the pipes scraped to a ragged halt.
“I willnae keep ye long from the dancin’,” he said, “for I am nay hand at speeches, and me betrothed will tell ye so herself and charge ye a penny for it.” A roar went up at the word betrothed, and Kate went pink to the ears and lifted her chin and did not deny a word of it.
“Kate’s done me the honor she had nay reason on this earth to do me, and we’re to be wed at the turn of the year.
And there’s but one wee soul in this hall whose leave I’ve nae yet thought to ask.
” He stepped down from the dais and crossed the floor to Olivia and held out his big scarred hands to the baby, grave as a man stood before a council of Elders.
“Rosie Crawford, will ye have me for a faither and let me spoil ye rotten for the rest of me days?”
The whole hall held its breath.
Rosie regarded him from the safe high fortress of Olivia’s neck, sucking on two fingers, weighing the great fool up and down.
Then she took her fingers out of her mouth with a wet pop and pitched herself forward out of Olivia’s arms and into Alastair’s, and flung both fat arms around his neck and squeezed for all she was worth, and the hall erupted in cheers that nearly lifted the beams off the walls.
Kate pressed both hands to her mouth and wept and laughed at once, and Maisie thumped her stick on the flagstones in approval, and even Lucas was grinning like the boy he still half was.
It was in the very thick of that cheering, with the fiddle starting up afresh and the whole hall surging in to clap Alastair on the back and pass the baby hand to willing hand, that the floor tilted gently under Olivia, and the golden light went silver and swimming at the edges, and she reached out and caught the back of a chair.
She was not on the floor. Ragnall had her before she even reached it, one arm like an iron band around her waist, the color draining from his face.
“Olivia.” He cast his gaze round the crowded hall as if for a throat to set his hand to. “What is it? Who? Where’s the healer? Someone fetch… What’s wrong with ye? Tell me. Who did this? Who do I—”
“Ragnall.” She lifted a hand to his jaw and turned his wild face back to her own.
He was in full black temper, the old dangerous stillness up in his eyes, a man casting frantically about for an enemy to put down because the woman in his arms had swayed on her feet, and she loved him so much in that moment that she could scarcely draw breath around it.
“Ragnall, ye great fool. Peace. There’s nay one here to kill. ”
“Ye nearly went down.”
“Aye. I did.” She drew his head down and put her mouth close to his ear so the crowded, laughing hall would not have it before he did.
“I didnae want to say it today and take the shine off Kate’s good news.
But ye may as well ken the why of it, afore ye put half yer own guests to the sword.
” She felt him go utterly, breathlessly still against her. “I am with child, husband.”
He drew back and looked at her, and she watched as it moved across his face—the black temper fading away, replaced by something vast, stunned, and undefended.
It was the face of a man who had once sworn on his sister’s broken body never to want anything this badly, for fear that the wanting itself would break him. Now, he looked at the woman who had shattered that promise completely and made him so glad beyond words about the breaking.
“A bairn,” he said. Barely a sound at all.
“A bairn. Come spring.”
Ragnall Crawford, the Laird of Clan Cairn, who rarely laughed and never wept, pressed his forehead against his wife’s and made a soft, broken sound she felt more than heard.
His large hand rose to gently and reverently rest on her belly, where their child was growing.
Meanwhile, the loud golden hall continued cheering itself hoarse for another couple, paying no attention to them at all, which suited them both perfectly.
“I love ye,” he said against her mouth, fierce, like an oath sworn on steel, like a man who had learned the words too late and meant to make up for all the lost years of them at once. “I love ye, Olivia. Both of ye. God help me, the three of us.”
“I love ye too.” She was laughing now, and her cheeks were wet, and she did not care who saw. “Now, put yer murderin’ face away and dance with me, husband, before yer grandmaither reads the whole tale off the pair of us and tells the glen afore we’ve danced a single reel.”
Across the hall, over the rim of a cup she was not meant to have, Maisie was already grinning like a woman who had known every secret in the room a full hour before it was spoken. Which, in the way of grandmothers, she very likely had.
The End?