Chapter 26
The morning she was set to leave, Edward found reasons to be anywhere in the yard except near the carriage.
He inspected the east wall, where a stone had come loose two winters back and would likely outlast him without falling.
He questioned the smith about a shoe on Beira that needed no questioning.
He stood at the granary door and read the same tally sheet three times without once absorbing a number on it, all the while watching, from the corner of his eye, the small procession taking shape by the gate.
Duncan had the carriage horses hitched and was checking the harness buckles, tugging at each strap twice, crouching to run a hand along the traces.
“Ye’ve checked that buckle three times now,” Edward said, coming up behind him.
“Four, actually.” Duncan did not look up. “Better four times than the axle givin’ out somewhere past Dunvegan with the boy aboard.”
“The axle’s sound. I had it looked at meself last month.”
“Aye, well.” Duncan straightened, wiped his palms on his breeches, and looked toward the keep steps, where Melodie was directing two servants with a trunk between them. “Ye’d think, watchin’ this, that someone was bein’ sent off to war rather than a fortnight at her own kin’s castle.”
Edward said nothing to that.
“She hasnae smiled once this mornin’,” Duncan went on. “Nae at William. Nae at Melodie fussin’ over the trunk. I’ve never ken her to go a whole mornin’ without smilin’ at somethin’.”
“She’s tired. It’s an early start.”
“Aye. That’ll be it.” Duncan went back to the harness, and if he did not believe a word of the explanation, he had the sense not to say so twice.
Chloe came down the keep steps a few minutes later, carrying William on her hip, dressed for travel, her hair pinned back more simply than Edward had ever seen it.
She was talking to Melodie about something—the trunk, maybe, or the route—her voice steady and even, and she did not glance toward the granary once.
Edward set the tally sheet down and made himself walk over.
“Ye have everythin’ ye need?”
“Aye.” She shifted William higher on her hip. He had found a fistful of her collar and was working it with great concentration. “Melodie’s packed for a month, though I told her a fortnight would do.”
“Better too much than too little, on the road.”
“That’s what she said.” Chloe glanced past him, toward the gate, toward the four guards already mounted and waiting. “Four men for one carriage and a fortnight’s ride. Ye’d think I was smugglin’ the crown jewels out of the castle.”
“The roads have had trouble on them. I told ye that.”
“Ye did.” She did not ask what trouble, same as she had not asked before.
She adjusted William’s blanket instead, tucking a corner more securely, and looked at everything in the yard except Edward’s face.
“Well. We should be off before the light gets much higher. Jenny will have the whole house watching the road by midday if we’re late. ”
“Aye.”
Neither of them moved.
William, sensing an opening in the silence, made a valiant grab for Edward’s sleeve, and Edward reached out, letting the boy’s small fist close around one finger.
“He’ll be good company for ye,” Edward said. “On the road.”
"He'll scream the first hour and sleep the second, if Melodie's guess holds. She says it's always the way with him whenever somethin' unsettles his routine — new room, new face, anythin' unfamiliar. A carriage will likely be no different."
“Consistent, at least.”
That got something out of her. Not quite a laugh, just the ghost of one, gone as fast as it arrived, and she pulled William back before Edward could decide whether to be glad of it or sorry it had not lasted. She turned toward the carriage.
“Chloe.”
She stopped, one hand already on the door.
“Send word when ye arrive.”
“Ye said that already.”
“I am sayin’ it again.”
She looked at him carefully, then, for the length of two breaths, something shifting behind her eyes that he had no name for and no right to inquire about. Then she nodded once, handed William up to Melodie inside the carriage, and climbed in after him without any ceremony.
Duncan swung the door shut and gave the signal, and the carriage lurched forward, the four mounted guards falling into place around it, and within a few minutes the whole procession had cleared the gate and turned onto the north road, dust rising thin behind the wheels.
Edward stood in the yard longer than he needed to, watching the road long after there was nothing left on it to watch.
“Duncan.”
Duncan, who’d been coiling a spare length of rope near the stable door, looked up. “Me Laird?”
“Take a horse. Follow at a distance, far enough back she willnae see ye, close enough ye could reach the carriage inside a quarter hour if ye had to.”
Duncan set the rope down slowly. “Ye said four guards were plenty.”
“Four is plenty for trouble on the road ye can see comin’.
I want someone behind them for the trouble ye cannae.
” Edward kept his eyes on the empty road, not on Duncan’s face, though he could feel the weight of Duncan’s attention regardless.
“Daenae let her catch sight of ye. Daenae let the guards report it back to her, either, if it can be helped. She’ll take it as me nae trustin’ her to manage her own journey, and she’d nae be wrong, exactly, but that isnae—”
“That isnae what it is,” Duncan finished for him, when Edward did not.
“Nay.”
“I ken what it is, me Laird,” Duncan said it plainly, no teasing in it for once, which was somehow worse than if he’d teased. “Ye daenae have to explain it to me.”
“I wasnae explainin’.”
“Course ye werenae.” Duncan was already moving toward the stable, calling over his shoulder for a fresh horse to be saddled. “I will send word each night by the fastest man Alfie can spare, so ye’ll ken they’ve made camp safe. Ye’ll want that, I expect, even if ye’d never say so.”
Edward did not answer, which Duncan seemed to take as an answer. Within half an hour, he was mounted and through the gate himself, keeping well back of the dust the carriage had already raised.
Edward watched him go the same way he’d watched the carriage go, standing in the yard with his arms crossed and nothing useful left to do with his hands.
Tyler found him there some time later, still standing, the yard around him gone back to its ordinary business. A cart being loaded, two boys chasing a loose hen past the well, the smith’s hammer starting up again somewhere behind the stables.
“Ye’ve been out here a while,” Tyler said.
“Checkin’ the wall.”
“Ye checked the wall an hour past. I watched ye do it.” Tyler leaned against the granary door, arms folded, in no apparent hurry to be anywhere else. “She’ll be fine, ye ken. Four guards, good roads, and Duncan trailin’ behind, whether ye admit to sendin’ him or nae.”
“I didnae say I sent him anywhere.”
“Ye didnae have to.”
Tyler pushed off the door and started back toward the hall, already talking about something else entirely.
A shipment expected from the coast, a dispute between two tenants over a fence line, the kind of ordinary castle business that had filled Edward’s days for thirteen years before Chloe had walked into his kirk in the rain.
She made every one of those days feel considerably less full than he’d once believed them to be.
Edward followed him inside because there was nothing left in the yard worth standing over, and the road stayed empty behind him the rest of the morning, exactly as a well-guarded road with nothing wrong on it should.
The carriage stopped at midday to rest the horses in a clearing off the road, where a shallow burn flowed over stones, and the guards could water the team.
Melodie took William down along the bank, and Chloe stayed behind on the carriage step with a lapboard and the stub of a candle, finishing the letter she’d started drafting in her head somewhere around the second mile.
We depart as planned and should reach ye within the week. I bring William, Edward’s nephew, along with me. He is easy company once he's had an hour to settle into new surroundings, which I mention only so ye're nae alarmed if he greets ye with a scream instead of a smile.
She read it back once, satisfied, and reached to fold it when one of the guards—Robb, the youngest of the four—approached the side of the carriage with his hand already halfway up in apology for the interruption.
“Me Lady. There’s a rider stopped up the road, asking after our party. Says he’s come from MacLaud lands.”
Chloe set the lapboard down. “Asking after us, how?”
“By name, me Lady. Yers and the boy’s both.”
That was enough to bring her down off the step herself rather than wait on a report secondhand. The rider had drawn up a short way off, close enough to have been watching the clearing before announcing himself, and he sat his horse with his hands loose on the reins, unhurried.
“Lady O’Brien.” He inclined his head, not quite a bow. “Fergus Boyd. Laird MacLaud sent me ahead to meet yer party on the road and see ye escorted safe the rest of the way.”
“We’ve an escort already, Master Boyd. Four of me husband’s own guard.”
“Aye, and fine men they look, too. But four who ken the general shape of the route isnae the same as one who’s ridden every mile of it a hundred times in every season.
The Laird thought ye’d want the extra certainty, this close to the western passes.
There’s been talk of raiders workin’ that stretch. ”
Chloe glanced past him at the road he’d come down, empty in both directions, no second horse, no sign of the letter he’d claimed to be carrying back. “Ye daenae have the return letter, I’ve only just finished writin’ it.”
“Nae yet, me Lady. I’d meant to carry it back once I’d seen ye a fair way further along, so I could report to Lady MacLaud that I’d laid eyes on the party meself and found ye well.” He nodded at the folded page still sitting on the lapboard behind her. “Whenever it suits ye to hand it over.”
It was a reasonable answer. She turned it over and found nothing in it she could have pointed to and named wrong, and still some old, stubborn part of her sat forward, unwilling to let go of the shape of him without knowing why.
“How did MacLaud hear we’d set out, and on which road, quickly enough to send a man ahead of us?”
“Word travels the coast faster than folk credit, me Lady. A rider passing through Hendry’s lands carried it along, and Lady MacLaud had me saddled within the hour of hearin’.
” He said it without pause, without the small hitch of a man building an answer rather than reciting one.
“She’s had the good chamber aired since. Asked me to tell ye so.”
The good chamber.
Jenny’s own phrase, from her own letter, landed just right enough to loosen something in Chloe’s chest, followed almost immediately by the colder thought that a man sent to be believed would naturally know to say exactly what would be believed.
“Ye ken the household well, then.”
“Well enough. Carried word between the two castles more times than I could count.” He held a hand out, palm up, toward the letter. “I will take that now, if it please ye, and ride a while ahead to be sure the road’s clear before ye reach it.”
Chloe looked down at the letter. One folded page, a blot of wax, weighing nothing at all, and she found she was in no hurry to put it in his hand for reasons she could not yet defend to anyone, least of all herself.
“What clan are ye of?”
“MacLaud born and MacLaud raised, me Lady. Lady MacLaud will vouch for me the moment ye arrive, if ye’d rather wait on that than take a stranger’s word for it on an empty road.
” He said it patiently, unbothered, and that patience should have settled something, but it settled nothing at all.
“I daenae mean to press ye. Only the day’s movin’, and I’ve a fair ride ahead of me whichever way ye decide. ”
She had no real cause. That was the whole trouble of it.
Every answer he gave her came back sound and plausible, exactly what a real messenger would say standing in a real clearing on a real errand.
Yet she kept circling back to the set of his shoulders, too straight, too much like a man used to a sword rather than a saddlebag, and to the way his eyes had gone once, briefly, past her toward the four guards watering their horses, cataloging something she could not name.
“Ye’ll ride ahead of us the whole way, then. Nae just the passes.”
“The whole way, me Lady. Every mile of it.”
She held the letter out. He took it with a small nod, tucked it inside his jerkin, and gathered his reins.
“What is it ye ride?”
He paused.
“A gray geldin’, me Lady. Sound of wind, steady on rough ground, naught special to look at.” He turned the horse before she’d finished deciding whether to ask anything further, and was down the road and out of sight within a few minutes, the dust settling slowly behind him in the still midday air.
Melodie came back up from the burn with William on her hip, damp to the knee and entirely unbothered by it.
“Who was that, then?”
“MacLaud’s man. Come to see us the rest of the way.” Chloe watched the empty road a moment longer, the dust gone flat and undisturbed now, no trace left of the rider at all. “He’s to escort us.”
“Fine, then. More men, more safety, aye?” Melodie hitched William higher and started back toward the carriage, already talking of getting him fed before the afternoon’s ride. “Ye look like ye’ve swallowed somethin’ sour, me Lady.”
“Do I?”
“Aye.” Melodie glanced back at her, some of the ease going out of her own face to match it. “Somethin’ wrong with him?”
Chloe looked once more down the empty road, at the place where the dust had already gone still, and found she had nothing to give Melodie that would sound like more than a woman inventing trouble out of a stranger’s good posture.
“Nothin’ I can name,” she said, and climbed back up into the carriage, and did not stop thinking about the gray gelding, or the good chamber, or the particular way the man’s eyes had counted her guards, for the whole of the rest of that day’s ride.