Chapter 10 #2
"Well." Greer tucked a loose strand of hair behind Grisselle's ear, brisk and unthinking. "Ye have a good hand for order, lass. I'll say that for ye."
Grisselle smiled. "Thank you, Mistress Greer."
"Daenae thank me. Off with ye now. I still have work."
Grisselle went, though she touched the same spot behind her ear twice more before she reached the stairs, as though she could still feel it there.
She was crossing the gallery when Isobel stepped directly into her path, arms folded, one eyebrow already climbing.
"Well," Isobel said. "Ye look like a woman who's spent the whole day pretending very hard that nothing happened."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Alpin came in from the shore last night looking like a different man. Whistling. He doesnae whistle. I've known him thirty years and could count on one hand the times I've heard it."
"Perhaps he's simply in good spirits."
"Perhaps," Isobel agreed, entirely unconvinced. "And perhaps the moon fell in the sea, and nobody's told me." She studied Grisselle's face, missing nothing. "Something happened."
"Nothing happened," Grisselle said, and heard exactly how unconvincing it sounded.
Isobel held her gaze a long moment. Then, slowly, a smile crept across her face, not triumphant, just deeply pleased with itself.
"Aye. Well. I have a wedding to help plan, apparently, whether me brother sets a date or nae. Greer wants ye in the hall within the hour, for the fabric."
She turned to go, already three steps down the gallery before calling back over her shoulder, light as anything. "Ye might do something about that mark on yer lip first, mind."
Grisselle's hand flew to her mouth.
Isobel was already laughing, and gone.
Alpin found Niall on the practice yard, running a whetstone down the edge of a blade that didn't need it, and dropped onto the bench across from him.
"Ye're up early," Niall said, not looking up from the stone.
"So are ye."
"Aye, but I have an excuse. Somebody has to keep this place standing while ye go wandering the shore at all hours." Niall turned the blade, checked the edge against his thumb, set it down. Only then did he look up properly, and whatever he saw made him go still. "Ye look different."
"I look the same as I always look."
"Ye daenae." Niall leaned forward, studying him. "Ye came in off that shore last night looking less like a ghost than I've seen ye in ten years, Alpin. What happened out there?"
"Nothing happened."
"Ye're whistling these days too. Isobel told me. Said she nearly dropped a tray."
"I dinnae whistle."
"Ye do now, apparently." Niall's grin spread, slow and wide, the particular grin he wore right before he made something worse.
Alpin stood, reaching for a blade of his own from the rack. "Mind yer own business, Niall."
"That is me business. I've spent thirty years minding it." Niall stood too, still grinning, unbothered by the flat look Alpin gave him. "Ye ken I'll only keep asking."
"Then I'll only keep saying nothing."
"Fair enough." Niall picked his own sword back up, settling into a ready stance across from him. "I'll get it out of ye eventually. I always do."
They sparred through the better part of an hour, and Alpin worked harder at it than he needed to, driving Niall back across the yard with a force that earned him a raised eyebrow and no further questions, which suited him well enough.
He found Grisselle in the stables that afternoon, though he hadn't gone looking for her.
He'd meant to check the grey mare's shoe, the one Tam had mentioned needed resetting before winter. Instead, he found the stall door open and Grisselle already inside it, running a brush down the mare's flank in long, even strokes while Tam held the halter and offered commentary.
"Ye want to go with the grain of the coat, me Lady, nae against it."
"I am going with the grain, Tam."
"Aye, mostly."
Alpin stood in the doorway and watched her a moment longer than he meant to.
She'd tied her hair back with a strip of leather that had clearly come from the tack room rather than her own belongings, and there was a smear of something — grease, or dirt, he couldn't tell which — along the side of her jaw that she seemed entirely unaware of.
The mare leaned into the brush strokes, ears loose, tail swishing lazy and content, the same mare that had near taken Tam's arm off three days past.
"She doesnae usually stand for strangers," Alpin said.
Grisselle startled, the brush stopping mid-stroke. "I didn't hear you."
"Ye were arguing with Tam about brush direction. Ye wouldnae have heard a cannon."
"I wasn't arguing."
Alpin stepped into the stall, and Tam, sensing the shift in the air the way stable boys always did, muttered something about checking the water trough and made himself scarce.
Alpin reached out and ran a hand along the mare's neck, more from habit than need. "She threw Fergus twice last month. Wouldnae let Isobel near her for a week after."
"She likes having her ears scratched. Just there." Grisselle demonstrated, and the mare's eyes went half-shut, her lower lip drooping loose. "I don't think anyone's told her she's meant to be difficult."
"She's nae meant to be anything. She's a horse."
"Everyone's meant to be something, apparently. I've been told what I'm meant to be since I was old enough to hold a fork correctly." Grisselle kept brushing, not looking at him. "Perhaps she's simply never had anyone tell her otherwise."
Alpin didn't have an answer for that, so he let it go. He stood there instead, close enough that the mare's tail brushed his sleeve, watching Grisselle work the brush down the same patient line over and over, and found himself in no particular hurry to leave.
"You could hold the halter properly," Grisselle said. "Since you're standing there doing nothing useful."
"I'm inspecting her shoe."
He hadn't looked down at the shoe once. Grisselle straightened, brush still in hand, and found him watching her mouth instead of the mare's hoof — a beat too long before his eyes cut away to the stall wall like it had suddenly become interesting.
"You're standing very still for a man inspecting a shoe."
His jaw worked. He crouched down fast, too fast, and lifted the mare's hoof like he'd meant to all along, though his thumb pressed harder into the frog of it than the job called for.
"Ye going to hand me that pick, or should I use me teeth?"
Alpin took the halter from her without further comment, and for a while neither of them said anything at all, the only sound the soft rasp of the brush and the mare's contented breathing and the wind working at the loose shutter somewhere above the loft.
It was, he realized somewhere in the middle of it, the easiest quarter hour he'd spent with another person in longer than he cared to count.
No council pressing him toward decisions he hadn't made, no ghosts pulling at him from three miles out, just a horse and a woman who talked to him like he was simply a man standing in a stable, nothing more complicated than that.
The realization sat wrong in his chest, like a stone swallowed too fast.
"I should see to me council," he said, too abruptly, and reached to hand the halter back to her.
Their hands met on it again, same as the bread that morning, and this time neither of them pretended it hadn't happened. Grisselle didn't let go of her end.
"You said that already. About the shoe. Neither one was true."
"Aye." He didn't let go of his end either. "Neither was."
The mare shifted, impatient, and the halter swung between them, forgotten. Grisselle's gaze dropped to his mouth and came back up fast, and whatever she saw on his face made her breath catch loud enough that he heard it over the wind in the loft.
"Alpin."
"Daenae." His voice came out rougher than he meant it. "If ye say it, I willnae be able to walk out that door, and I need to walk out that door."
She let go of the halter first. He was gone before she'd drawn her next breath, boots loud on the stable stones, and it was a long moment before she trusted her hands enough to pick up the brush again.