Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Greer arrived at his study door without knocking, which told him everything he needed to know about the conversation that was about to happen before she'd said a single word.
"Me Laird." She set an armful of fabric swatches and a folded list down on his desk, directly atop the ledger he'd been pretending to read. "We need to talk about a date."
"I told Eachann there'd be one within the fortnight."
"Aye, and the fortnight's half gone, and I have a hall to prepare, a feast to plan, and a clan that'll start asking questions if their Laird cannae manage to name a day for his own wedding."
Greer folded her arms, plainly a woman who had rehearsed this on the walk up from the kitchens and intended to deliver every word of it. "The preparations cannae wait on ye finding yer courage, me Laird. I say that with all due respect."
"Ye say it with no respect whatsoever, Greer."
"Aye, well. I've known ye since ye were in short clothes. I've earned a little right." She tapped the folded list once, hard, with one finger. "We will really appreciate a date me Laird, or I'll pick one meself and ye can explain to the lass why her own wedding got decided by her housekeeper."
Alpin looked down at the list, then at the swatches of green, cream, and Herston plaid spread across his ledger.
A knot of familiar tension tightened in his chest. Signing off on the tartan meant locking the council's contract into stone, sealing a bargain forged out of political survival rather than choice.
He smoothed a hand over his jaw, finding no answer that would satisfy her without exposing how thoroughly the upcoming wedding choked him.
"I'll have it settled by week's end," he said, pushing the swatches away.
"Thank ye, me Laird." Greer gathered the swatches back into her arms, though she left the list behind, squarely in the center of his desk where he couldn't avoid seeing it. "The clan's expecting a wedding, me Laird, whether ye're ready for it or nae. Best ye decide to be ready."
She left without waiting for a response, and Alpin sat looking at the list a long while after the door had shut behind her, the words on it meaning considerably less to him than the fact of its existence.
Proof, apparently, that this was happening whether he'd finished deciding how he felt about it or not.
He put off going anywhere near the great hall until well past midday, telling himself it was the grain stores that needed his attention and not any particular reluctance to walk into whatever Greer had set in motion.
The grain stores, when he finally checked them, needed nothing at all. He went to the hall anyway, on his way to the stables, or so he told himself.
He heard them from outside the hall. Isobel's laugh first, bright and unguarded, then Greer's voice underneath it, dry and put-upon, and a third voice threading through both of them that he'd have known blind in a crowded room by now.
He stopped in the doorway.
The long table was buried under fabric. Bolts of it, swatches of it, a whole hillside of color spread across the wood where the council usually argued over grain quotas and border disputes.
Grisselle sat in the middle of it with a length of pale heather-colored linen draped over one arm, holding it up against the light streaming through the tall windows.
"It'll wash out by the third wearing," Greer was saying, not looking up from the list in her hands. "Ye want something that holds its color, or ye'll be standing at yer own vows looking like a dishrag."
"It's meant to be pale, Greer. That's the entire point of the color."
"There's pale, and there's forgettable, and I'll nae have ye forgettable at yer own wedding."
"What if we dyed it darker at the hem only," Isobel put in, "and kept it pale through the bodice? Best of both, and it'll look deliberate rather than accidental."
"Now that," Greer said, considering it, "is nae a terrible thought."
Grisselle laughed at something Isobel said under her breath, and Alpin found the sound had lodged somewhere behind his ribs before he'd decided to let it in.
He crossed the threshold.
"What about the food?" Isobel went on, already reaching for a fresh sheet of paper. "Have we settled the venison, or are we still arguing?"
"We settled the venison three days past," Greer said. "We're onto whether Fergus MacKay's whisky gets locked up before the ceremony or after."
"Before. Absolutely before. Have ye forgotten the officiant proposal already?"
"I'll have Tam keep an eye on him," Grisselle offered. "He seems fond enough of order that he'll enjoy the responsibility."
"Tam couldnae keep an eye on a barn door," Greer said. "But bless ye for offering."
Alpin had to press his knuckles briefly against his own jaw to get it back under control.
"I offer because someone has to." Grisselle looked up and caught him standing there, and didn't look away fast enough to pretend she hadn't. "You have an opinion on any of this, or did you only come to inspect the grain stores from a safe distance?"
"I came for the grain stores." Alpin picked up a swatch of the pale heather linen off the table, turned it once in his hand, set it back down exactly where it had been. "Greer's right. It'll wash to nothing."
Greer made a small, satisfied noise and didn't say I told ye so out loud, though her face said it plainly enough.
"Then what would you choose?" Grisselle said, "Since you've apparently an opinion after all."
"The green. The one under yer elbow." He didn't quite look at her when he said it, his eyes on the fabric instead. "It'll hold its color, and it'll suit ye better than the pale."
Grisselle glanced down at the swatch she hadn't noticed she was resting her arm on, and said nothing for a moment longer.
"Well," Isobel said, breaking the pause before it could stretch any further, "he's given his opinion. Try telling him a wedding's soft business after that."
"I said one sentence, Isobel."
"Aye, and I'll treasure it for years." Isobel turned back to Grisselle without missing a beat. "What about flowers? We settled on heather, aye?"
"Heather," Grisselle confirmed. "Whole armfuls of it, if we can manage. My grandfather always said…"
"—a bride carrying heather carries the whole hillside with her, aye, ye've told us," Isobel said it fondly rather than dismissively, already reaching for another swatch. "I like that. I might steal it for me own wedding, whenever that happens."
"Ye'd have to find a man first," Greer said.
"I'm working on it. Slowly. Carefully. Like a woman avoiding a bear trap."
"Ye'll be old and grey before ye find one that way."
"Better old, grey, and unmarried than married to the first fool who asks," Isobel said, entirely unbothered, and reached for the next bolt of cloth without missing a beat.
Alpin watched them. Greer's list, Isobel's laughter, Grisselle's hands moving over fabric, the whole table a chaos of color and argument and easy, unhurried warmth that filled the hall in a way he hadn't heard it fill in longer than he cared to count.
This is what it looked like.
The thought arrived on its own, unbidden, and he didn't fight it off the way he usually fought off thoughts that led toward the past.
Before. When me mother ran this hall and me father was still a man who laughed, and there were always women at this table arguing over something that mattered more to them than it did to anyone else, and the whole keep felt alive because of it.
He remembered his mother's voice from somewhere far back, arguing this same argument about a different wedding — whose, he couldn't recall now, only that she'd stood exactly where Grisselle sat now, sunlight catching the same table, laughing at something his father had said from the doorway before he'd had the sense to make himself scarce.
Whatever this was — this ordinary, unremarkable afternoon of cloth and lists and easy laughter — belonged to them for the moment.
He had no wish to be the thing that made it stop, made Grisselle straighten her spine and remember herself, made Isobel's laugh go careful and considered the way it always did the instant he entered a room these days.
He turned before any of them could look up and see whatever his face was doing.
He walked back toward the stables, though his mind remained pinned to the scene in the hall—the way the firelight had traced the curve of Grisselle’s neck, the soft rise and fall of her chest beneath the tight linen bodice, and the way her dark hair had loosened from its pins, brushing against her bare collarbone.
A sudden, sharp heat flared low in his gut, a sudden, fierce craving to step up behind her, wrap his hands around her waist, and press his mouth against the warm skin of her throat until her quick wit dissolved into a ragged gasp.
Alpin swallowed hard, his jaw locking as he forced his stride toward the stalls, with no memory afterward of the distance between the hall and the horses—only the sight of her body etched behind his eyes and the sound of her laughter following him the whole way there, settling into his chest like a coal that hadn't quite gone out.
Supper was a quiet business most nights, the four of them - Alpin, Grisselle, Isobel, and Greer - scattered along more table than four people needed, but that evening Isobel kept up a steady stream of chatter which suited Alpin well enough.
He reached across the table for the bread, and the candle at his elbow caught the pale ridge of scar along his forearm where his sleeve had ridden up, throwing the old white line into sharp relief against his skin.
Grisselle looked.
Not long. A beat, no more, her eyes catching on it the way anyone's might, but he felt it land the same as if she'd reached out and touched it herself. His hand pulled the sleeve back down, breaking off a piece of bread with more force than the task required.
"Something wrong with the bread?" Isobel asked.
"Nothing's wrong with the bread."
"Ye're glaring at it like it's insulted ye personally."