Chapter 12 #2
"I'm nae glaring at anything." Alpin set the bread down and reached for his cup instead, aware of Grisselle's eyes elsewhere now, studying her own plate. He found he couldn't decide which was worse, that she'd looked, or that he'd noticed her looking.
Alpin pushed his plate back, the wooden legs of his chair scraping sharply against the flagstones.
"I have ledgers to review," he grunted, making no effort to mask his sudden urge to clear the hall.
"Now?" Isobel asked, her spoon hovering halfway to her bowl, a faint, knowing twitch touching the corner of her mouth. "The sun is barely down, Alpin."
"The accounts willnae balance themselves," he replied, already rising to his full height.
Grisselle didn't look up immediately. She calmly set her cup down, her dark eyes gleaming with a sharp, dangerous spark of amusement as she leaned back against her chair.
"Is it the ledgers, Laird MacLeod?" Grisselle murmured, her voice smooth, perfectly dry, "or are you running from a discussion about table linens? I assure you, napkins will not bite."
Alpin paused, his hand resting heavy on the back of his chair, his jaw locking hard. "The clan’s grain debts take priority over piece-work and silk ribbons."
"Naturally," Grisselle replied, her lips curving into a slow, deliberate smile that drew his eyes straight to the mouth he had been thinking about all afternoon. "Though a Chieftain who flees at the sight of a fabric swatch makes one wonder how he fares against actual steel."
Across the table, Isobel covered her mouth with her napkin, her shoulders shaking with silent, delighted laughter as she darted her eyes between the two of them.
Alpin glared down at Grisselle, a sudden, heavy heat flaring in his chest at her quick, unyielding defiance. He stepped away from the table, his voice low and gravelly as he turned for the corridor. "The ledgers will be finished tonight."
He sat in his study a long while after, the heavy account books open on the desk before him, and not a single figure of it entered his head.
It's an old scar. She's seen it before.
She had, in fact, seen the whole of it, that first day at the East Tower, and made no particular remark on it then beyond the ordinary curiosity anyone might show a stranger's history written on his skin.
He couldn't account for why tonight had felt different, why one glance across a supper table had settled into his chest the way it had. After turning the question over twice without profit, he gave up on the ledgers entirely and went looking for something that required less thinking.
He found Isobel in the small sitting room off the gallery, curled into the window seat with her mending forgotten in her lap and a book open instead, the same worn copy of Highland tales their grandfather used to read from, the spine cracked from decades of use.
"Ye're supposed to be hemming that," Alpin said, dropping into the chair across from her.
"I'm supposed to be doing a great many things. Reading felt more urgent." Isobel didn't look up from the page. "Ye're wandering the castle at an hour when ye're usually already asleep, so either something's troubling ye, or ye're simply bored. Which is it?"
"Neither."
"Liar." She finally glanced up, marking her place with one finger. "Ye have that look on yer face."
"I daenae have a look."
"Ye have several looks, Alpin, and I've catalogued every one of them since I was old enough to walk."
"Then ye'll be disappointed. There's nothing to tell."
"Mm." Isobel returned to her book, entirely unconvinced, though she let it go. "Ye ken what I was reading, before ye interrupted me with yer mysterious nothing?"
"What?"
"The story about Grandda and the selkie wife. Ye remember it?"
Alpin found the corner of his mouth moving before he'd approved the motion. "The one where he claims he talked a seal into giving him her coat back, out of pure kindness, and she granted him a wish for it?"
"That's the one."
"He made that story up entirely. There's nae a selkie within a hundred miles of this coast, and even if there were, Grandda couldnae talk a hungry dog into leaving a bone alone, let alone charm a magical seal-woman out of her own skin."
"I ken it's made up. That's nae the point."
Isobel closed the book gently, resting her hand flat on the cover.
"The point is he told it to me forty times if he told it once, and every single time he changed some small detail, just to see if I was still listening.
The wish was different every telling. Once it was gold.
Once it was fair winds for a whole season.
Once, memorably, it was that his beard would grow in redder, which made no sense at all given the story, but he told it with such conviction I believed it for a full year. "
"He was a terrible liar and worse at consistency."
"He was the best storyteller this glen has ever produced, and ye'll nae convince me otherwise." Isobel's voice went softer at the edges, fond rather than argumentative. "I miss it. Somebody making things up just to watch me face while I worked out whether to believe them."
"I could make something up, if it'd please ye."
Isobel's eyebrows shot up, delighted. "Go on, then. Prove ye've inherited something from him besides the height."
Alpin considered a moment, searching for something absurd enough to be worthy of the challenge.
"There's a fish in the loch below the east ridge," he said, "grown so old and so large that it's outlived three generations of MacKay fishermen, and every one of them swears it took their best hook and swam off wearing it like an earring, out of pure spite. "
The small solar off the main hall was warm, smelling of dried peat, lavender, and the sharp bite of tallow smoke from the iron sconces mounted on the stone wall. Heavy wool tapestries, faded by generations of damp sea air, hung over the narrow slit windows to keep out the evening chill.
Isobel sat near the hearth, her knees tucked beneath the heavy, dark green plaid of her skirt.
She was clad in a thick wool dress the color of moss, her dark hair bound loosely at her nape with a plain leather thong.
In her lap lay a basket of unspun sheep's wool, her fingers working lazily at a tear in her cuff.
"That's terrible. Grandda would be ashamed."
"Ye asked for something made up. Ye dinnae specify it had to be good."
Across from her, Alpin leaned his broad back against the dark timber mantelpiece.
He wore his daily working tunic of coarse grey wool, open at the throat and stained dark at the cuffs from the stable grease, his heavy tartan draped casually over one shoulder.
His long legs were stretched out toward the crackling fire, his boots spattered with dried mud from the lower glen.
"Fair." Isobel laughed, the sound filling the small room in a way that eased something in his chest he hadn't realized had gone tight.
"Ye ken, ye should do that more often. Say foolish things.
Ye're entirely too serious most days, Alpin.
It's exhausting, watching ye carry the whole glen on yer shoulders every waking hour. "
"Somebody has to carry it."
"Aye, but ye neednae look quite so grim while ye're doing it. Grandda carried plenty and still found time to invent a selkie wife for me entertainment." She tucked her knees up under her, settling deeper into the window seat. "I worry about ye sometimes. Ye ken that."
"Ye worry about everyone. It's yer particular talent."
"It's a talent that requires practice, and ye give me ample opportunity for it.
" She said it lightly, but her eyes stayed on him a beat longer, searching for something he wasn't ready to show her.
"Ye've seemed different, this past fortnight.
Lighter, some days. Then heavier again, like tonight. I daenae ken what to make of it."
"There's nothing to make of it."
"Ye keep saying that. I keep nae believing ye. We could go on like this all evening, if ye have the patience for it." She smiled, taking the sting from the words. "I'll stop asking, for tonight. But only for tonight."
"Generous of ye."
"I am, generally, an extremely generous person. Ye should tell people that more often. Improve me reputation."
She reopened her book, though she kept talking, apparently unwilling to let the conversation end entirely on his terms. "Ye ken, if ye ever did want to talk about whatever's put that look on yer face, I wouldnae tell a soul.
Nae Greer, nae the council, nae even the mare, and she's the most discreet creature in this entire castle. "
"I'll remember that."
"See that ye do." Isobel's eyes dropped back to her page, though the smile stayed. "Go on, then. Off to bed, or wherever it is broody Lairds go to brood. I have a selkie wife to get back to."
Alpin stood, and paused a moment in the doorway, watching his sister curled into the window seat with their grandfather's book open on her knee, entirely at ease in a way he found he envied more than he'd admit to her directly.
"Isobel."
She looked up.
"The height's nae the only thing I got from him," he said. "Ye should ken that. Whatever else ye think of me."
Something shifted in her face, warm and a little surprised, though she covered it quickly with a smirk. "I already ken that." She tipped her head, studying him a beat too long. "Do ye?"
He didn't answer that fast enough for it to sound convincing. "Some days."
"Only some days." She raised a brow, no bite in it at all. "That's a start, I suppose. Go on, off to bed."
"Ye ordering me out of me own castle now?"
"Someone has to." She was already back in her book, and by the time he reached the passage, he heard her laugh once more behind him, soft and to herself, at something on the page that had nothing at all to do with him.