Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They left the forge with the smell of scorched iron still clinging to Grisselle's cloak.
Old Fergus red-faced and pleased with himself after showing her how a horseshoe was properly set.
The chapel after that — small, cold, smelling of stone and old candle wax, the same chapel where his own parents had married and where, in three weeks, he supposed he would stand at the front of it himself.
"It's smaller than I expected," Grisselle said, once they were back out in the lane.
"Ye keep saying things are smaller than ye expected. Ye'll want to adjust yer expectations, living up here."
"Or perhaps everyone in London simply builds things larger than they need to be, to make up for something."
"That sounds like an insult aimed at an entire city."
"Well…" She said it without apology, tugging her cloak tighter as the wind picked up, the light already beginning its slow slide toward evening. "I didn’t mean it as one."
They started back up the track toward the castle as the sky over the water turned the color of a bruise, going yellow at the edges, walking rather than riding for the first stretch, the horses led behind them, unhurried.
"Ye did well today," Alpin said, before he'd quite decided to say it.
"I only spoke to people."
"Ye spoke to people the way most folk daenae manage, even after years of trying. Half that village has kent me since I was in short clothes and still greets me like they're waiting to see what mood I'm in first. They dinnae wait with ye."
"Perhaps they simply liked me."
"Perhaps." He considered it a moment longer. "Or perhaps ye daenae carry the same weight I do, walking into a room. They ken what it costs to disappoint their Laird. They daenae ken yet what it costs to disappoint ye, so they've nae reason to be careful."
"That's either the saddest thing you've said to me, or the most honest."
"Might be both."
They walked on, the track climbing steadily, the village shrinking behind them into a scatter of lit windows against the dark.
"Tell me something about the clan," Grisselle said. "Something that isn't in any ledger. Something Isobel wouldn't think to tell me because she's too close to it to notice it's interesting."
Alpin thought a moment. Alpin thought a moment, his eyes scanning the open expanse of the glen stretching below them.
The afternoon sun was cutting through a break in the heavy grey clouds, painting the heather along the hillsides in deep streaks of purple and rust. A cold breeze blew off the loch, rustling the tall yellow grass along the track and carrying the sharp, damp scent of wet bracken and pine.
"Every MacKay born in the last four generations has the same crooked left ear,” Alpin said, his low voice carrying easily over the sighing wind.
“Nobody kens why. Old Mairi swears it's a curse from a wronged fisherman's wife two hundred years back.
The MacKays themselves just call it the family ear and daenae much care to explain further. "
"That's an excellent fact,” Grisselle said, her dark hair blowing across her cheek as she pulled her tartan tighter around her shoulders against the gust. “I want more like it."
"The Frasers up the glen willnae eat rabbit,” Alpin continued, pulling his horse to a slow walk as the path narrowed near a rushing mountain burn.
The cold water spilled over dark, moss-covered boulders, spraying a fine mist into the air.
“Any of them. Ask why, and ye'll get five different stories depending which Fraser ye've asked, and every one of them will insist theirs is the true version. "
"What's your version, if you had to choose one?"
"I daenae ken. I've never asked. Some things are better left as five stories than one answer."
Grisselle laughed at that, low and unguarded, and the sound of it settled somewhere in his chest the same way it had in the hall days before, warm and entirely unwelcome in how easily it had made itself at home there.
"What about the Herstons?" she asked. "Do we have an unexplained ear, or a rabbit we won't touch?"
"We have a sea we cannae leave alone," Alpin said, before he'd thought better of it, "and a temper that skips a generation and then comes back twice as strong to make up for it."
"Which generation did it skip?"
"Mine, apparently, if Isobel's to be believed. She says I got Grandda's temper and me father's stubbornness, and neither in a proportion anyone finds convenient to live with."
"I find it convenient enough."
"Ye've kent me a matter of weeks. Ask me again in a year."
"I intend to." She said it lightly, though something in it landed with more weight than the tone suggested, and neither of them addressed it further, the track leveling out now as the castle gate came into view ahead, dark stone against a sky gone the deep blue-grey of full dusk.
They walked the last stretch in a silence that didn't feel like the absence of conversation so much as the natural end of it, the kind of quiet two people fall into once they've said enough for one afternoon and don't feel the need to fill the rest of it with more.
At the gate, Grisselle stopped to hand her horse's reins to the boy who came out to take them, and a loose strand of her hair, worked free by the wind on the climb up, fell across her cheek.
Alpin reached out and tucked it back behind her ear before he could stop himself, his knuckles grazing the curve of her jaw on the way.
She went still under his hand.
Neither of them moved to go in.
His hand stayed where it was, at her jaw, and she didn't pull away from it, though she didn't lean into it either, the two of them caught in some unspoken argument about who would move first and lose.
"You should let go of my face," Grisselle said, not moving.
"Aye. I should."
He didn't. His thumb traced once along her cheekbone, slow, testing, and her breath caught loud enough that he heard it over the wind working at the gate torches.
"Alpin."
"Aye."
"If you're not going to kiss me, you should stop looking at me like that."
"And if I am?"
"Then you're taking a remarkably long time about it."
His mouth twitched, and he stepped in closer, close enough now that she had to tip her head back to hold his eyes, close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him in the cold.
Her hand came up and closed around the front of his shirt, not pulling him in, not yet, just holding on, an anchor against whatever she was about to do.
"Last chance to change yer mind," he said, low.
"I rarely change my mind once it is set," she murmured, her fingers tightening softly around the heavy wool of his shirt, tugging him an inch closer until the heat between them was unmistakable. "Though you seem intent on taking your time."
Alpin didn't step back. His hand moved slowly up her side, his heavy palm resting firm against the curve of her waist, locking her in place. He leaned down until his mouth hovered just beside her ear, his low, gravelly voice sending a sudden shiver down her spine.
"Careful, lass," Alpin growled softly, his thumb tracing a slow, deliberate circle against her hip through her tartan. "Daenae poke the beast unless ye intend to deal with what comes out of the cage."
Grisselle’s breath hitched in her throat, her dark eyes flashing up to meet his as the banter melted instantly into thick, heavy heat.
The last of the light was failing fast behind them, the gate torches not yet lit, the stable boy already gone back inside with the horses, leaving the two of them alone in the deepening dark of the courtyard.
Grisselle turned her face toward him, slow, deliberate, nothing accidental in the movement at all, and Alpin closed the last of the distance between them and kissed her.
It wasn't like the East Tower, all urgency and retreat before either of them had decided anything. It wasn't like the beach, either, all crashing tide and desperation neither of them had meant to reach for.
This was slower. Chosen.
His hand stayed where it had settled at her jaw, his heavy, calloused, roughened thumb tracing once along her cheekbone before brushing over the warm curve of her bottom lip.
Alpin cupped the nape of her neck, his broad fingers tangling into the soft dark curls at her hairline, tilting her face up to his. He kissed her.
His mouth pressed deep and firm over hers, coaxing her lips apart with a low, gravelly hum in his chest. Grisselle’s breath caught, a soft gasp slipping into his mouth as his free arm slid around her waist, pulling her flush against the hard wall of his chest. Through the heavy layers of wool, she could feel the steady, thumping beat of his heart against her ribs, the broad width of his back beneath her hands, and the sudden, fierce heat radiating from his skin into the cold mountain air.
Grisselle's hand came up and closed around the coarse fabric at the front of his shirt, her knuckles white as she held on, her head tilting back as he deepened the kiss.
His thumb stroked slow, rhythmic circles along the sensitive skin behind her ear, down the column of her neck, and over her collarbone, sending a deep shiver through her body.
For a long moment, there was nothing in the keep but the tactile weight of his body pressed to hers, the rough scrape of his stubble against her cheek, the scent of crushed heather, rain, and clean smoke clinging to his cloak, and the low sigh of the wind working at the unlit gate torches above.
When they finally pulled apart, he kept his hand exactly where it was.
Grisselle didn't step back.
She stood there, her breath visible in the cold, her eyes on his in a way that held none of the careful distance she usually kept there, and Alpin found he had nothing at all to say that wouldn't undo whatever this was by naming it too plainly.
So, he said nothing.
Neither did she.
They stood like that at the gate, his hand still cupped along her jaw, hers still fisted loosely in his shirt, the dark settling fully around them now, and for a long while neither of them moved to break it.