Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The rope had three loops left.
Elspeth knew this because she’d been counting, steady and without hurry. And because hurry would show on her face, and her face was the only thing in this room she still controlled.
O’Brien had moved back to the window. The two men at the door were talking low among themselves. The fire crackled and spread its embers outward across the hearth stone, and she watched the nearest ember cool from orange to grey.
Three loops. Three loops, and the knot will give.
And then what, Elspeth?
She pressed her thumbnail into the next one.
Then something. Something is better than sitting here, waiting for Magnus to walk through that door alone into whatever this man has planned for him.
She looked at the window. The fires on the hills had dimmed from orange to a dull smear of light, far enough away that she couldn’t tell if they were growing or dying.
She looked at them and thought about Mrs. McAulay in the kitchen, about Becky folding the green gown for tomorrow, about Agnes solemnly holding a handkerchief at a wedding that was supposed to happen this morning.
Her thumbnail slipped and found the rope’s fraying edge instead, and she pressed harder.
Ye walked out alone, said a voice in her head that sounded like her father’s. Ye always were too much. Too much dreaming. Too much reaching. Ye walked into the dark for stars and brought this down on all of them.
She swallowed past the lump in her throat.
Aye, perhaps.
She’d spent her whole life in stories where the heroine’s wanting was the very thing that saved her, where dreaming hard enough bent the world toward something better.
She’d believed it with every ounce of her being, the way she believed in the poems she’d copied in green ink at fourteen, the way she’d believed in Katherine’s trust me and the auction and the idea that the right story was still out there waiting for her to find it.
And she had found something. She’d found a man who fixed henhouse doors in the rain and kept a blackened cup because it was all that remained of his father, and who had pressed his forehead against hers in a study two nights ago and undid her in a way she had never imagined.
She’d found something true.
And then she’d gone and walked out into the dark alone to look at stars and gotten kidnapped. Now, he was going to come through that door because he was Magnus Wallace and he didn’t know how to leave a broken thing unrepaired, and whatever O’Brien had planned was going to be waiting for him.
The second-to-last loop gave.
Daenae cry. Crying willnae untie the rope, or help Magnus, or get ye home, so daenae.
Her eyes stung anyway. She squeezed them shut for one breath, two, opened them again, and looked at the hearth.
The embers had spread further. One had caught the edge of a dry piece of bark that had fallen outside the grate, a thin curl of smoke rising from it, fragile and tentative.
She watched it. She thought about the distance between her back and the hearth—three feet, perhaps four—and about the fact that her hands were bound in front of her rather than behind her, which was careless of O’Brien’s men, and which had made the last hour possible.
She thought about the two men at the door.
When the rope gives, ye’ll have perhaps five seconds before one of them sees ye. The hearth is three feet to yer left. The embers are already spreading. Ye daenae have to start a fire. Ye only have to move one.
She pressed her thumbnail into the final loop.
Magnus will come in through that door, and O’Brien will be ready. The only advantage Magnus will have is if something in this room goes wrong first.
So make something go wrong.
The bark caught properly then, a small tongue of flame rising from it, and she watched the light move across the stone floor and thought about the book she’d given Magnus, the one he’d carried in his saddlebag to read at the ruined tower, the one she’d found him holding in the armory the night she’d asked him to stop pretending he didn’t like it.
She’d read him three poems that afternoon, her voice growing soft on the last one because the words had stopped feeling like words and started feeling like something she’d meant.
She thought about his face when she’d told him she wasn’t afraid anymore.
She thought about their intimate moment and how he had kissed her after he had brought her to climax. He had looked satisfied.
He’s coming. He’s already coming. He probably left before the sun was up and is riding west with his jaw set and his hand on his sword. He’s going to walk through that door alone, and whatever happens after that is going to be the rest of both our lives or the end of them.
The final loop snapped free.
She kept her hands in her lap, exactly as they’d been, and breathed.
Once. Twice. She looked at O’Brien’s back at the window.
She looked at the two men at the door, heads bent together.
She looked at the ember nearest the outer edge of the hearth stone, close to the leg of the wooden table stacked with O’Brien’s gear against the wall.
Right then.
She had started to push herself up from the floor when the door flew off its hinges. The whole thing, wood and iron both, collapsing inward fast and hard. Magnus burst in with his sword already drawn and an expression that she had never seen on his face.
His eyes found her first. Before the door had finished falling. Before O’Brien had fully turned from the window.
He took in the rope loosely circling her wrists, the position of the two men, and O’Brien’s hand going to his blade all in the space of a single breath, and then his gaze flicked back to her one last time, sharp and brief and steadying.
She held up her hands so he could see the rope was loose.
His jaw moved once. He turned toward O’Brien and raised his sword, and his voice when he spoke was the quietest she had ever heard it.
“Step away from the window.”
* * *
O’Brien had a knife at her throat before Magnus had cleared the doorway. He’d moved fast for a man his age, crossing the room the moment the door caved in, one hand fisting in Elspeth’s hair and hauling her upright, the other pressing the blade flat against her neck.
Magnus stopped.
The two men by the door had their swords up. He took that in, took in the room, the fire, the distance between himself and O’Brien, the rope loose around Elspeth’s wrists, and the fact that her hands were free.
She’d gotten free herself.
He filed that away and looked at O’Brien.
“Put it down,” he said.
“In a moment.” O’Brien’s voice was calm, almost genial. He hadn’t changed much. Broader through the chest, grey at the temples, but the eyes were the same. “First, I want ye to look at her.”
Magnus was already looking at her. He was also watching O’Brien’s knife hand, the angle of his elbow, the slight forward lean that said he was ready to move left.
“Look at her properly,” O’Brien continued.
“Because this is what it feels like, Magnus. This specific moment. This is what yer father left for me when he stood by and did nothing.” He pressed the blade closer, and Elspeth’s chin went up, jaw set, eyes on Magnus rather than the knife.
“This is what ye’ve had comin’ for thirteen years. ”
Magnus moved left.
O’Brien had been expecting him to rush straight. He hadn’t expected the angle, and it bought Magnus two steps before O’Brien shoved Elspeth sideways toward the hearth and brought the knife around in a sweeping arc.
Magnus caught his wrist and turned it, and then they were close, too close for swords. O’Brien slammed his elbow hard into Magnus’s jaw and broke free.
The two men at the door lunged for him. He knocked the nearest one down with a shoulder to the chest and a knee to the ribs. The second one swung high and missed, and then Elspeth’s voice came from the direction of the hearth, sharp and carrying.
“Duck.”
He dropped.
Something hot and glowing sailed above his head, scattering embers and catching the second man in the face. The man swore and fell back, clutching his eyes.
Magnus straightened and looked at Elspeth, who was crouched at the hearth with a piece of burning wood in her still-bound hands, composed.
O’Brien laughed, and Magnus turned back to him.
The man had retreated to the window, his knife gone now, his sword drawn out instead. He was laughing properly, head thrown back, shoulders shaking. It was the worst sound Magnus had heard in thirteen years, that laugh, because it was delighted.
“There it is.” O’Brien raised his sword. “There’s the face.” He stepped forward, rolling the blade once in his wrist. “Do ye ken what I’ve waited for? Nae the castle. Nae yer precious lands. But this. That look on yer face right now, kennin’ she’s behind ye and I’m in front.”
He lunged. Magnus parried and pushed him back.
“Every time ye love something, Magnus Wallace, it dies. Yer father. Yer mother. Yer wee sister and her bloody swan.” Another lunge, lower, testing. “And now her.”
Magnus drove him back three steps and said nothing.
“She’ll die like the rest of them.” O’Brien pressed forward, harder, working the angle toward the wall.
“And ye’ll rebuild again, because that’s all ye ken how to do, and I’ll wait again, because that’s all I need to do, and this will go on until there’s nothin’ left of the Wallace name but ash and stubbornness. ”
Magnus slammed his sword against O’Brien’s and held it there, locked hilt to hilt, the two of them close enough that he could see the grey in O’Brien’s stubble and smell smoke on his coat.
“Ye burnt me home,” he grunted. “Ye killed me family. Ye’ve spent thirteen years waitin’ for me to fall apart.” He shoved O’Brien back hard and followed him. “I’m still standing.”
O’Brien hit the wall and pushed off it fast, slashing wide, and caught Magnus across the upper arm, not deep but sharp.
Magnus stepped inside the swing and drove his elbow into O’Brien’s nose.
Felt it break. O’Brien’s head snapped back against the wall, and his sword hand dropped. Magnus caught his wrist and pinned it.
From behind him, another handful of embers hit the floor between them. Elspeth was repositioning. Buying him half a second.
He used it.
O’Brien’s sword hit the floor. His back hit the wall. Magnus’s forearm went across his throat and held him there. They were both breathing hard, and the room was very quiet except for the fire.
“She’ll still die,” O’Brien wheezed. “Everyone ye let yerself want, they always die.”
“Nay,” Magnus said.
He stepped back and let him fall.
He stood there for a moment longer than he needed to, looking at O’Brien on the floor, and then he turned.
Elspeth was at the hearth. She’d pushed herself upright and was standing with the burned stick in her hands and the rope hanging loose from her wrists and a smear of ash across her left cheek. She was looking at him with her chin lifted, her eyes very bright and her breath coming fast.
He crossed the room in four steps and lifted his hands to her face.
He didn’t say anything. He turned her face left, then right, checking, his thumbs moving along her jaw, her temples, her throat where he could see the faint mark from the blade at her neck.
Then he looked at her hands, where the rope had been, the skin reddened from the embers she’d thrown twice in the dark.
He lifted her hands and pressed his lips to them. The right, then the left, holding each for a moment.
His hands were shaking. They shook against her face and hands, and he couldn’t stop it, couldn’t order it back the way he could order everything else in his body. He stood there with his forehead pressed against her hair and his hands trembling and let it be.
“Magnus.” Her voice was very close. Her unburned fingers found his jaw and held it. “I’m here.”
“Aye.” His voice came out wrong. He cleared his throat, and it came out wrong again. “Aye, I see ye.”
“Ye found me.”
“I was always going to find ye.”
She made a small sound against his shoulder and pressed closer.
He wrapped his arms around her and held her with everything he had, thirteen years of careful nothing finally useless, and said into her hair quietly enough that it wasn’t a declaration but a fact, “I love ye, Elspeth.”
She went still.
“I love ye, and I should have said it before now. I should have let ye wear yer ribbons on the mornin’ of our wedding, and I should have…” His jaw tightened. “I should have been many things I wasnae. And I intend to spend a considerable time being them from here on out.”
He pulled back enough to look at her face. His hands were still shaking. “I willnae let anything touch ye again. I swear it on every stone of Ben Cruachan and everything in it. I will protect ye until I draw me last breath.”
Elspeth looked at him, her burned hands curved against his face, ash on her cheek. “I love ye too,” she said. “And ye’re bleedin’ on me gown.”
He looked down. He was.
“Aye,” he said.
“Let’s go home, Magnus.”
He took her hand, careful of the burns, and didn’t let go of it. Not when he called for his men, not when they brought the horses, not once on the long ride back to Ben Cruachan and everything waiting there.