Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
The morning had been a chaos of the best kind.
Becky had cried twice while pinning Elspeth’s hair and blamed it on a loose thread both times.
Mrs. McAulay had appeared in the doorway three times to make sure everything was proceeding correctly.
Each time she had declared herself satisfied and left, and each time she had returned within four minutes with a new concern.
Katherine sat on the bed, munching on an apple and offering commentary that was occasionally helpful and consistently opinionated. Agnes stood in the corner, observing the proceedings with her arms folded.
“The left side,” Katherine said around a bite. “The curl on the left is lower.”
“It’s meant to be lower,” Becky said firmly.
“Is it?”
“Aye.”
“It looks lower than proper.”
“Katherine,” Elspeth said to the mirror.
“Aye?”
“Eat yer apple.”
Katherine ate her apple.
Mrs. McAulay came back a fourth time with the white flowers she had been pressing since yesterday, small and starlike, and started weaving them through Elspeth’s curls. Her hands were steady only because she was concentrating very hard on keeping them that way.
Elspeth watched her in the mirror and said nothing, because Mrs. McAulay ’s lips were pressed together in a way that indicated she was determined not to cry. Her efforts required a short moment to take effect.
“There,” Mrs. McAulay announced, stepping back to look at her handiwork and wipe a bright drop from the corner of her eye. She lifted her chin with pride. “New beginnings.”
“Aye,” Elspeth said softly.
Mrs. McAulay cried anyway, briefly and efficiently, and went back downstairs before anyone could comment on it. Or even worse, join in.
The green gown went on last. Katherine set the apple down to help with the laces. She tied the last one and stepped back to look at her beloved friend.
For a moment, the room was quiet. Elspeth looked at herself in the mirror and thought about the solar in Liam’s castle, and her father producing papers, and a friend who had commanded “trust me” with her eyes and meant it with her whole heart.
Katherine met her eyes in the mirror. She said nothing. She only pressed her lips together and nodded once, which was enough.
The hills were draped in gold when Elspeth came out.
Ben Cruachan had been many things to her in the last few weeks—a fortress, a surprise, a home before she had ever thought to call it one.
She had seen it in rain and firelight and pale morning stillness.
She had not seen it like this, not with all the hills painted amber above a joyous gathering of people in the yard below.
Every face she had come to know over the past weeks turned upward to watch her descend to her happiness. The pipes sounded someplace she could not see, and Magnus appeared at the foot of the steps.
He had dressed in Wallace tartan, the dark wool clean and well-fitted around his broad shoulders.
He was standing very straight with his hands at his sides.
He was looking up at her intently with a profound fondness.
When she finally reached the bottom step, he offered his hand.
She took it, and his fingers gently closed around hers.
“Ye wore the ribbon,” he said, his voice low.
She had. Threaded through the curls on the left side, there was the auburn ribbon from his coat pocket, the one he had carried from the stables yesterday morning while she was still missing.
She had found it on her dressing table this morning without a note because Magnus did not leave notes, but she knew him.
And she knew where the ribbon had come from, and she had threaded it in herself before Becky had even come to dress her.
“Aye,” she said.
His hand tightened around hers, and they turned toward the gathering together.
Duncan stood to Magnus’s left. Elspeth had seen him in many configurations over the past weeks: amused, scheming, teasing, strategizing.
She had never seen him like this: his jaw set and his eyes bright with joy and red at the corners.
He caught her looking and straightened immediately, clearing his throat and shifting his gaze to the hills.
Liam glanced at him.
“I’m nae,” Duncan said preemptively.
Liam looked away with a smirk.
Duncan pressed his fist briefly to his mouth and looked up at the sky.
The words came from the elder who had known Ben Cruachan before the fire, an old man with a voice that carried across the yard and up the hillside without effort.
Elspeth listened with her hand in Magnus’s, and felt every word of it settle differently than she had expected.
This did not feel like a ceremony. It felt like the confirmation of a decision that had been made some time ago in a study, or at a ruined tower, or in an armory in the middle of the night, at a time when she had asked a man to stop pretending he did not like poetry.
She looked at Magnus while the elder spoke.
He had turned his gaze forward, his jaw set, his composure present and collected.
He must have felt her look because his eyes dropped to her face and lingered there.
He did not look away again. His thumb moved once across her knuckles. Back and forth, slowly.
She heard Agnes somewhere to her right making a small decisive sound.
When the time came for the vows to be exchanged, Elspeth had hers ready. She had been carrying them in her chest for three days. Now, she was watching Magnus reach inside his coat.
He produced a book. It was small and worn, its cover soft from handling. She recognized the crease along the back cover from where she had held it open too long in the same position at the ruined tower.
Her poetry book. The one he had used to steady a wobbling desk. The one he had carried in his saddlebag to the hills.
A sound rippled through the gathering. Not quite laughter. Magnus looked up at all of them, then at the book in his hands, and his jaw shifted. Then he turned his eyes to Elspeth.
“I still think poetry is exhaustin’,” he stated.
Proper laughter erupted at that, rippling through the yard. Duncan made a sound that was definitely not a sob, and Katherine gripped Agnes’s shoulder.
Magnus stood in the middle of it all, holding a page in the worn book with his thumb, waiting for the laughter to settle.
When it was quiet enough, he looked down at the page. Then he looked back at Elspeth.
“But there was one line ye read aloud once that lingered in me mind.” He paused.
His voice had dropped out of the public register and into the one she knew from studies and corridors and a lodge in the western hills.
It was for her to hear, not the gathering, though everyone heard it.
“It says: I would rather share one lifetime beside thee than face all the ages of this world alone.”
Tears welled up in her eyes unbidden. She had been holding them back since the dressing room, and now they could no longer be denied their rightful claim.
They blurred Magnus’s face into a soft golden hue.
She blinked hard and found him again, standing there with her book in his hands, looking at her like she was the only legible thing in his world.
She whispered her own vows. She knew she would not be able to repeat what she had said afterward. The words rose from a part of her that had been pushed down deep for a long time. She felt them leave that place. She saw them land in his heart.
Magnus took both her hands when she had finished, the book held carefully under his arm, and she decided she had had enough of waiting. She stepped into him, her arms going around his neck. His hands rose to her back at once, pulling her close, and the yard burst into a sound she barely heard.
He kissed her with everyone watching, but neither of them cared. She shivered to the soles of her feet.
When he finally drew back to look at her, his eyes were dark, and his hands were splayed warm against her back. He was not merely looking at her. He was seeing her.
His lips curled into a slow, rare smile that was only meant for her. He pressed his forehead against hers and lingered there for a moment, in the middle of Ben Cruachan and the golden hills and all the people who had stayed, and breathed.
Behind them, Duncan stated, “I’m nae crying,” and Liam said nothing.
Katherine burst into loud sobs and made no attempt whatsoever to be graceful about it. Agnes passed her a handkerchief.
* * *
The Great Hall had never sounded like this.
Magnus stood at the edge of it for a moment after supper, before anyone could find him and insist he do something ceremonial, and listened.
The fiddles were going properly now, the reel working exactly as it had not in the rehearsal.
Three village men had pushed the nearest table further back to make more room, and the dance floor was already full.
Duncan was in the middle of it.
He had located a widow from the eastern village at some point during supper, and he was presently demonstrating a step Magnus was reasonably certain he had invented on the spot. He held her hand and grinned at an angle that had served him approximately half as well as he believed it did.
“Is that working?” Elspeth appeared at Magnus’s shoulder, following his gaze.
“For him or for her?”
“Either.”
“Nay,” Magnus said.
Elspeth pressed her lips together. “She looks entertained.”
“That’s nae the same thing.”
“To Duncan, it is.”
From across the hall, Duncan caught Magnus’s eye, pointed at the widow with considerable pride, and mouthed something that Magnus chose not to interpret.
Magnus looked away.
Near the hearth, Katherine was on her feet despite everything, her color high, one hand resting against her middle and the other conducting the nearest musician’s tempo. Liam stood two feet behind her with his arms folded.
“Katherine,” he said.
“I’m standing still.”
“Ye’re nae standing still. Ye’re swaying.”
“Swaying isnae dancing.”
“Ye were dancing four minutes ago.”