CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
That night, Malcolm tossed and turned and couldn’t settle into sleep.
The castle had quieted after supper, though not entirely. A place preparing for a wedding never truly slept. He had told himself he was going to the garden because the air indoors had grown too close. The excuse contained enough truth to remain unconvincing.
He was standing near the side passage, when he heard her footsteps behind him. He turned before she reached him, as though he had been expecting her all along.
Grizel came into the dim passage wrapped in a shawl, with her hair loosened from the day’s careful arrangements and her face drawn in the candlelight, her eyes far too awake for the hour. She looked as though she had argued with rest and won the poorer victory.
“Were ye going somewhere?” she asked.
“Out.”
She smirked. “How richly described.”
His mouth barely moved. “The garden.”
“At night?”
“It is quieter then.”
That, at least, could not be disputed. The silence between them warmed by the small absurdity of restraint, where a touch might have been nothing and therefore was not nothing at all.
“Come,” he urged.
They left by the garden door. The night opened around them, cool and silvered.
Moonlight lay across the paths in pale bands, reflected on wet leaves and the sharp edges of the low hedges.
Most of the storm’s damage had been cleared away, though a few broken branches still lay stacked near the wall.
The air smelled of damp earth, rosemary, old stone, and the faint mineral breath of the sea.
For a while, they walked without direction.
Malcolm shortened his stride without meaning to.
Her leg was better, but not fully. He heard the difference in her steps, though she hid it well.
He knew the rhythm of injury as he knew the rhythm of waves against a hull: where weight changed, where breath caught, where pain was swallowed before it could become sound.
She said nothing of it at first. Neither did he.
Silence with Grizel had once been a contest. Now it was a danger of another kind. It did not stand between them. It drew them nearer, lulled by the scrape of gravel beneath their feet, the whisper of wind through the garden, the distant sea, and all that had gone unsaid since the hall.
“They have been calling me future lady all day,” she mused as if she were merely thinking out loud.
“I heard.”
“Did ye order it?”
“Nae.”
“Did ye suggest it?”
“Nae.”
“Did ye threaten anyone until they arrived at the conclusion unaided?”
He glanced at her, resisting a smile. “Nae to all that.”
She laughed before she could stop herself. The sound struck him oddly. It moved through the dark garden and caught somewhere in his chest.
They walked on past the herb beds, where thyme and rosemary grew dark and fragrant beneath the moon. Her steps shortened near the turn in the path. Malcolm slowed at once. She noticed.
“I am nae limping,” she warned.
“I said naething.”
“Ye slowed.”
“Perhaps I wished tae admire the garden.”
“At this pace? In darkness?”
“I am a patient admirer.”
“Of plants?”
“Among other things.”
Her breath caught as she suppressed a chuckle, but he heard it. Words were dangerous enough when sharpened. He had forgotten they might be worse when honest by accident. Grizel, merciful creature that she was not, let him have the pretense of not having heard too much.
They reached the low stone wall where the garden overlooked the falling ground toward the dark line of the sea. Moonlight had laid a broken path across the water, silver scattered and remade with every movement of the tide. It made the world look gentler than it was.
Malcolm had never trusted such beauty. Danger seldom announced itself with proper ugliness. It hid behind polished manners, feast tables, letters, market stalls, fathers’ names, and gifts wrapped in linen.
Yet with Grizel beside him, the night felt dangerously peaceful.
“Dae ye ever tire of being obeyed?” she suddenly asked.
He set one hand upon the stone wall. It was cold beneath his palm. “A strange question from a woman who obeys me only under duress.”
“I was asking seriously.”
He considered deflecting. It would have been easier. Habit was always easy. But the garden was quiet, and she had asked as though she truly wished to know, not to win.
“Aye,” he admitted.
She turned toward him. “Why?”
“Because obedience is useful, but it isnae the same as loyalty.”
“Nae.”
“And loyalty isnae the same as trust.”
The last word left him more carefully than the others. Trust was a thing men spoke of often and offered rarely. In his life, it had usually meant leaving a door unbarred and hoping no one came through it with a blade.
Grizel looked down at her hands. Moonlight made them pale. The red mark on her wrist had faded a little, but not enough to vanish. He had seen the women paint it there that afternoon and felt something in him tighten at the sight.
“Dae ye trust many people?” she asked again.
“Tavish.”
“That is one.”
“Eilidh, with most things.”
“She would be delighted by the qualification.”
“She would correct me if I made it larger.”
“True.”
He thought about it for a moment. “A handful of men.”
“And me?”
The question came quietly. Malcolm couldn’t answer at once.
The wind moved over the wall, carrying salt and cold water with it. He saw the moment she regretted asking. Perhaps it wasn’t because she did not want the answer, but exactly because she did. Her pride gathered itself around her like a cloak, but not quickly enough to hide the exposed hope beneath.
He could have spared them both with a lie. He did not.
“At times,” he confessed, for the evening seemed to have been made for confessions.
Her eyes lifted.
“At times,” she repeated.
His gaze held hers. “More than is wise.”
The truth lay between them, unadorned and dangerous. He had not meant to say it. Or perhaps he had. There was no safety in giving Grizel even a little truth. She had the unnerving habit of holding it as if it mattered and then looking for the wound beneath it.
She turned back toward the garden. “I used tae think wisdom was choosing the least ruinous path.”
“And now?”
“Now I suspect it sometimes looks a great deal like folly from the outside.”
“That may be because it is folly.”
“That isnae comforting.”
“I wasnae made for comfort.”
“Nae,” she said, and looked at him again. “I dinnae believe that.”
The words struck softly. He could have borne accusation. He was accustomed to suspicion, defiance, anger, even fear. Those things had edges he knew how to meet. Gentleness did not. Gentleness entered where no blade could and left him without guard or answer.
He looked at her beneath the moonlight and felt, for one unsteady moment, seen too kindly. The wind lifted a loose strand of hair across her cheek. He raised his hand, then stopped.
It would have been a small liberty, nothing more. Another man might not have considered it at all. Another man might have touched because he wished to touch and called the wish sufficient reason. Malcolm waited.
Grizel did not move away. Only then did he reach forward and draw the strand back, tucking it near her temple with as much care as his rough hand knew how to manage. His fingers grazed her skin, warm and soft beneath the cold night air.
It was only a touch. It unsettled him more than the fight at Ardbrack. His hand fell, but he did not step back.
They had stopped walking. Neither of them had chosen to, not plainly. The path had simply brought them here, to the wall and the moonlight, to the sea breathing beyond the cliffs, to a silence no longer empty enough to escape into.
“Ye were angry today,” she whispered.
“In the hall?”
“Aye.”
“I was correcting foolishness.”
“That is one way tae describe it.”
“What is yers?”
She studied him in that direct manner of hers, which made evasion feel both cowardly and inevitable.
“Ye made it impossible for anyone tae pretend that me presence here is a… temporary nuisance.”
His face gave nothing away. “Would ye have preferred I allowed it?”
“Nae.”
The answer came too quickly. He heard what she had not meant to reveal in it: relief, fear, a certain bewilderment, as though she had not known until that very moment what she wanted him to have done.
If he spoke too soon, he would say the wrong thing. If he touched her, he might not stop at one careful strand of hair. If he stepped away, he would make a lie of everything he had already allowed into the open.
She looked down at the red mark on her wrist. “When I came here, I thought I had purchased time with a bargain. Then I thought I had stepped intae a role until it could be made lawful. Then intae an alliance. Then a duty. Every day, there was another name for it.”
“And now?” he asked.
The question cost him more than it ought.
She looked up. Moonlight touched her face, catching at the fine line of her cheek, the seriousness of her mouth, the brave uncertainty in her eyes.
He wondered if she was thinking of the same things he was: her hand over his on the ride from Ardbrack, her mouth beneath his in the quiet chamber, the hall falling silent when he had said she was not a guest, the ceremonial cloth placed beside his.
“Now,” she said slowly, “I am beginning tae think the names matter less than I hoped.”
His breath left him quietly. The distance between them had narrowed again. He did not know which of them had moved. Perhaps neither. Perhaps both. Perhaps the night itself had grown smaller around them.
“Grizel,” he whispered.
Her name carried warning because it had to. It carried a question because he could no longer help it. It carried want because he was tired of pretending there was none.
“Ye should go inside,” he said.
“Should I?”
“Aye.”
“Because of me leg?”
“Among other things.”
“What other things?”
His gaze dropped to her mouth. He should not have let it. He did anyway.
Her breath changed, then steadied. “That is a very poor argument for going inside.”
“It is the only one I have.”
“Then perhaps ye should make a better one.”
His mouth almost curved. “Ye are determined tae be difficult.”
“I was raised carefully.”
“A lie.”
“A useful one.”
He looked at her then and felt the last of his restraint strain dangerously.
He did not kiss her yet. The wanting was there, close enough to burn.
But so was the old fear, the old lesson carved too deep to ignore.
Wanting had been called love in his father’s house.
Possession had worn the mask of protection.
Anger had claimed the language of care. Malcolm had spent his life prying those things apart with bloody fingers.
And now Grizel stood before him in the moonlit garden, asking him without asking to believe he could want without taking.
She lifted her hand and touched the edge of his sleeve. It was such a small contact. His eyes closed. He hated that she could undo him with so little.
“Malcolm,” she whispered.
He opened his eyes.
This time, he did not step away. He did not give her command, jest, warning, or strategy. There was no language left that would protect him from the truth of her standing there, brave and silver-lit, with the sea sounding beyond the wall and the future pressing close enough to touch.
“Aye,” he answered.
And it was the nearest he could come, for now, to saying everything.