Chapter 5
Chapter Five
The argument had been going on for the better part of an hour.
Alba stood in the center of the village square with rain settling softly across her dark cloak, listening to Tavish the tanner explaining for the third time already, why the MacGregor soldiers currently occupying the cottage beside his workshop were an affront to everything he held dear.
Beside him, his wife nodded.
Across the square, two MacGregor men stood with their arms folded and their chins up, understanding enough of the tone to know they were the subject even if they could not follow every word.
Behind them all, snow kept falling, soft, quiet, entirely unbothered.
“They took the good well,” Tavish said, gesturing aggressively toward the stone structure. “The close one. Me wife has to walk to the far well now; and in this weather!”
“Both wells belong to the village,” Alba said, her voice cutting through the chilled air. “Nae to yer workshop and nae to any particular family.”
“Aye, but before they arrived, we used it.”
“Before they arrived, the well had a cracked surround that three different men promised to repair, and none of them did. I believe one of those men is standin’ in front of me.
” Tavish’s mouth snapped shut at Alba’s words.
His wife’s nodding slowed considerably. “The MacGregor soldiers using it have repaired the surroundings. I saw the fresh mortar meself this mornin’. ”
She let the silence hang for a moment. Then she looked past Tavish to the others. About a dozen MacLaren villagers in various states of cold and grievance, and behind them, half as many MacGregor faces watching from a cautious distance, sensing the sharp change in the wind.
An older woman with a child pressed into her skirts. A young mother holding an infant, tightly wrapped in wool so that only its face was visible, pale and pinched from the cold. A man with hollow cheeks and cautious, watchful eyes, who kept his gaze on the ground.
Something moved through Alba’s chest. Not strategy. Not calculation. Something older and simpler than either.
She had hidden in a dark passage on her wedding night while men died on the other side of the stone.
She had emerged at dawn into a castle that was then hers by marriage rights, into a grief that was not yet real, and the only thing that had kept her upright was the knowledge that people were depending on her to be so.
These people across the square had not even had a passage to hide in. They had stood in the open and watched everything burn.
She looked at Tavish. Then at the crowd.
“These people lost their homes,” Alba said.
She did not raise her voice; she had learned early that volume was the wrong tool for an angry crowd.
“Everythin’ they owned. Their children are sleepin’ in unfamiliar beds in an unfamiliar place, same as yer children would be if yer roofs burned over yer heads tonight. ”
She paused, letting the image take root in the biting frost. “So ye’ll show them the same kindness ye’d want shown to yers. Because this clan, all of it, MacLaren and MacGregor both, survives winter together or it does nae survive it at all.”
The square went entirely quiet except for the soft hiss of falling snow.
Tavish shifted his weight, suddenly fascinated by the mud on his boots. His wife found something absorbing to study in the gray tree line in the middle distance.
Old Catriona from the far end of the lane began nodding slowly. She did not join in the general murmur of the crowd. Instead, she stood perfectly still, her thin fingers sinking deep into the shoulder of the small child who had buried his face in the thick wool of her skirt.
She did not smile, and her shoulders did not relax from their rigid, defensive set. Her eyes, sharp and heavily lined with exhaustion, tracked Alba’s face with a heavy, unblinking intensity.
She looked at the MacLaren crest pinned to Alba’s cloak, then up to the curve of her jaw, and finally straight into her eyes. Her hand tightened fractionally on the boy’s shoulder, pulling him an inch closer to her side. Alba met her gaze and nodded once, briefly, woman to woman.
The MacGregor woman dipped her chin in return.
“If anyone has a genuine complaint about resources or accommodation,” Alba said, turning her attention back to the gathered villagers, “ye bring it to John O’Connor before the end of the week.
Ye daenae bring it to the square, and ye daenae take it out on people who’ve already lost more than any of ye have.
” She gave them one last, unyielding sweep of her eyes. “Are we understood?”
A general murmur of assent rippled through the crowd. It was not warm, but it was present, and that was enough for now.
She turned and walked back toward the castle before anyone could find a new grievance to air.
The biting cold followed her the whole way up the hill, pressing at the back of her heavy cloak.
Three days into Sebastian’s deadline, and the castle had already rearranged itself around his presence so thoroughly that Alba sometimes turned a corner expecting to see her own home, only to find something that looked almost like it, but was not quite.
His maps hung on her stone walls. His men shouted down from her scaffolding.
His supply count had already replaced hers in the south storeroom ledger, written in a different hand with darker, bolder ink.
And here I am, she thought with grim clarity, standing in the village square defending his people to mine.
She pushed through the heavy timber castle gate and kept walking.
The sensible voice at the back of her mind, the one she usually ignored and usually regretted ignoring, pointed out that she had not defended them for his sake. She had done it because it was right.
Because those women in the square had lost everything and deserved better than to stand in the cold and be resented for it. Because clan survival was not a sentiment, it was arithmetic; two groups who could not share a well in November would never survive February.
She knew all of that. It was still his people she had stood up for.
She climbed the frost-slick castle steps to find Philomena, determined not to think about him further.
* * *
Sebastian found the problem with the eastern drainage ditch at half past noon.
He was walking the outer wall with Hamish, conducting the systematic military assessment he completed within the first week of taking any new position and examining every wall, every gate, and every point where water moved or should move but did not.
He crouched beside the northeast corner, his leather boots grinding against the frost, and pulled a massive fistful of compacted leaves and broken stone from the blocked ditch.
It was sodden, deep, and heavy. Two seasons of absolute neglect at minimum, backing water steadily against the foundation stones in a way that would begin undermining the mortar by spring if left alone.
He dug his calloused hand deeper into the muck and found something even worse. Three seasons, maybe.
“Get two men on this today,” he said, wiping his hand on a cloth. “Clear it and re-channel before the ground freezes hard.”
“Aye.” Hamish crouched beside him, squinted at the dark water line on the stone above the blockage, and stood again. “I spoke with O’Connor this mornin’.”
Sebastian straightened to his full height. “Her man-at-arms?”
“Aye. Capable lad. Careful. Kens when to push and when to hold. That kind of loyalty isnae bought, it’s earned.
” Hamish fell into step beside him as they resumed their slow march along the ramparts.
“He told me the southern barns are nearly repaired. Sheep pens should hold till spring without additional reinforcement.”
Sebastian nodded. “The families will need them.”
Hamish glanced at him. “Still four days out, ye think?”
“Three, if the road holds.” He looked out over the glen. “The women, the bairns, the old ones, they left two days after us. I wanted the soldiers here first, the walls assessed, the worst of the repairs begun before they arrived.” A pause. “They shouldnae come to chaos.”
“They’ll come to a castle with a lady who’d rather see us gone,” Hamish said, without particular judgment.
“Aye.” Sebastian kept walking. “Which is why the walls need to be ready before she has more to argue about.”
Sebastian nodded silently. He had already walked the southern fields himself at first light, long before the rest of the household had stirred.
It was good grazing land. Well-maintained fencing ran to the lower boundary.
It was the kind of work that did not announce itself with a flourish; it simply existed.
“Good land,” Hamish murmured, looking out over the glen. “Strong walls.”
“Aye.”
The snow had softened to a fine, nearly invisible fall, more felt on the skin than seen.
Below the wall walk, the village appeared small and quiet, with gray smoke drifting from about a dozen stone chimneys in slender columns swaying sideways in the wind.
From up here, it looked peaceful, just like the Highlands always seem from a distance.
All that harsh, indifferent beauty masking whatever struggles lay beneath.
“Some of the men are already callin’ it Blackthorn Castle,” Hamish said. He spoke carefully, delivering the words in the exact low tone he used when he knew something would land badly. “And it hasnae been two full days.”
Sebastian’s jaw tightened until a dull ache bloomed in his back teeth. “They’ll stop.”
“I will tell them.” Hamish paused, letting his boots click against the stone, which meant he was far from finished. “Strong lady, too.”
“Hamish.”
“Only sayin’ what I observe.”
“I ken exactly what ye’re doin’.”
“Do ye?” Hamish’s tone went perfectly neutral, his most lethal register.
“She went to the village this mornin’. MacLaren and MacGregor were both at each other over well rights before the snow had even settled properly.
She could’ve let it run, let the resentment fester, let our people look like the difficult ones, give herself a solid reason to tell the council this arrangement is entirely unworkable. ”
He paused just long enough to let the wind howl between them. “She stood between them and told her own people to treat ours with kindness. Defended them, Sebastian. In her own square, to her own tenants, three days into a week she intends to spend findin’ a way out of this.”
Sebastian kept his dark eyes locked on the wall ahead.
The wind swept violently across the high wall, pulling at his dark hair. He stood anchored in it, saying nothing for a long, heavy moment because there was absolutely nothing to say to that.
Not honestly.
Brian had not laughed since the fire. Sebastian had been watching the boy for any sign of life, knowing it would come eventually, but uncertain of when or what would finally reach the deep place the fire had burned through.
“She’d be good for him. Brian. She’ll be good to him.” Hamish said, as if reading his mind. His voice lowered further. “And for ye.”
Sebastian turned slowly. The look he leveled at Hamish had ended conversations with considerably more formidable men than this, across considerably higher stakes.
Hamish did not back an inch. He did not even lower his arms. He had seen this same dark scowl when Sebastian was a hot-headed seventeen-year-old throwing training swords against the armory wall, and he had seen it on three different battlefields among men twice his size screaming for mercy.
Hamish met the fierce glare with a flat, entirely blank stare of his own.
Sebastian barked out one short laugh. Rough, humorless, and far too loud for the quiet of the ramparts.
“There’s nothin’ good for me.” He heard the raw bitterness in how it sounded and did not bother softening it; it was not the kind of truth that benefited from softening.
“There hasnae been for a long time, and we both ken that fine.”
The neutral expression left Hamish’s weathered face entirely. What replaced it was harder, more direct, and much older. “That is a coward’s talk.”
Sebastian’s eyes went to him sharply, flashing dark.
“Aye,” Hamish said, meeting the fury without a single flinch.
“I said it. And I’d say it again.” He took another step closer, lowering his voice.
“Ye’ve spent ten years being the sword because Duncan needed one and ye were bloody good at it.
Duncan’s gone. Ye’re the Laird now. And a Laird who decides he deserves nothin’ is just a man waitin’ to die in a way that looks noble from the outside. ”
Sebastian’s hands had gone entirely still at his sides. He could feel the creeping cold sinking deep into his knuckles.
“I am a warrior,” he said, his voice coming out lower than intended, rough as gravel. “That’s all I have ever been. All I was built to be. I will do what I must for this Clan. For Brian.”
He turned back to look out over the vast valley, the heavy grey sky pressing low over the jagged mountain peaks, the white fields below. “Whatever this marriage needs to be, if there will be one, I will make it work for them. That’s enough. It has to be enough.”
“Does it?” Hamish said it quietly. It was not a challenge this time. It was something much more tired.
Neither of them spoke another word.
Below them, the village went about its afternoon chores.
A wooden cart crossed the muddy square. Children briefly appeared between the stone cottages and then vanished again.
The MacGregor women from the well were now visible outside their cottage, hanging wool over the fence rail to dry despite the cold and snow because damp things need air regardless of the weather.
His people. Her land. Both of them were trying to survive until spring.
Hamish left without further comment. Sebastian stayed exactly where he was.
He did not know how long he stood there. Long enough for the cold to shift from discomfort to the deep numbness he had learned to ignore. Long enough for the village to quiet, the early dark to settle over the glen, and the lit windows to appear one by one in the castle behind him.
His eyes found her window without his permission. The Eastern Tower. There was only an amber light on that entire side of the wall.
He looked at it for precisely as long as it took him to become thoroughly annoyed with himself.
Then he turned his back on it and walked away.