Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
This was a quieter gathering than the celebration a few nights before, a supper, not a dance.
Alba stood near the far end of the second table and listened to it for a moment before she let herself move.
Overlapping noise filled the space from stone wall to stone wall.
Laughter cut sharply across the scrape of a fiddle.
Horn cups clattered against heavy oak. A MacGregor boy and a MacLaren boy scrambled between the trestle legs, chasing each other with ferocity until a kitchen girl caught them both by the back of their collars and deposited them firmly on a bench with thick crusts of bread shoved into their fists.
She had done this. The bread, the ale, the fires burning from the Great Hall to the upper corridor, all of it. The rushes changed, and the tables were pulled together end to end so no Clan sat separate from the others.
She moved into the crowd.
Philomena appeared at her elbow almost immediately, a platter of bread held overhead, her cheeks bright with heat and effort.
“The ale barrel at the south end is running low,” she announced. “And one of the MacGregor lads asked me to dance twice.” She paused for the full effect. “I told him I had matters of great importance to attend to.”
“Ye told him ye’d be back in a quarter hour,” Alba said, already moving past her toward John O’Connor.
“Twenty minutes,” Philomena called after her, entirely unashamed.
John was near the screens passage, his arms folded. Alba pressed a hand briefly to his forearm as she passed.
“The ale barrel at the south end,” she said.
“Already on it, me Lady.” He unfolded his arms. “The MacGregor quartermaster and I had words about the grain count earlier.”
“Good words or bad words?”
He considered. “Words that ended in agreement. Eventually.”
“That’ll do,” she said, and left him to it.
A hand caught her sleeve near the hearth.
Alba turned.
The woman was perhaps forty, dark-haired, with a tight, quiet composure. She was wearing Alba’s green wool, the everyday one, not the silk, pulled roughly at the waist with a piece of common cord. The practical, desperate adjustment made something ache deep in Alba’s chest.
“Me Lady.” Her voice aimed at the space between them rather than Alba’s face. “I wanted to thank ye for the dress.” Her rough palms pressed briefly against the front of the green wool. “It’s warm. I only wanted ye to ken that.”
“It suits ye,” Alba said simply, genuinely. “Wear it well.”
The woman looked up then, just a fraction of a second, her eyes finding Alba’s before dropping back down. She nodded once and slipped back into the crowd.
Alba stood frozen for a single breath.
Near the hearth, three older women had arranged themselves in a companionable cluster beside the fire.
One of them, a broad-shouldered MacGregor woman with silver-streaked hair, was holding Alba’s dark blue winter cloak—the heavy one, lined with thick rabbit fur—pressed against her chest with both arms. She was not wearing it. She was simply holding it.
Alba crossed toward her.
“Ye’ll be warmer if ye put it on,” she said.
The woman looked up. “I will put it on when I am ready.”
“Aye,” Alba said. “Fair enough.”
The woman beside her, young, laughing, wearing Alba’s ivory wool with a child plastered to her hip, looked up with bright eyes. The child was reaching for the nearest candle flame.
“He gets like this,” the young woman said, catching the small wrist without looking, redirecting the sticky fingers toward her braid. “At home I’d put him near the window, but…” She stopped. Her laugh softened slightly. “Well.”
“There’s a window bench at the east end,” Alba said. “I will have one of the girls put a stool beneath it so he can see the whole room.”
The young woman looked at her for a moment as if that simple kindness was something she had not been expecting. “Thank ye,” she said quietly.
The child grabbed the dark braid in his fist and yanked with tremendous satisfaction.
“Braw lad,” Alba told him.
He beamed at her.
She moved on.
The girl appeared next, eight years old, no more, completely swimming in Alba’s russet wool kirtle, the hem dragging the floor in a long curl behind her like a tail. She stopped directly in front of Alba and stared up with round, black eyes.
“Yer dress is too long,” the girl said.
“It is,” Alba agreed. “We’ll fix that tomorrow.”
The girl considered this, apparently weighing whether it was a satisfactory answer. She tugged the hem of the kirtle up experimentally with both fists, studying the result. “I could wear it folded,” she said.
“Ye could.” Alba crouched before her, quickly tucking the excess fabric into the cord at her waist so the hem cleared the floor by a clean inch. “There. Now ye willnae trip and ruin the evening’s entertainment before the fiddle even finishes.”
The girl looked down at the improvement with grave solemnity. Then she looked back up at Alba. “Ye’re very good at dresses.”
“Years of practice,” Alba said.
“Will ye be here tomorrow?”
Something caught in her chest. “I will be here tonight,” she said. She smiled. “That’s enough for now.”
The girl seemed satisfied. She went back to her bread.
Alba straightened. She stood in the center of the hall, listening to the frantic fiddle, feeling the fire hot against her face, and quietly, privately, she let herself love this.
The noise of it, the weight of two hundred people and more filling every corner of a Great Hall that had been too quiet for too long.
She did not look for him. She had decided that before she ever came downstairs, and she held the decision firmly.
She moved toward Hamish with the perfectly reasonable pretense of asking about the week’s grain count, spoke with him for three full minutes about entirely practical things, and felt the heat at the back of her neck fail to diminish by a single degree.
She turned toward the kitchen door.
Across the Hall, above the heads of two hundred people, Sebastian MacGregor was watching her.
She had not meant to find him. She had deliberately kept her gaze so deliberately elsewhere for two hours that finding him felt less like a choice and more like a collision.
He was not pretending to look elsewhere. He was not engaging his men, or scanning the room, or performing anything at all. He stood near the stone entrance with his horn cup loose in one large hand and his full, unhurried attention on her.
He crossed toward her before she could decide whether to let him. The crowd parted for him without seeming to notice it was doing so.
"Ye've been on yer feet since dawn," he said, stopping close enough that she had to tip her chin to hold his gaze. "Ye havenae eaten."
"I will eat when I have a moment to spare."
"Ye willnae. Ye never do." He looked down at her steadily. "I had Cook set a plate aside. It's gettin' cold waitin' on yer pride."
She opened her mouth to argue on principle, found she had no actual argument, and closed it again. "That is…" She stopped. "Thank ye."
"Aye." He did not move away. Something in his expression, low and banked, held there a beat too long for the middle of a crowded hall.
The fiddle screeched on. The Hall roared. All of it continued to move entirely around them.
Alba held his gaze for one long, ragged breath.
Then she turned, walked straight through the kitchen door, and let the heavy timber close behind her.
The cold of the stone passage pressed hard against her flushed face. Through the door, the muffled roar of the Hall sounded like a distant storm.
She looked down. Her hands were entirely steady.
Her heart was violently slamming against her ribs.
* * *
She had made it through the early morning without seeing him.
This was an achievement she afforded herself one brief moment of quiet satisfaction over before Brian materialized outside her chamber door.
He was holding a wooden sword nearly as long as he was tall, gripped in both hands. When the heavy door creaked open, he looked up at her, “Fight with me,” he said.
“I beg yer pardon?”
“I have a sword that could fit ye.” He stated this as though it resolved every possible objection she could conjure.
“Do ye now.” She crossed her arms, fighting the twitch at the corner of her mouth. “And what makes ye think I’d lose?”
That, clearly, had not occurred to him. He blinked up at her, momentarily recalculating. “Ye’re a Lady.”
“I am a great many things before I am a Lady, wee man.” She reached out and tapped the flat of the wooden blade with one finger. “Mind yer footin’ next time ye say that to a woman holdin’ a sword.”
A slow, delighted grin broke across his face, gap-toothed and entirely unguarded. For a moment, he looked so much like his uncle that something in her chest twisted pleasantly before she could stop it.
“Are ye always this cheery before breakfast?” she asked, crouching slightly to bring herself level with him.
“Aye.” He offered the word proudly, his small chin lifting.
Dear God.
He was Sebastian in miniature, only softened by wild curls and two missing teeth on his left lower jaw.
She reached out and flicked one of those curls off his forehead. He ducked away from her hand, laughing, then immediately leaned back in for more.
“Brian.” She kept her voice low and warm. “Ye are too young to be fightin’.”
He drew himself up to his full height, which brought the top of his head approximately to her collarbone. “I am nae. I am a young man.” He paused, his expression turning deeply earnest. “Uncle Sebastian says proper trainin’ starts early or it doesnae start at all.”
“Did he?” She bit back a smile. “And does Uncle Sebastian also say young men should be challengin’ ladies to duels before they’ve had their porridge?”
Brian considered this with great seriousness, clearly searching for the trap in the question. “Nay.”
“I thought nae.”
“He’s very firm about it,” Brian added, undeterred, circling back to his original point.
“Then go fight yer uncle.” She had to press her lips together hard against the laugh that wanted out.
Brian considered this with apparent seriousness. “He’s choppin’ wood.”