Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
The maid went to Alba first.
Sebastian watched it happen from the shadowed doorway of the great hall. The girl crossed the corridor with a question already forming on her face, passing him by without a flicker of hesitation. She continued straight to the Study. Alba’s sharp voice answered before the knock even fully landed.
He stood frozen in the doorway, saying nothing.
It was the third time this morning. The groundskeeper at dawn, the urgent question about the linen allocation, and now this.
A few days of armed occupation, his name carved into every ledger, and his hardened men stationed on every gate; and yet, when something needed deciding, the castle still turned instinctively in her direction.
He pushed off the oak doorframe and walked.
He needed air. He needed the biting cold and open space, and something brutal to do with his hands before the suffocating tangle in his chest resolved itself into something he could not take back.
He crossed the frozen courtyard, collecting the heavy iron axe from the chopping block where he’d left it that morning. He set a thick log upright.
The axe came down. The wood split clean.
He set another.
The maid going to Alba first was not a problem he could solve with a written contract.
He understood that now, with a cold, practical clarity that offered nothing comforting.
A signature changed a legal title. It did not change in ten days, or three years before that.
It did not alter the deep, cellular knowledge of a household built entirely around one person’s authority.
A castle would take considerably longer than a strict deadline to relearn its master.
I need her. That would be the raw fact beneath my request.
He had needed her long before he fully understood it, from the exact moment he had watched her effortlessly manage Hamish in the kitchen corridor on their second morning and filed the memory away without comment.
He could hold the stone walls. He could feed the Clan.
He could settle the border disputes, walk the perimeter lines, and make the agonizing decisions that kept hundreds of people alive through a brutal winter.
But the thing she did—the way the castle itself vibrated and responded to her presence, the immediate instinct in the household, the accumulated trust of three years in every small, unremarkable interaction—that was not something he could replicate, replace, or run a Holding without.
He set another log. The axe came down with a violent crack.
He had kissed her in that dark corridor the night before. She had kissed him back, deep and desperate, and then she had murmured two days in a voice that had meant something he had not fully let himself hear until he was lying alone in the dark afterward.
He had lain in the cramped garrison room, staring at the water stain on the ceiling and turning her words over and over. He realized, too late and too clearly, that she had not meant two days the way he had wanted her to mean it.
She had meant two days left until she walked out of his life forever.
He buried the iron axe deep into the timber block and left it vibrating there.
Hamish was crossing the south yard. It was either a bizarre coincidence or a calculated move; but with Hamish, it was rarely a coincidence.
“Walk with me,” Sebastian barked.
They took the High Wall walk. The cold up here was different; sharper than at the sheltered courtyard.
It was a moving, biting wind that got deep into the joints, requiring a hard forward motion to manage.
Below them, the vast glen stretched out white and utterly still.
The jagged mountains were quickly disappearing into a low, heavy gray cloud that was building from the north with serious, winter intent.
“The servants go to her first,” Sebastian said, his voice flat.
Hamish said nothing. That silence meant he’d noticed it, too.
“Every damn time,” Sebastian muttered, his eyes tracking the perimeter. “The maid this mornin’. Campbell at dawn about the south field drainage. I am standin’ ten feet away, and they walk right past me to find her.”
“Aye.” Hamish’s thick leather boots clicked steadily against the stone. “They do.”
“This needs to change.”
Hamish remained quiet for three paces. “Does it?”
Sebastian snapped his head around, glaring.
“I only mean,” Hamish said, adopting that careful neutrality that meant he was about to say something Sebastian would not enjoy, “that it’s nae disloyalty, me Laird.
They go to her because she kens where the linen press is hidden, why the North Drainage backs up in October, which farmhand needs a firm word, and which one needs to be left alone. ”
A short pause landed between them. “That’s nae a threat to yer authority. That’s a castle that’s been damn well run.”
“I ken that.”
“Do ye?” Hamish glanced at him sideways, his brow arching.
Sebastian’s jaw tightened until the bone ached. He said nothing.
“The papers,” Hamish reminded him, shifting his weight. “They’re still unsigned.”
“I am aware.”
“She’s got two days left on yer agreement.”
“I am aware of that, too.”
“And the letter to MacKenzie’s wife?”
Sebastian stopped dead in his tracks.
Hamish stopped right beside him. Below the wall walk, the entire inner courtyard was visible.
Across the frozen stones, near the kitchen garden gate, Alba was crossing with Brian attached to her side.
Brian had his blunt wooden sword tucked firmly under one arm, his free hand wrapped tightly around hers.
His small fingers were entirely lost in her grip.
He was talking rapidly, Sebastian could see the sheer animation of it even from this height, the enthusiastic tilt of the boy’s head, the emphatic gestures of a child making an important point.
Alba was looking down at him. He could not see her exact expression from this distance, only the gentle angle of her head, the slight, protective cant of her body toward the boy, and the easy accommodation of her pace to his shorter stride.
Something massive and heavy moved through Sebastian’s chest. It was a sensation he had no useful name for.
“She’ll go,” he said. The words came out level, stripped of every ounce of emotion he was refusing to acknowledge.
“If I force the deadline, she’ll go straight to MacKenzie and take Brian’s best chance at a settled home with her.
” He kept his eyes locked on the courtyard below.
“And if I let the deadline pass without resolution, the council will question the arrangement, and I will have a different problem altogether.”
“So what do ye do?” Hamish asked quietly.
“I need her to stay.” He said it plainly, without ornament, because absolute clarity was the only thing that worked when the situation was dire. “Nae because the contract requires it. But because she’s right for Brian and…” He stopped himself.
Hamish waited, unblinking.
“Because the castle runs when she’s in it,” Sebastian finished. He heard how thin the excuse sounded. He was agonizingly aware of how thin it was. “I cannae manage this holdin’ without her runnin’ the other half of it. That’s a fact, and I’d rather say it plainly than pretend otherwise.”
Hamish looked at him for a long, heavy moment. “Is that the only reason, me Laird?” Hamish asked softly.
Sebastian looked back down at the courtyard.
Alba had stopped. She looked up with her chin level, her expression showing something complex and guarded, unreadable from across the distance. Brian was still talking, but she was no longer paying attention to the boy.
Her dark eyes found Sebastian’s across the cold, open space.
He held her gaze, refusing to look away, the tension pulling taut between them like a wire.
Then she turned away sharply, her hand still locked in Brian’s, and walked straight through the kitchen garden gate without looking back.
Sebastian watched the space where she had been. He reached down, picked up the axe from where he’d left it buried, and set a new log. He brought it down with a violent, shattering force. The two halves cleared the block entirely, landing in the frost-covered grass on opposite sides.
“Call a council meetin’,” he ordered, his breath pluming in the freezing air. “Soon. Every clan senior, MacGregor and MacLaren both.”
Hamish’s eyebrows moved slightly upward. “And Lady MacLaren?”
Sebastian set another log.
“Invite her.” He brought the axe down, splitting the wood clean through to the stone. “She’ll come. She willnae be able to help herself.”
Hamish made a sharp sound that was almost certainly a suppressed laugh and walked away before Sebastian could look at him.
* * *
The Solar was the only room in the castle that still felt completely hers.
It was small, too small to be useful for much beyond sitting, with a single narrow slit of a window that looked out over the jagged eastern cliffs.
She had come here the night her husband died.
She had come here that first bitter winter when the accounts would not balance, and she had not wanted anyone to see her desperately working out whether they would survive.
She had come here on every occasion when the world outside the door required her to be steel, when she had needed to be nothing at all.
She sat in the pitch blackness with her hands resting in her lap, watching the torches move through the courtyard below.
His men were still unloading. Even at this late hour, they kept working as the massive supply wagons rolled through the iron gate in a slow, muddy procession that had been moving since midmorning.
The steady, efficient sounds of it drifted up through the cold night air: the creak of timber, the heavy knock of barrels, and the occasional murmur of male voices.
Her courtyard. Her Gates. Her cobblestones darkened with someone else’s mud.
The heavy door creaked open behind her. She did not turn.