Epilogue
Sebastian woke before Alba most mornings now, though he had learned better than to say so aloud, since she claimed it as proof that marriage had softened him into an early riser he had never been before.
He let her sleep a while longer, propped on one elbow, watching the gray morning light creep across the chamber they had long since furnished properly, the pile of furs by the hearth replaced months ago with an actual bed neither of them had ever quite admitted to preferring.
By the time she woke, he was already half-dressed, and she squinted up at him.
“Ye’re doin’ that thing again,” she said, voice thick with sleep. “Standin’ there lookin’ pleased with yerself before I have had a chance to be properly awake.”
“I am simply admirin’ the view.”
“Ye’re gloatin’.”
“A man’s allowed to gloat over his own wife.”
“Is he?” She sat up, her hair a wild tangle around her shoulders, and reached for the shirt he had discarded the night before, pulling it over her head rather than bothering with her own clothes just yet.
“I have a council to sit through this mornin’.
Ye could gloat somewhere useful instead, like the trainin’ yard, where Hamish keeps insistin’ the new recruits need someone to shout at. ”
“They need someone to shout at. They daenae need me specifically.”
“Aye. They need ye specifically,” she smiled.
Down in the Great Hall, the morning had already settled into its usual rhythm by the time Sebastian made his way through it.
Servants clearing the last of the breakfast trestles, a pair of hounds sprawled by the cold hearth, Brian’s voice carrying from somewhere near the kitchens where he had clearly talked his way into an extra sweet roll before the Cook caught him at it.
“I saw that,” Sebastian said, catching the boy mid-bite as he ducked past.
Brian froze, crumbs still on his chin. “Saw what?”
“The roll ye were nae meant to have before yer lessons.”
“It’s only a small one.”
“It’s yer third small one this week.”
Brian thought about it, then apparently decided the conversation had gone its natural way, and he darted off toward the courtyard without further comment, leaving Sebastian to shake his head and walk toward the yard himself.
Hamish was already there, drilling a line of recruits through basic sword forms.
“Lord kens they need the work,” Hamish remarked gloomily as Sebastian approached, watching one poor lad nearly drop his blade entirely on the backswing. “Half of them couldnae hold a sword steady if their lives depended on it, which, given the state of things lately, it very well might.”
“Give them time.”
“I have been givin’ them time for a month. Some men just arenae born for it.”
“Some men just need someone patient enough to teach them properly, instead of shoutin’ until they freeze up entirely.” Sebastian nodded toward the lad still struggling. “Let me take that one for a while.”
“Be me guest. He’s yers for the mornin’.”
By midday, the training yard had emptied for the noon meal, and Sebastian found Fergus in the courtyard instead, engaged in what appeared to be a losing argument with his own daughter, who had decided at the ripe age of nearly two that walking meant walking directly toward the well every single time she was set down.
“Lily. Lily, nae the well!” Fergus scooped her up for what looked like the fifth time, earning an indignant shriek of protest for his trouble. “I swear this child has a singular purpose in life, and it’s drownin’ herself the moment I look away.”
“She takes after her mother, then. Stubborn as stone.”
“She takes after her mother in every possible way, God help us all.” Fergus settled Lily onto his hip, where she immediately began tugging at his beard instead, apparently satisfied with this alternative entertainment.
“How’s married life treating ye, MacGregor?
Ye’ve had, what, four months of it now?”
“Better than I deserve, most days.”
“Aye, most men would say the same and mean it less than ye do.” Fergus grinned. “Margaret still insists ye’ve gone soft since the weddin’.”
“I have nae gone soft.”
“Ye smile now. Regularly. It’s unsettlin’ for a man who spent three years scowlin’ at anyone who so much as looked at ye.”
“I had less to smile about then.”
“Fair point, that.”
Sebastian found Alba later that afternoon, exactly where he expected her, in the Great Hall, seated at the head of the long table with a stack of ledgers before her, arguing amiably with Philomena over the household accounts while a pot of tea went cold between them.
“We daenae need three new tapestries for the West Corridor,” Alba was saying, not looking up from the parchment in front of her. “One will do fine.”
“One will look sparse next to the new hearth Sebastian built.”
“Then we’ll live with sparse.”
“Ye’ve become remarkably stingy for a woman married to a laird with a full treasury.”
“I have become sensible for a woman who kens exactly how quickly a full treasury becomes an empty one.” Alba finally glanced up, catching sight of Sebastian in the doorway, and something in her expression shifted, softened, the argument with Philomena forgotten for a moment. “Ye’re back early.”
“Hamish claims the training’s nearly done for the day. I thought I’d rather spend the rest of it arguin’ with ye about tapestries.”
“There’s nothin’ to argue. I have already won.”
“Have ye?”
“Philomena agrees with me. Daenae ye, Philomena?” She turned to look at her. “Ye ken,” she added, setting the ledger aside entirely now, “we could simply commission one tapestry that looks expensive enough to satisfy Philomena and cheap enough to satisfy me.”
“That is nae how tapestries work, me Lady.”
“It could be, if the weaver is willin’ to lie about the cost.”
Philomena, wisely, said nothing at all, and busied herself instead with refilling the now-cold pot of tea, clearly unwilling to be dragged further into a fight she had no intention of losing on either side.
That evening, the Great Hall filled with the ordinary noise of a household settling into supper.
Servants moving between tables, Brian recounting some elaborate and almost certainly exaggerated tale of his day’s adventures to anyone who would listen.
Isobel and Alasdair were seated near the hearth, deep in quiet conversation of their own, Fergus attempting, with limited success, to convince Lily that supper came before dessert rather than the reverse.
They came to visit often; it was already a big family.
Sebastian took his seat beside Alba at the head of the table, close enough that her shoulder brushed his when she reached for her cup.
He found himself, not for the first time, simply observing the whole of it unfold around them. The noise, the warmth, the particular fuss of an ordinary evening in a Keep that had once stood cold and half-empty before she had walked into it and refused to leave.
It struck him, watching her laugh at something Isobel murmured across the table, that he would have traded every stone wall he had ever claimed by force for this single ordinary evening, and counted it the better bargain by far.
A year of ordinary evenings, stacked one atop the other, and he still had not tired of them.
“Why are ye starin’?” Alba said quietly, without looking at him.
“I am nae starin’.”
“Ye are starin’ at everyone like ye cannae quite believe it’s real.”
“Maybe I cannae.” He reached for her hand beneath the table, threading his fingers through hers. “A year ago, I’d have called any man mad who told me this was how I’d spend me evenings.”
“And now?”
“Now I cannae imagine spendin’ them any other way.”
Down the table, Brian’s voice rose suddenly over the general noise. “Uncle Sebastian, Fergus says ye once fought ten men with yer bare hands! Is that true?”
Sebastian glanced toward Fergus, who had the decency to look faintly sheepish over the rim of his own cup.
“Somethin’ like that,” Sebastian said. “Though the number tends to grow a bit larger every time Fergus tells the story.”
“It was six last I heard it,” Alba said, arching a brow at Fergus. “Last month it was seven.”
“The story improves with age,” Fergus said, entirely unrepentant, and the whole table dissolved into easy laughter, Lily included, even though she had not the faintest idea what any of it meant.
Sebastian squeezed Alba’s hand once beneath the table and did not let go. Then he felt her fingers tighten around his.
He glanced over. She was not eating. She’d barely touched the food on her plate all evening.
He realized now that there was something in the set of her jaw that had not been there an hour ago, something that looked less like the usual sharpness she wore and more like a woman working up the nerve to say something she had been holding onto.
“Ye’ve gone quiet,” he observed, his voice low enough to not carry past the two of them.
“I have been thinkin’ how to say somethin’.”
“That’s never stopped ye before.”
“This is different.” She turned to look at him fully now, and whatever nerves had been building behind her eyes gave way to something steadier, something that made his own chest go tight before she’d said a single word more. “I am carryin’ yer child, Sebastian.”
For a moment, the noise of the Hall dropped away, the whole world narrowing down to her face, the words she’d just uttered and the sheer, staggering weight of them.
“Say that again,” he managed.
“I am with child.” Her mouth curved, uncertain and hopeful at once. “I have suspected for a fortnight. The healer confirmed it this mornin’, before the council.”
“Ye kent this mornin’ and said nothin’?”
“I wanted the right moment.”
“This is the right moment.” He was already on his feet, his chair scraping loudly against the stone floor, drawing more than a few curious glances from further down the table.
He did not care. He caught her hand and pulled her up beside him, right there in front of the whole Hall, and found he could not have kept the words in even if he’d wanted to.