Forty yards, perhaps fifty, from the inner gate to the keep entrance, the horse walking at a pace that had nothing urgent left in it now that the urgent part was done.
The rain was still coming down steadily, the particular persistent Highland rain that had no interest in stopping and knew it. It ran off the brim of his hood and down between his shoulders and pooled in the crease of his gloves.
She was pressed against his chest, her back to him, her weight settled into him.
She's too tired to hold herself.
He could feel the tension still in her spine. The rigid control she'd been holding herself to for however long she'd been standing in that courtyard. But underneath it, something that had been braced was coming loose, fraction by fraction, with each step of the horse.
He kept his arms around her and held the reins and looked at the back of her head and did not say anything. There was nothing to say on horseback in the rain that could carry what he wanted it to carry, and he had learned, imperfectly and late, that some things needed the right conditions or they came out wrong.
He reined in under the archway.
Dismounted. Turned immediately and put his hands back at her waist and lifted her down. Her hands found his arms again, and she steadied herself against him and then stayed there, not stepping back. Her palms flat against his forearms, and the rain coming down around both of them in the narrow shelter of the arch.
Her hair was plastered to her face on one side. Her cloak was soaked through. She was looking at him with an expression he couldn't fully read, which was not something he was accustomed to when it came to her face. He had learned her face over weeks of watching it when he thought she wasn't watching him watch it, and he could read most of what moved across it. This he couldn't.
It's too many things at once.
She's still so beautiful.
He stepped back and gestured toward the door.
She didn't move.
He looked at her.
She was standing at the threshold with her hands at her sides now, looking at the keep entrance the way she'd looked at it the first day he'd brought her here. Measuring it, calculating it, deciding what it meant. Only the calculation was different now. He could see that much.
"Why do ye wait here?" he asked.
The rain hit the stone around them. She kept her eyes on the door.
"Because I daenae ken," she said, and her voice had the particular quality of someone working very hard at steadiness and mostly getting there, "if I was saved." She stopped. Swallowed. "Or kept."
He stood with the rain running off him and felt the words go in somewhere below the collarbone, finding the specific place they were aimed at, which was deep and accurate of her and exactly what he deserved.
Kept.
He thought about the first day.
The ledge above the falls, her wrist in his hand, the powder she'd thrown that had blinded him, the way she'd run with the absolute certainty of someone who knew the landscape better than he did and was going to use that knowledge right up until the moment she couldn't.
He thought about the rope he'd tied at his own belt and the way she'd sat straight-backed in his saddle for two hours in deliberate refusal to lean against him, and the locked door, and the key he'd kept.
He thought about a hundred other things that came after, and did not improve the picture.
The rain came down.
He stepped toward her.
Not just to be saved, but also kept.
I'm keeping her.
"I was afraid," he said. The words came out rough, dragged up from somewhere he didn't open often, scraping the sides on the way. "When Fergus reached me on the ridge and told me what had happened."
He held her gaze. She was looking at him now, fully, the assessment in her eyes sharp despite everything she'd been through. He made himself stay in it, stay in her direct green gaze, and not manage his face into something more comfortable.
