"I'll return north," he said. "To the clan. When things are more settled, when the land is secure, and the men have learned to trust the title, I'll send for ye. Ye'll come north then and we'll..." He stopped again. "We'll make what we can of it."
"And when will that be?" she asked.
He said nothing.
"A season? A year? Two years? I'd like to ken how long I'm to sit in someone else's castle bein' cared for before I'm permitted to begin me own life."
"I daenae ken," he said. And she believed him. That was the worst part of it. She could have done something with a lie. With the truth, she had nothing.
She looked at him standing there in the firelight with his jaw set, his hands still, and his eyes doing that complicated, exhausted thing they did.
She thought about the girl she had been eight months ago, who had received the elders' decree, wept in private, then dried her face and begun preparing herself. That girl believed, deep down, that the man at the end of the road would see her, find her useful, capable, and maybe, eventually, worth choosing.
She was done with that girl now. She could feel it, the exact moment of it, standing in this hall with the peat smoke in her throat and the cold coming off the stone.
"Then go," she said.
"Go north. Secure yer land. Win yer men. Do what a laird must do." She lifted her chin. "I willnae beg ye to stay. I willnae write letters askin' when ye're comin' back. I willnae sit in Isobel's castle countin' the weeks and waitin' to be sent for like a piece of furniture that's been put in storage."
She met his gaze and held it. "But when ye do send for me, when yer land is settled, and yer men trust their Laird, and ye decide ye're ready to have a wife, ye'll find that I've also been busy. And the woman who comes north to yer castle will nae be the woman standin' in front of ye now, so I'd advise ye nae to expect her."
The silence that followed was long enough that she heard the wind change pitch outside.
"Aye," he said. His voice had changed. She couldn't name how.
He turned and walked to the door. When he reached it, he stopped, his hand on the wood, his back still facing her. She waited. She had nothing to say to his back, and she would not fill the silence for him.
He did not turn around.
He walked out.
The sound of his boots on the stone passage gradually faded, then disappeared, leaving only the fire, the wind, and the quiet that follows a door closing. Around her, the hall moved on, voices, scraping chairs, the ordinary noise of a celebration that did not know or care what had just ended beside the hearth.
Margaret stood still for a moment. She looked at the fire and allowed herself to fully feel the weight of it, the loneliness, the anger, and the sharp sting of being told plainly that she was not wanted. She felt it completely, without an audience, because she would not pretend to be composed when she had no reason to be.
Then she unclenched her hands.
"Margaret."
Isobel appeared at her side, she had been there for some time, hovering at the edge of the hearthlight, close enough to reach her but far enough to give her room. Her eyes were soft with something that was not pity. Margaret was grateful for that. She could not have borne pity.
"I'm all right," Margaret said.
"I ken ye are," Isobel said. "That's nae what I was goin' to say."
"What were ye goin' to say?"
Isobel looked at her for a moment. "I was goin' to say that I'm sorry. Nae because of what he said. Because ye deserved better than this night. Ye came here in good faith, and ye were met with..." She stopped. "Ye deserved better."
Margaret looked at her friend. She felt the back of her throat tighten and breathed through it, slow and deliberate.
"He's nae wrong," she said quietly. "About the clan. About what he's building up there. I understand the difficulty of it." She paused. "I simply daenae think it excuses him."
"It doesnae," Isobel agreed.
"Good." Margaret smoothed the fabric of her gown. Her hands were steady. She was proud of her hands. "Then we're agreed."
She looked at the door he had walked through. She stared at it long enough to say goodbye to the version of this night she had hoped for and allowed herself to mourn it briefly, as you mourn something that was never real, which is its own kind of grief.
