"Tell me about the castle," she said to Isobel. "Tell me what needs doin'. I'll need somethin' to occupy meself until spring."
Isobel blinked. "Tonight?"
"Tonight," Margaret said. "There's nay point in sittin' with it. I'd rather be useful."
She pulled a chair toward the hearth and sat down, and if her eyes were slightly too bright in the firelight, neither of them mentioned it.
Isobel sat across from her, and they talked until the fire burned low, and the hall grew warm with their voices, while the empty space where Fergus MacKenzie had stood slowly began to belong to her instead.
Chapter One
Nine Months Later
He was already reaching for the claymore before he was fully awake.
Thirty years of soldiering did that to a man. The body learned to move before the mind caught up, learned to treat every sudden sound as a threat until proven otherwise. His hand found the bedframe. Where was his claymore? He had stopped sleeping with it drawn three months ago, when the clan had settled enough that he no longer expected to be murdered before breakfast.
He lay still for a moment, breathing.
The sound came again.
Not a threat. Not steel striking stone or a man's bark at the gate. Something smaller and infinitely more piercing, coming from the corridor outside his door.
Fergus sat up.
The room was gray with the first, hesitant light of morning. The hearth had turned to cold ash overnight. He could see his breath. He pulled his tunic over his head, found his boots, and crossed the floor to the door.
He opened it.
The maid standing in the corridor flinched so hard she almost dropped the bundle in her arms. She was young, one of the kitchen girls, he thought, though he had not yet learned all their names. Her face was blotched from crying, the cold, or maybe both. The bundle in her arms was the source of the noise. It was very small and determined to make itself heard.
Fergus examined the bundle and then looked at the maid.
"Where did that come from?" he said.
The maid opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She thrust a folded piece of parchment toward him with her free hand—the hand not busy trying to contain the escalating bundle.
He grabbed the parchment and read it.
He read it again.
The writing was uneven, the letters pressing hard into the page in some places and barely grazing it in others. A man writing quickly, in pain, or both. The words were few. Euan Calloway had never wasted language, and he had not wasted it here.
The pox has taken Catriona. It will take me before the week is out. There is no family, her mother's kin are gone, and mine will not keep a girl child. I have thought carefully about who I trust with her life. I trust ye, Laird, because I have watched ye these past months and I ken what kind of man ye are beneath the title.
Ye are not yer circumstances. Neither is she. Keep her safe.
He recognized the name signed at the bottom.
Euan Calloway. His clan advisor. One of the first men who had not looked at Fergus as an interloper when he inherited the title. A man who had sat across from him at the early tables and spoken plainly when everyone else chose careful words.
Fergus had respected him for that. He had meant to tell him so someday, when there was time.
There would not be time. The pox had seen to that.
He lowered the parchment.
The bairn in the maid's arms took a breath and yelled with fresh determination.
