This is deeply uncomfortable.
The noise pressed in from all sides, layered and directionless, nothing like the order of a training yard or a council chamber where voices had purpose and sequence. A child was crying somewhere to his left about something that seemed to involvea flower crown. Two of the women had started disagreeing, cheerfully, about the right way to salt mutton. Maisie was now telling a story that involved a lot of hand gestures.
He did not follow most of it. He listened anyway, or at least tried to. His attention kept drifting toward the boundary wall, the list of things waiting for him, the eastern fence posts, the grain count, the letter from the MacAlister steward that he had not yet replied to. He pulled his focus back. Let the noise be noise. He stopped trying to organize it.
A small body pressed against his left arm.
He looked down. One of the younger children, a boy of perhaps four, had simply leaned into him the way small children lean into whatever is solid and available, without asking, without looking up. He was watching Margaret with round, interested eyes, his weight settled comfortably against Fergus's side as though this was a completely ordinary thing to do to a person.
Fergus did not move away.
He sat with the child's weight resting against his arm and looked over at Margaret, who was now listening to the six-year-old explain something at length, her expression patient and genuinely interested. Lilly was dozing against her chest, one small fist loosely curled under her chin.
She is good at this.
Margaret looked up and saw him already watching. Her eyes drifted over him, noting the child against his arm, and the fact that he had been there for a while. She expected him to say something, to mark the moment in that way she did—a raised brow, a careful word that conveyed three meanings at once.
She looked at him for a moment, something shifting in her expression that he could not name, and then she turned back to the child who was still talking. As though his being here was unremarkable. As though it was simply what he did.
He sat with that for a while.
When Lilly began to stir, he was already standing. He crossed the few feet between them and held out his arms before he had consciously decided to. Margaret looked up at him.
"I'll hold her," he said.
A beat of silence. Margaret blinked, just once, and he watched her recover from something she had not expected.
"Will ye now?" she said.
He took the bairn. Lilly regarded him with the bright, assessing eyes she always turned on him. He adjusted her against his chest, more certain than the first time, less careful about where his hands went.
"Aye," he said, not quite looking at Margaret. He felt her eyes on him for a moment longer than necessary.
He did not explain himself. He had nothing to explain. He sat back down on the grass with the bairn against his chest and the child still leaning against his arm, and he looked out across the courtyard at nothing in particular, and he told himself this was simply practical.
The warmth of Lilly's small body settled against his ribs.
Chapter Twelve
She was still thinking about it the next morning.
Lilly had fallen against his chest. His large hand rested on her back, steadying her instinctively. The way he looked out across the courtyard afterward, as if he needed somewhere else to focus his eyes besides her.
I'll hold her,he had said. As though it was nothing, even though it was everything.
Margaret stood at the nursery window in the early light, watching the glen below the castle wall, the long grass still silver with dew, the hills rolling away into a pale morning sky. Lilly was behind her in the crib, breathing in the slow, untroubled way of a bairn who had been well-fed and well-held and had no concerns about the day ahead.
He is capable of it. He simply does nae ken he is.
That was the thing about Fergus MacKenzie. He was not a cold man. She had stopped believing that within the first week. He was a man who had been taught, by years and circumstance and God knows what else, to keep everything useful and discard everything soft. He had built an entire identity around it. The soldier. The Laird. The man who did not need anyone.
But she had seen his face in that nursery. She had seen it in the courtyard. She had watched him sit in the grass with a child leaning against his arm and do nothing about it, and she knew, with the quiet certainty of a woman who paid attention, that something in him was shifting.
Good. Then we keep goin'.
She went to find him after breakfast. He was in the yard, already deep in conversation with Angus about something involving the eastern boundary, his arms crossed, with an expression that usually appeared before ten in the morning—one that conveyed he had already made a decision and was explaining it as a courtesy. He glanced at her when she arrived. She paused to let him finish the sentence he was in the middle of.
"Good mornin'," she said, when he had.
