"Aye." He looked at her with the careful neutrality he had been using since the rain. "What is it?"
"We are goin' to the glen."
A pause. "I've work?—"
"Angus will manage it." She looked at Angus, who had the excellent instincts of a man who understood when he was being asked to agree with something. "Willnae ye?"
"Aye, me Lady," Angus said, with a straightness of face that Maisie had clearly trained into him. "Absolutely."
Fergus looked at Angus. Then back at her. His jaw did the thing it did when he was calculating whether an argument was worth the effort.
"The glen?" he repeated.
"The glen," she confirmed. "We need flowers for the nursery garlands. And for the great hall. It will nae take long."
It took considerably longer than that. She had always intended it to.
This was not about flowers, and it was not about errands. It never had been. She had understood something about Fergus MacKenzie in the first week. That he was a man who could command a room, lead men into danger, and make decisions that determined the course of other people's lives, and yet had never once been asked to simplybesomewhere without a purpose.
Every moment of his life had been assigned a function. Soldier. Man-at-arms. Laird. He did not know how to exist in the spaces between roles, and so he had filled them with work, and then more work, and then the performance of work when the real work was done.
She could not reach him in the spaces where he was already armored. Not in the great hall. Not at council. Not on the training ground.
But here — in the ordinary, purposeless rhythm of a morning walk, a kitchen task, an afternoon in the open air — the armor had nowhere to hang. He could not be a Laird while kneading bread. He could not be a soldier while picking heather. He could only be himself, and that was the man she was trying to find.
She was not running him on errands. She was dismantling him, very carefully, one common morning at a time.
The path descending from the east wall opened into a wide, sloping meadow before narrowing toward the actual glen. The air shifted instantly, feeling fuller somehow, less dominated by stone, smoke, and the weight of the castle behind them. The hills rose on three sides, purple-green in the morning sunlight, with a very wide, very blue sky above. Somewhere below, a river wove through the valley floor, its steady, low sound reaching their ears before they saw it, blending with the wind.
Fergus walked beside her with his hands behind his back and the posture of a man accompanying someone on a task he expected to complete efficiently.
Margaret slowed her pace.
Not dramatically. Just enough to make efficiency impossible. She moved through the tall grass at a slow, unhurried pace, as if she had nowhere urgent to go, stopping when something caught her eye, crouching down to examine a cluster of wildflowers at the base of a gray rock. First, she noticed the yellow ones, small and vivid. She picked one up and turned it between her fingers, studying it carefully.
"Tormentil," she said, to no one in particular.
Fergus stopped beside her. "What?"
"The flower." She held it up. "Tormentil. Me mother used to put them in the window in summer. She said they were common, but she liked them anyway." She set it carefully in her basket. "She said there was nay shame in likin' common things."
Fergus said nothing. She had not really expected him to. She straightened and kept walking.
"Did she," he said, after a moment. Not a question exactly. More like a door, held slightly open.
"She did." Margaret moved toward a patch of heather further along the slope. "She had very decided opinions about most things. The windows. The bread. The correct order in which to greet guests." She smiled at the ground. "She would have had a great deal to say about this castle."
A pause. She sensed him struggling not to let the shutters down. Finally, he spoke coolly. "In what regard?"
She glanced at him. He was looking into the middle distance, his expression carefully neutral, but he had asked. That was the point. He had asked.
"The hall needs more light," she said. "She always said that. A dark hall makes for a dark household. She would have had those shutters off the south windows before the week was out."
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite enough to name. "And ye agree with her?"
"I agree with her about the windows." Margaret crouched again, this time for a stem of purple heather, pulling it cleanly from the root. "About the bread, I have me own opinions."
She heard something then—something she had not heard from him before, not quite a laugh, too brief and controlled for that, but the breath that comes just before one, quickly suppressed. She did not look up. She added the heather to the basket and moved on, giving him the privacy of it.
