Poetry.
Not printed. Written by hand, in a script that was measured and deliberate. She lifted the page closer.
The hills keep what the valley forgets,and the river kens where the stone has wept.
She stood very still for a moment.
"Ah, what do we have here?" she said quietly, to herself as much as to Lilly. "It seems someone in this castle kent exactly what I like."
She did not know the hand. She stood in the slanted light and looked at the pages for a long moment, turning them carefully, reading fragments. The voice in them was not what she expected from a castle full of land records and grain tallies. It was spare and precise, attentive to the exact quality of things, the particular color of winter hills, the weight of silence before a storm. Nothing wasted. Nothing soft for its own sake.
The sound from the corridor made her turn.
Margaret hurried to the doorway, only to find it was empty. The passage beyond it, as far as she could see, remained undisturbed except that she glimpsed a very tall figure, broad shoulders, and a gait that only Fergus had.
"Hun? Look at that, bairn. The laird. Now, why did he leave without comin' to see yer pretty little face?"
She made a moue at Lilly, who giggled, then yawned. She waited, listening. Perhaps he would return. She turned back to the shelves.
By the time she glanced down again, Lilly had finally surrendered. Her breathing had gone slow and even, her cheek pressed fully against Margaret's shoulder, her fist still loosely curled.
She moved to the window and settled onto the low stone seat beneath it, carefully arranging the bairn against her. The sunlight streamed warm and direct across her lap and the openpages of the Highland folklore she had resting on her knee. She began to hum again, very softly.
Chapter Fourteen
Steel met steel, and Fergus drove forward, forcing Angus back three steps before the man found his footing and answered with a lateral cut that came close enough to be a genuine problem.
"There ye are," Angus said, breathing hard. "I was beginnin' to think ye'd gone soft on me."
Fergus said nothing. He reset his stance and came again.
The yard was full. Six of his men working in pairs, the rhythm of it all blade and breath and the dull percussion of boots on hard ground.
Good sound. The sound of a clan that could defend itself.
He had built this into them over months, the discipline of daily practice, no exceptions, no rank excused.
Angus pressed left. Fergus read it two moves ahead and was already moving, steel locking, breaking, circling. His body knew this. His body had always known this. It was everything else he was less certain of.
He had stood in that doorway and watched her humming, low and soft, her lips close to the bairn's hair. Lilly's eyes had been closing. Margaret had not hurried her. She had just kept moving, kept humming, her hand steady on the bairn's back as though there was nowhere else in the world she needed to be and no one she needed to be it for.
As though the bairn was hers.
The thought had arrived without warning and settled somewhere it had no business settling.
He had left before she could turn around.
He turned the thought away. Angus came hard from the right, and he answered it cleanly, the impact traveling up through his wrist and shoulder with a familiar, grounding ache.
He had gone looking for them because the nursery was empty and the healer had told him Margaret had taken Lilly for a walk an hour ago. An hour was long enough to get turned around in this castle, long enough to end up in the older passages where the torches sat empty, and the floors were uneven. He had told himself it was practical. He had told himself this while already moving toward the east corridor.
He had found them by the light under the door.
He had stood in that doorway and watched her move between the shelves in the low, slanted light, Lilly against her shoulder, her hand trailing the spines of books she was reading aloud as she found them. Her voice had been barely above a murmur, steady and unhurried, shaped more for the bairn than for meaning. The child had been almost asleep. Margaret had not known she was being watched.
He had known the room held maps and old clan records. He had been in it once, years before he took the Lairdship, looking for a boundary document. He had felt it was not worth staying or returning to.
Now, with her there, he had not wanted to leave. Still, he left anyway. He came here instead and grabbed a sword, which was the only reliable way he had to deal with thoughts that would not behave.
