"Nearly twelve," the woman said quietly. She had not been invited. She spoke anyway. "He is nae yet twelve."
Fergus looked at the man. Then he looked at the woman. Finally, he looked at the man again, and something became clear to him with the cold, precise certainty of a blade finding its angle.
"I'll tell ye what," he said, his voice even. "I've need of more hands in the stables. I'll take the boy. Ten sheep and five sacks of grain for yer trouble."
The man's face shifted. First surprise, then quick and open calculation.
"Aye," the man said. "Aye, that's... Aye, me Laird."
The hall went very still.
Fergus let it sit. Three full seconds. Long enough for every person in that room to hear what had just happened.
He raised one hand. The quiet deepened.
"The boy stays with his mother." His voice had dropped, quiet and final. "Ye just sold yer son for ten sheep and five sacks of grain." He held the man's gaze. "Ye daenae deserve him."
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
The man opened his mouth. Something in Fergus's face closed it again.
"We're done," Fergus said.
He scanned the room the way he always did after a decision, reading the faces, measuring what the words had built and what they had cost. His eyes moved to the back of the hall.
Margaret was there.
She was standing near the wall, very still, her hands folded in front of her. She was not wearing the careful, measuring expression she usually carried. She was not composing herself or calculating her next move. She was simply looking at him, her face entirely open, something in it warm and certain and plainly, unmistakably pleased.
Not surprised. Pleased.
As though she had expected exactly this of him and was glad to have been right.
He held her gaze for one moment. Then he turned away and called the next matter, because the alternative was standing at the head of his own council hall, thinking about the look on his wife's face, and he was not prepared to do that in front of his entire clan.
Fergus was the first to leave the hall, going through a side door behind his seat that led out toward the stables.
Once outside, he could not resist the urge. He mounted his horse and rode out at a relaxed pace through the lower glen, his eyes drifting through the tree line out of habit as much as purpose. The ground was soft beneath him, the horses moving quietly through the tall grass, their breath fogging in the cool air.
Angus had grabbed the hunting bows and followed him out. He now rode to his left, a half-length behind. He had been unusually quiet since they left the castle gate.
Fergus let it be. He had his own quiet to manage.
Her face kept coming back to him. The way she had been standing, the look she had worn when his decision landed, open and certain and warm in a way she had not tried to conceal. He had turned away from it. He had called the next matter, done his job, and not looked at her again.
A deer broke from the far tree line and disappeared again before he had fully registered it. He let it go.
"Ye were good in that hall," Angus said.
"I daenae want to talk about the hall."
"Aye." A pause. "Do ye want to talk about the deer ye just let walk away?"
Fergus said nothing. He adjusted his grip on the reins.
They continued riding in silence, the glen opening up before them, with hills rising on both sides into the pale summer sky. Somewhere above the ridge, a hawk slowly circled. The sound of the river was faint but steady through the trees.
Fergus did not realize he had stopped until Angus pulled up alongside him. He had not meant to. His horse had simply slowed at the edge of the ridge, where the glen flattened and the full stretch of MacKenzie land opened out below. The fields, the river bending south, the distant dark line of the boundary trees, the castle sitting low and solid at the center of it.
