"I'll take her," he said.
Mrs. O'Halloran blinked. "Me Laird?"
"Give her back." He held out his arms, and after a brief pause in which the housekeeper reassessed everything she thought she knew about him, she complied. "Ye have work to do. Make a list of what's needed for the bairn and bring it to me by midday. We'll see what can be sourced before the week is out."
Mrs. O'Halloran looked at him holding the baby. Her expression flickered with something complicated and then settled into professional neutrality. "Aye, me Laird."
She left.
Fergus carried the bairn down the corridor, through the door at the end, and into his solar, which was the only room in the castle that was reliably warm before the rest of the fires were lit because he had paid attention to the placement of the hearth when the repairs were made. He set her down on the wide chair near the window, wedged between his plaid and the arm of the chair so she could not roll, then he stepped back and looked at her.
"Yer name is Lilly," he said. He had decided this in the corridor and felt no need to explain his reasoning. "Ye'll nae remember me tellin' ye, but that's what ye'll be called."
Lilly considered this. She grabbed a fold of the plaid with one small fist and pulled it toward her mouth.
"Daenae eat that," Fergus said.
She ignored him. He suspected this would become a pattern.
He moved to the window. The morning had fully arrived now, pale and cold, with the ridge to the north cutting a dark, jagged line against a sky that could not decide between gray and blue. He had stood at this window on a hundred mornings, contemplating the work of the day—the endless, granular, unromantic work of being a laird. The fences. The stores. The men who were slowly learning to trust him, one small proof of competence at a time.
He thought about Margaret.
He had been thorough about not thinking about his wife. He had buried her memory—her steadiness, the particular quality of her voice that night in the hall, the way she had looked at him without flinching when he said things he was not proud of. He had pushed it down beneath everything else to do in a day, and there was always enough to do in a day, and it had mostly worked.
Mrs. O'Halloran was right. She was right, and he had known she was right for six months, and he had been choosing not to act on it because acting on it meant returning to Dunalasdair and walking across a courtyard toward a woman he had abandoned on her wedding night, and he did not have a clear picture of how that conversation would go.
He had one now.
He could already feel the shape of it, the specific, controlled courtesy she would offer him: the straight spine. He strongly doubted that the woman he left behind would run to him, and when he examined that thought honestly in the gray morning light, he realized he did not want her to. He desired the woman who had stood in that hall and told him plainly what she thought of him because that woman was the kind of person a castle like this needed, a clan like this needed, and maybe, though he was not ready to admit it outright, the kind of woman he himself needed.
Behind him, Lilly made a sound.
He turned.
She had loosened the plaid from the arm of the chair and was concentrating intently on it, as if she had a clear goal. She had not cried again. She was simply there, steady and warm, completely indifferent to the significance of what she symbolized.
Fergus crossed the room. He sat down in the chair beside her, elbows on his knees, and looked at her properly for the first time. She was small in a way that made you careful, but she was not fragile. There was something in her that was already insisting on itself. She had Euan Calloway's stubbornness about her, and then he had to look away from the window for a moment because that was a thought with an edge to it.
"Yer father was a good man," he said. His voice was quiet. "I daenae say that about many. I should have told him."
Lilly pulled the plaid over her face. Fergus reached over and moved it aside so she could breathe. She grabbed his finger in the process, the grip sudden and startlingly firm, and did not let go.
He sat with his finger in her grip and looked at her. She looked back at him with the dark, serious eyes of someone who had not yet been taught that the world was complicated and was therefore entirely certain about it.
"Aye, all right," he said. "I'm goin' to get Margaret."
He was not certain if he was talking to the bairn or to himself or to some version of the conversation that was already beginning in his chest, working out its shape, finding its words. He supposed it did not matter. The decision was the same either way.
He needed to go south.
He needed to bring his wife home.
Chapter Two
Nine Months Later
"Ye're holdin' it too tight," Margaret said. "Look. The stem breaks if ye grip it like that. Hold it the way ye'd hold a bird. Firm enough that it stays, gentle enough that it lives."
