"Aye," Margaret breathed, her fingers tracing the edge of the scarlet cloth.
Then she lifted her eyes to his. He didn't look away. He had no reasons left to hide. He had spent the last hour on a stool in her chamber, watching the velvet against her waist and counting her freckles like a man building a case against his own sanity. He was beyond pretending.
He stood up, his towering height dominating the small space. He set the pin box on the table with a firm click.
"I'll find the brooch," he said.
"Of course," she replied. Her voice trembled, just a fraction.
He went straight to the solar, unkeyed the iron chest, and spent considerably longer than necessary working through the old clan silver. He turned each heavy piece in his calloused hands. He was in no hurry. He had nowhere he was needed that was more pressing than this.
At the very bottom of the chest, he found it. A heavy silver brooch, ancient and solid, with a small raw inset of dark river stone.
He set it on the dark wood table and stayed exactly where he was.
She will wear the red.
Fergus picked up the silver brooch, closed his fist around it until the metal bit into his palm, and went back to claim his wife.
Chapter Eighteen
He had slept poorly for the fourth night in a row.
He knew the cause of it. He was not interested in examining the cause of it at any length, so he did what he always did when his mind refused to quiet. He rose before dawn, dressed in the cold dark, and went outside to where the air had enough edge to it to clear a man's head whether he wanted it cleared or not.
The courtyard was empty. The mist sat low over the northern ridge, the ground soft beneath his boots, the only sound the distant shift of horses in the stable block. He stood in it for a moment with his breath fogging and his hands loose at his sides.
His fingers found the brooch in his coat pocket before he thought to stop them.
He had retrieved it from the clan chest three nights ago. Walked all the way to her chamber door, stood in the dark corridor longenough to hear the wood settle and pop in her hearth, and then lost his nerve, turned around, and gone to bed like a coward.
The brooch had been in his pocket since, knocking against his hip with every stride, a small weight that had become impossible to ignore.
He was going to give it to her today. He just had to find the words first, and words had never been his chosen weapon.
He called for his horse.
* * *
The weaving hall lay at the far end of the east wing, past the old, disused stillroom and down a steep flight of worn stone steps.
Margaret had found it entirely by accident during her second week at the castle, tracking the deep, rhythmic, blood-like thrum of the looms through a heavy door she had assumed led out to the herb gardens.
The room was long and low-ceilinged, its whitewashed stone walls draped with rich, heavy lengths of finished cloth in deep, tallows, madders, and woad-blues. Four massive, dark-wood looms anchored the center of the space, their timbers smooth and blackened by decades of friction. The air smelled strongly of rich lanolin, linseed oil, and the deep, comforting warmth of a room that was occupied every single day and never allowed to go completely cold.
Six women worked in the dim afternoon light. They looked up when Margaret entered, but the rhythm of the flying shuttles never faltered. In this room, she had quickly learned, the measure of a person was whether they were worth breaking the work for.
"Lady MacKenzie." Seona, the eldest weaver, called out without pausing her hands. At sixty-two, her fingers were as precise, gnarled, and weathered as the castle's foundation stones. "The gray wool arrived from the lower glen this mornin'. Ye'll want to see it."
"I will." Margaret sat on the low wooden window bench, pulling a heavy skein of wool from the central pile. She ran the coarse, greasy fibers through her fingers, testing their strength against her palm. "For the winter cloaks?"
"For whatever ye say it's for, me Lady," Seona replied, a rare note of respect slipping into her gruff voice. "But the weight's right for the frost."
Bridie, a sharp-eyed twenty-year-old with the fastest shuttle in the wing and a tongue to match, glanced up from her warp. "Did Angus's wife come to ye yet? About the linen for the upper beddin'?"
"Maisie? Nae yet. Why?"
Bridie shot a quick, guilty look sideways at Seona. The older woman glared back with a terrifying severity, and Bridieinstantly ducked her head, returning to her loom without another word.
