Margaret observed the silent, tense exchange, storing it away for later. A secret was spreading through the castle, taking hold in the kitchens.
"She'll come when she's ready," Seona said firmly, closing the topic.
The steady, heavy rhythm filled the room again. The looms didn't clatter or slam; they breathed. It was a low, hypnotic percussion that lived beneath their voices rather than over them.
Margaret came here as much for that grounding sound as the work itself. It was the only truly unhurried place in the entire restless castle.
"The winter festival," Margaret said after a quiet moment, wanting to bridge the distance. "Who usually handles the garlands for the rafters?"
"Used to be Anadel Campbell's task," said Moira, a dry, observant woman of thirty who possessed an unhurried manner Margaret had come to rely on. "Before she passed two winters back. Lately, the men just throw dried heather from the stores onto the tables and call it a day."
"The hall looked bare and cold at the last gatherin'," Margaret noted, remembering how the shadows had swallowed the empty corners.
"Aye," Seona grunted, her shuttle sliding home. "It did."
"I'll take it on. If there are nay objections from the older hearths."
"Nae a one," Bridie said quickly, her head still down. "We'd gladly see some life in those rafters."
Outside the small pane of glass, the gray dawn finally shifted into a pale, watery gold, throwing long, slanted bars of light across the stone floor. Two ravens cut through the mist, heading toward the battlements of the north wall.
"He was up on the battlements again last night," Catriona remarked casually, her eyes fixed on her threads.
Margaret's hands stilled entirely on the gray wool. She didn't look up, keeping her eyes trained on the fibers, but her heart executed a slow, heavy thud against her ribs. "Was he?"
"Third time this week," Catriona continued. "Angus saw him durin' the middle watch. Says the Laird walks the whole perimeter, twice over, stops to look toward the pass, then goes back."
Catriona paused, letting the silence stretch. "Before ye came north from Dunalasdair, me Lady, he did it every single night."
Margaret turned the skein over, her skin prickling. "I didnae ken that."
"He's quiet about it. Never carries a torch." Seona's shuttle flew across the warp with terrifying speed. "Angus says it's just an old soldier's habit. A man who spent twenty years responsible for whether a hundred other men lived or died through the night doesnae stop checkin' the walls just because he's put down his sword and taken a title."
"Angus' is bein' soft and sentimental," Bridie chimed in, unable to help herself. "I think the Laird just cannae sleep. He looks like a man haunted by his own mind."
"Both can be true," Seona said softly.
Margaret set the gray wool down and picked up a finer, cream-colored skein meant for lining. Her hands moved mechanically, performing the task without being asked, but her mind was entirely stuck on the image of Fergus. Walking the freezing stone battlements alone in the dark, guarding a perimeter out of a bone-deep instinct he couldn't shake, keeping watch over a castle and a wife he didn't know how to talk to.
He had been a soldier all his life.
She remembered him standing in the firelight at Dunalasdair when he had come to claim her. Cold, unyielding, and wrapped in an armor of silence. She remembered the steady, rigid rhythm of his horse on the long, grueling trek north.
She hadn't understood his silence then. She had thought it was hatred. She was beginning to realize it was something far more complicated.
"He drove the fence posts on the eastern boundary line himself," Catriona added, her voice dropping into that rhythmic cadence of castle gossip. "In August, right after he took the Lairdship. Hamish offered his boys to dig the earth, but the Laird refused. Rode out alone at dawn, came back after dark. Forty heavy timber posts in a single day."
"Forty?" Margaret asked, her fingers gripping the cream wool more tightly.
"Aye. Hamish went out the next morning to check the depth of the holes. Came back to the stables and said it was the tightest, straightest fence line he'd seen in fifteen years."
"He never mentioned that to me," Margaret murmured, almost to herself.
"The Laird doesnae brag on his blisters," Seona said, her voice dropping lower, slipping beneath the deep thrum of the looms.
She paused her hands entirely—a rare, monumental gesture—and turned her sharp, dark eyes directly onto Margaret. "He is a good man, Lady MacKenzie. He's learnin' how to rule a home instead of a regiment. The men trust him because he bleeds into the same mud they do, and the women trust him because he doesnae treat their labor like fluff or pastime."
"I ken," Margaret whispered, the words catching in her throat.
