Olivia could not find it in herself to refuse her mother that request. So they dressed her by candlelight, with her mother’s gentle hands trembling over the laces, Anne pinning the gaps, and Maisie overseeing the process from her chair like a commander at war.
When they finally turned her to face the polished mirror, even she drew a breath in awe.
Who is that? That isnae a hostage of the Council. That’s a bride. God help me, that’s a bride who half wishes to be one.
Rosie took one long look at her and clapped her hands together and shrieked aloud with pure delight, and that small sound broke them all clean open.
Her mother pressed her fingers hard to her mouth, and her tears spilled over and streamed unchecked down her cheeks. “Oh,” she whispered through her fingers. “Oh, lass. Yer faither would have…”
And that was the one wound in all the world too large to be borne.
The room suddenly became airless. All those loving faces turned toward her in the candlelight, full of hope and grief, the delicate lacework pressing close around her and tomorrow waiting at the end of it like the edge of a cliff in the dark.
Olivia realized she could not stay inside it for even a second longer without falling apart in front of everyone.
“I need a moment,” she managed to get out. “Just… please, I only need a moment to meself. Daenae follow me.”
She grabbed the heavy blue skirts in both fists and ran. Not to her own chamber, where they would only come and find her. She went down the stairs and out through the screens passage and into the cold black air of the courtyard, still laced into her wedding gown, because the night at least would ask nothing of her.
The night before her wedding, she could not breathe inside her own skin.
Tomorrow, she would stand before a priest in a cold kirk and bind herself, body, name, and her whole future, to the Laird of Clan Cairn until one of them died.
She had been so certain she would feel rage tonight. She had counted on the rage, had stored it like winter fuel, trusting it to carry her up the aisle, through the vows, and out the other side.
Instead, she felt only a vast and lonely fear, with not one single soul she could say it aloud to. Because the only person under this roof who might truly understand the size of it was the very man she was meant to be afraid of.
She turned the fear over and over in the dark, looking for an edge to grip. It was not the wedding itself, she decided, not the kirk nor the vows nor even the long years of it stretched out ahead. It was that she no longer knew her own heart on the matter, and she had always, always known it.
She had ridden into this castle certain of everything, and in just a few days, her certainties had fallen apart one after another like teeth, leaving her the night before her wedding with nothing solid to hold on to but the warm weight of a dog by her door and the memory of a man rocking a baby by a fire.
I am to be married in the mornin’, and I’ve never in me life felt so alone in a keep so full of people.
She had not gone far across the moon-washed courtyard when a soft voice spoke out of the shadows by the brewhouse wall.
Brigid MacKee stepped out into the thin silvery moonlight. Olivia found she could not read the healer’s lovely face at all. Brigid had the beauty of a sharp, clear winter morning—all clean, cold lines and pale light and no comfort anywhere in it.
“Ye’re awake late, me Lady,” she said, with a small, polite smile that did not reach her green eyes nor warm her one single degree. “Are ye well? Is there aught ye need, this night of all nights?”
“Nay,” Olivia said. “Nothin’. I only wanted to take the air.”
“Then I will leave ye to it.” Brigid did not leave. “Though ye shouldnae wander about alone at night, me Lady. There are folk in this castle who’d nae weep overmuch to find ye’d come to some harm in the dark.”
“I didnae ken I needed leave to walk around me own home,” Olivia said, lifting her chin.
“But is it yer home, me Lady?” Brigid asked gently, almost kindly, which made it all so much worse.
“What do ye mean?”
“Truly, now? Ye will forgive me plainness. I’ve only ever ken this place as the house yer braither ruined, and yer kin bled white over long years of feudin’. There’s fresh earth in the kirkyard yet for it, and Kate’s up in her chair like a ghost that forgot to die. I’d have thought that it’s a hard thing to call a place home when ye’ve had so great a hand in fillin’ up its graves.”
Olivia was too stunned to reply.
Brigid inclined her fair head, the very picture of courtesy. “Sleep well, me Lady. Ye’ve a great day ahead.”
She melted back into the dark between the buildings as quietly as she had come.
Olivia stood alone in the cold moonlight, feeling exactly as if she had been slapped across the face by a hand wearing a soft kid glove so that there was not even a mark left to show for it.
