The words slid under Olivia’s ribs and lodged there like a thorn, because there would be no children.
That was the whole shape of the bargain she had struck, was it not? She had drawn her line in Ragnall’s study and meant to hold it, and a woman who would not be touched did not get a pack of scowling terrors of her own to chase across a courtyard.
She had not once let herself feel the cost of that. She felt it now, all at once, with a baby’s heart beating quick against her own and the last of his mother’s roses crushed sweet between them, and it knocked the breath clean out of her.
She buried her face in Rosie’s dark curls so that none of them could see it.
“I am sorry, wee one,” she murmured, so low it was almost nothing, almost a breath. “I am sorry ye’ll never have cousins. It isnae yer fault.”
The baby giggled and patted her cheek with one damp hand, forgiving her absolutely for a sin she would never understand.
“Olivia.” Her mother’s voice came soft and frayed from the doorway, where she had gone to answer a knock Olivia had not even heard. Her face was wet and shining and frightened andproud all at once. “It’s time, me darlin’. The kirk’s full. They’re waitin’ for ye.”
Olivia turned to hand the baby back to Maisie and found that Kate had already stood up.
She stood in the middle of the floor in her clumsily laced green gown with her thin hands half-lifted and then not lifted at all, arrested, as if she had walked to the edge of something and could not make her feet carry her over it.
Nobody in the room moved. Elspeth’s hand flew to her mouth. Even Maisie, who had a word for everything, had nothing to say.
“I daenae ken how,” Kate said, her voice very small. “It has been so long that I daenae ken how any longer.”
“Ye ken fine,” said Olivia. “Ye’re only feart. That’s nae the same thing.” She stepped close and laid the baby into her mother’s arms.
Rosie went easily. That was the thing that broke them all. She went the way a baby went to a warm place she had always known—without hesitation, without one moment’s doubt—and she fisted a hand in her mother’s dark hair and pressed her rosy face into her mother’s neck and stayed there.
Kate made a sound that was not a word. She folded over the baby with her whole body, over the small warm weight of her,and she wept as Olivia had not seen a living soul weep, silent and shuddering and half a year too late.
Elspeth crossed the room without a word and put an arm around her. Maisie sat down abruptly in the nearest chair, pressed her old hand flat over her mouth, and said nothing at all.
“There,” Kate whispered into her daughter’s hair, over and over, rocking her. “There now. There ye are. There ye are, me wee bird. I ken. I ken. I’m here.”
They stood a long while like that, the four of them, and nobody moved to hurry it. Outside the window, a bell began to ring somewhere down in the kirkyard.
“Olivia.” Her mother’s voice was ruined. She did not let go of Kate. “It’s time, me darlin’.”
Olivia looked at them one last time, Kate and the baby and her mother holding them both, smoothed her loch-blue skirts with hands that had finally, mercifully gone still, and lifted her chin.
“Aye,” she said. “Let’s nae keep me groom waitin’. I’d hate for the man to think I’d lost me nerve.”
It was, she thought, very near the bravest lie she had ever told in her life.
CHAPTER 12
Ragnall stoodat the head of the cold stone kirk in his father’s plaid and his grandfather’s silver brooch, waiting to be wed to a woman who hated him.
He discovered that his hands were not quite steady. He marked the fact with a kind of distant astonishment.
His hands did not shake. They never did. They had not shaken when he buried his father, nor when he carried his sister up the stairs in pieces, nor in any field he had ever stood in with steel coming for his face. They were shaking now, very slightly, in a quiet kirk full of flowers, and he could not for the life of him make them stop.
Alastair stood at his shoulder in the place of the best man, scrubbed and braided and looking nearly as ill as Ragnall felt.
“Ye’ve gone the color of a fish belly,” he murmured, without seeming to move his lips. “Try nae to fall over, or else the clan will never let the pair of us forget it.”
“I am aware,” Ragnall said.
“Breathe, man. Folk generally find it helps.”
He was about to tell Alastair precisely where he could keep his counsel when a stir went through the packed kirk, a turning of heads and a rising murmur. He looked up and lost every word in his head at once.
