“Maither—”
“I ken.” Elspeth let her go and smoothed the sleeve back down over the bruises with great care, as if covering them were a kindness she could still perform. “I ken, lass. I’ll nae make a scene at yer husband’s table.” She picked up her cup, her hand not quite steady. “But I’ll be thinkin’ about it the whole road home, and ye may as well ken that too.”
Anne said nothing at all. She had not said much since the feast. She only pushed the honey across the table toward Olivia without being asked, and pushed her spectacles up her nose, and watched everything the way she always did.
Olivia felt the whole bright warmth of the morning go cold around her.
CHAPTER 18
The gardensat Cairn were not grand, and Elspeth had made her feelings on the matter perfectly plain within an hour of arriving.
“Criminal,” she had said, on her knees in the herb bed with her good traveling skirt in the dirt and her hands already black to the wrists. “Look at it. The rosemary’s gone to wood, and there’s nae been a knife near these roses in three years. And would ye look at what’s happened to the thyme, Olivia. Would yelookat it.”
“It’s nae our garden, Maither.”
“It’ssomebody’sgarden,” said Elspeth, in the voice of a woman confronting a moral failing, and went on weeding.
She had left the herb beds in better order than she found them, and had said nothing further about it, and Olivia had not been able to decide whether that was a kindness to the castle or a reproach.
But the morning sun cast a golden glow over the chaotic spread of it, and there was a low stone bench warm enough to sit on, and for a little while, it was enough just to be outside with a baby, a dog, and a woman slowly learning how to be alive again.
Kate carried Rosie. That was a wonder in itself. She had lifted the baby from Olivia’s arms at the garden gate without being asked, settled her on one thin hip with the unthinking ease of a body recalling what it had tried hard to forget, and walked the paths with her, naming the plants in a low voice for a child who understood not one word of it.
“He brought me flowers once,” Kate said out of nowhere, her eyes fixed on a tangle of bramble. “Magnus.”
Olivia went very still on the bench. “Ye daenae have to talk about him.”
Kate shook her head. “Nay, I want to. I’ve nae said his name aloud to a livin’ soul in half a year, and it’s been rottin’ in me like a splinter left in too long.”
She did not look at Olivia. She looked at the baby, at Rosie’s dark head bent over a fistful of stolen leaves.
“He was beautiful, yer braither. And clever, and funny when it suited him. He’d meet me at the boundary stone in the gloamin’ and tell me the war was a foolishness, that he and I could end it between us, that love was stronger than any feud the old men cooked up.” Her mouth twisted. “I believed every word. I was sodesperate to. I’d have believed the moon was a bannock if he’d told me so with his hand in me hair.”
“Kate—”
“He never meant a word of it.” Her voice stayed terribly even. “I was a door, Olivia. That is all I ever was to him. A way into me braither’s land without havin’ to fight him for it.”
“I daenae understand.”
“Nay, ye wouldnae. It’s an ugly wee piece of arithmetic, and ye have to be a certain sort of man to work it.” Kate’s hands lay still in her lap as she sat on the bench. “A ruined lass has to be married. That’s the whole of it. That’s his whole clever plan. If he got me with child and it was ken, then Ragnall would have to come to Blythe with his hat in his hand andaskhim to take me, and nay laird sends a dishonored sister to a man’s house empty-handed. He’d have had to send the land with me. The river, and the good grass on both banks, all of it signed over as me tocher, and nae a drop of blood spilled for it.” She looked up. “He’d have got in one winter what fifty years of war couldnae buy him, and he’d have been thought a fine man for takin’ me forbye.”
Olivia felt the floor go strange beneath her.
“And when I quickened, he was pleased.” Kate’s mouth moved, not into a smile. “God help me, I thought it meant he loved me. He waspleased, and I lay there thinkin’ it was joy.”
“But ye didnae marry him.”
“Nay.” Now, something came into the flat voice at last, and it was not grief. It was iron. “I wouldnae. He told me what I’d been for, and I wouldnae give him the satisfaction of it. I wouldnae wed him, and I wouldnae give them his name, nae to Ragnall, nae to me grandmaither, nae to the priest, nae to a livin’ soul. I said the bairn had nay faither.” She lifted her chin, and for one moment, she was not a ghost in a chair. She was a woman who had won something at a cost nobody would ever be able to calculate. “So his fine plan wanted the one thing he couldnae take by force. It wanted me toagree. And I wouldnae.”
The candle guttered.
“And that,” she said, “is why he came for her instead. Because if he couldnae have the land through me, he’d have the bairn. Blythe blood, raised in a Blythe house, a wee soldier for the cause, and me left with nothin’ and nay way to prove she was ever mine. He came into me chamber for her while I was still weak from the birth, and when I wouldnae give her up?—”
She stopped. Her hand had gone to her ribs, to the place where the bones had healed crooked. “Well, ye ken the rest. Ye live with the man that came after.”
Olivia’s eyes were burning. “I didnae ken any of it,” she whispered. “I swear it to ye, Kate. I grew up at that man’s side and I didnae ken a thing.”
“I ken ye didnae.” Kate looked at her then, and there was no blame in her ruined green eyes, only a vast and weary kindness. “That’s the cruelty of it, is it nae? The ones who love a monster are always the last to see the teeth.”
