She was not back in a moment.
She packed slowly and poorly, folding the same shawl three times and misplacing it in the wrong trunk. Twice, she sat on the edge of her bed—the bed she had slept in since she was small—and pressed her knuckles tightly against her mouth, not crying because she had promised herself long ago in a muddy yard that she would never let an enemy of her house see her cry.
Her maid came to help, but Olivia sent her away. This last hour in her room was hers, and she would not share it, not even with kindness.
I willnae look back at the door. I willnae count what I am leavin’. I will walk out as if I am only goin’ down the glen for the day.
When at last she came down with two trunks dragged behind her and a face like carved marble, the light filtering through the high windows had shifted gold and low across the floor.
Two hours. He had waited two hours.
He had not thrown her over his shoulder. He had not sent a man up to fetch her, nor a maid to scold her, nor a single sharp word up the stairs. He sat exactly where she had left him and watched the fire burn down, and when she appeared in the doorway, he rose without a word of complaint, as if her keeping him waiting half the afternoon were the most natural thing in the world and required no remark from anyone.
“Ready?” he asked.
She looked, for one last moment, at the hall she had been born in. At her mother by the cold window. At her brother in a ring still too big for his hand. At the door her father would never again come walking through, ducking his head under the lintel, calling for his supper and his hawk and his fierce wee daughter.
Her mother crossed the hall to her. She did not weep, which Olivia had been dreading, and she did not tell her to be brave, which would have been worse.
“Ye’ll write,” Elspeth said.
“I’ll write.”
“Ye’ll write the true things, mind, nae the comfortable ones. I’ve had a bellyful of men decidin’ what I’m strong enough to hear.” She reached up and cupped her daughter’s face in both hands. Her palms were warm and rough from the garden, andthey smelled of rosemary. Olivia thought, with a lurch, that she had not once in her life stopped to notice that, and now she would have to remember it. “Ye’re nae bein’ sold, whatever the men at that table think they’ve done. Ye’re bein’ sent. There’s a difference, and ye’ll ken it in time.”
“That’s nay comfort either, Maither.”
“Nay,” Elspeth agreed. “But it’s true, and ye’ll want it later, when the comfortable things have all worn through.” She kissed her once on the brow. “Go on, then. Head up. Let them see whose daughter ye are.”
“Aye,” Olivia said, and was fiercely proud of how steady it came out. “Let’s be done with it.”
She felt him look at her. She did not turn to see what was in it, because she had spent the last of her courage on that single steady word, and she had none left over to spend on him.
CHAPTER 3
Ragnall Crawford had killed men,settled debts that could not be settled any softer way, buried his father and his mother both, and once gone four days without sleep to hold a flooded ford against the spring thaw.
He had not, until this particular afternoon, understood the endurance required to wait two hours in an enemy’s hall for a woman who hated him to finish packing her dresses.
He had decided, somewhere within the first hour, that he would not rush her. It was the only kindness left to him, and a man took the kindnesses he could get, even tiny, insignificant ones that cost nothing but time.
She would come down after she had wept as much as she needed up there where he could not see, and he would pretend, for the last bit of dignity the day had left her, that he had not noticed a thing.
Let her have the hour. God kens I’d want it in her place. God kens I’d want a great deal more than an hour.
So they rode out of Blythe in silence, him on his black horse and her in the cart he had indeed brought, a good broad cart with room enough for two trunks and a great deal of spite besides.
The silence held the whole long way. Across the glen, over the high moor where the wind hit them sideways off the heather, and down again toward home as the light faded to a thin, golden hue.
He did not try to fill it. He had learned early that words wasted on someone who did not want to hear them were like drops thrown into a well, and Ragnall did not waste much, words least of all.
But he watched her.
He told himself it was duty, the same plain care he would give any soul newly come under his roof and his protection. She sat very straight against the jolting of the cart, one hand braced on the rail, and she looked out at the country going by with an expression he knew, because he had worn it once, on a different road, behind a different cart, after a different funeral.
It was the look of someone counting every familiar hill and stone and bend of water for what might be the last time, and refusing, on pure principle, to let one flicker of it show on their face.
Stubborn, he thought, and the word came with a warmth he had not asked for. The same as he was.
