“She’s nae readin’ that book,” he said before he could stop himself.
“Nay,” Kate agreed. “She isnae.”
“She’s been on the same page since the bell.”
“Aye. And ye’ve been countin’.” Kate turned another stitch. “Do ye ken, Braither, that ye’ve asked me twice this evenin’ whether the fire needs buildin’ up, and it’s July?”
“Kate.”
“I’m only observin’.”
Rosie fell over. He caught her without looking, and she shrieked.
“She’ll nae come to me,” Ragnall muttered, so it would not carry across the room. “She looks at me like I’m somethin’ she’s stepped in. And I cannae blame her for it, for I put her out that door meself, and I’d nae take it back, for I daenae trust meself in a room with her. There it is. That’s the whole sorry arithmetic of me.”
Kate said nothing for a while. The needle went in and out.
“Can I tell ye something,” she said, “and will ye promise nae to break anythin’?”
“Nay.”
“I’ll tell ye anyway.” She did not look up. “Ye ken why I stayed so long in that room. Everyone in this castle thinks it was because of the fall, or the arm, or the bairn. But it wasnae. It was because I loved a man who was usin’ me, and I couldnae tell the difference between the two, and after, I couldnae trust me own heart to tell me anythin’ at all ever again. So I stopped askin’ it. I lay in that bed for half a year, and I let it starve, because a starved heart cannae get ye killed.”
Ragnall had gone very still.
“It nearly killed me, mind,” Kate said. “It’s only that it takes longer that way, and it’s quieter, and nobody has to be blamed for it.”
“It isnae the same.”
“Nay?” She looked up at last, and her green eyes were perfectly steady. “Ye’ve a woman in this castle who ye’d walk into the sea for, and ye’ve locked her in a cold room down the passage and locked yerself in a colder one, and ye’re callin’ it protection.” A small, dreadful pause. “It’s theexactsame, Braither. Ye’ve only made a virtue of it, which is a thing I was never clever enough to do.”
The fire spat.
Across the long room, Olivia turned a page at last and did not read that one either.
The new chamber was beautiful, which only made it worse.
It was the finest room in Cairn after the Laird’s, high in the south tower, with a wide bed hung in good wool and a fire kept always lit and a window that looked clean down the glen to the silvery thread of the river.
Ragnall had not stinted. Whatever else he was withholding from her, he had not been mean with the walls of her cage.
From the high window, she could see clear down to the river, and beyond its far bank, the dark line of the hills that marked thestart of Blythe land. Close enough to ache for, and far enough to be another world entirely.
She had lived in this room for three days now. Three days of meals taken at the far end of a long table from a husband who passed her the salt with grave courtesy and would not meet her eyes. Three days of the maids’ cold little insolences and Kate’s anxious kindness and Rosie’s arms, the only true warmth in any of it.
Three nights of lying awake in a beautiful bed that did not smell of him, listening to the wind come down off the hills, and hating herself for missing the sound of another body breathing in the dark.
This is what ye wanted, ye great fool. Ye drew the line. Nay touchin’, ye said. Separate bedrooms, ye said. He’s only givin’ ye what ye asked of him. So why does it feel like he has reached into me chest and taken somethin’ out of it?
On the third night, a maid drew her a bath, sullen and silent, and left her to it. Olivia sank into the hot water in the firelight and let herself, just for a moment, just this once, remember.
The low, relentless voice in the dark. His hand clenched in the sheets to keep it off her skin. How he had called her bonnie. How he had told her that she was his. How he had watched her fall apart and never once touched her, holding to his word like a man gripping a cliff edge in a gale.
She remembered it now with her own hand drifting traitorously down through the warm water.
She was furious at her own body for wanting a man who had told her plainly, to her face, that he would not let himself wanther.
That was the cruelty of it. He had not said he felt nothing. She could have borne it if he had said he felt nothing. She could have hated him clean and gone to sleep.
