The towers of Cairn came up gray and solid against a sky turning to dusk, and the gates stood open in welcome. In the courtyard, waiting with the torches just being lit, were the two creatures most likely to undo whatever dignity he had managed to hold onto across the long miles.
His grandmother. And the dog.
“There she is!” cried Maisie, before the cart had so much as rolled to a stop, throwing her arms wide as if Olivia were a long-lost daughter come home at last and not a hostage handed over by the Council. “Och, would ye look at her. The bonnie wee thing. Come here to me, lass. Come. Daenae mind these great brutes; they’ve nay manners between the lot of them. I’ve given up tryin’ to teach them any.”
The dog, who answered to the name Tattie and to nothing else under heaven, took one long look at the newcomer and plainly decided that his entire life until this moment had been mere preparation for it.
He was a large and shaggy beast, the color of wet bracken, nearly as tall at the shoulder as a man’s waist. He crossed the yard like a slow landslide and planted his enormous paws on the side of the cart and gazed up at Olivia with his whole foolish heart shining out of his eyes.
Ragnall watched his bride’s steely composure crack straight down the middle. She did not smile. She fought it. He could see the entire war of emotion cross her face, and she lost, even if just for a moment, when the silly hound leaned his head against her arm and groaned loudly with the suddenness of his love. Her hand rose almost instinctively and rested on his broad head, her fingers moving through the fur, and her shoulders relaxed slightly.
It was the first time he had seen her show that kind of softness. Ragnall, who did not laugh much and smiled even less, felt a stir in his chest that he had not experienced in a long time and did not have the time to analyze at that moment.
“Ye should rest,” he said, swinging down from the saddle. “The journey was long, and ye havenae had a proper meal. We’ll talk at dinner, when ye’ve had a chance to settle.”
She gave him a look that implied dinner with him ranked somewhere between a wasting fever and the plague on her list. But Maisie already had her by one hand, and the dog already had her heart, and they both swept her through the door into the warm, dim interior of the keep before she could come up with anything sufficiently cutting to leave him with.
Ragnall watched the door close behind the three of them. Then he squared his shoulders and went to find out how badly the day had gone in all the corners of his keep that he had not been standing in.
His study was the warmest room in a cold keep, and the only one in all of Cairn that was truly his.
Alastair was already in it, boots up on the cold edge of the hearth as if he owned the place, which, after twenty years of friendship, he all but did. He was Ragnall’s man-at-arms and his oldest friend and the single soul in all the Highlands who would tell him the plain truth to his face without first checking which way the wind set, and that made him at once invaluable and frequently unbearable, often within the same breath.
“Well,” said Alastair, looking him over. “Ye’re alive. I’d half wagered against it.”
“It was a near thing.” Ragnall crossed to the side table and poured two cups of rough dark ale. “She kept me waitin’ two hours for her to pack.”
“Only two?” Alastair whistled low through his teeth and took the offered cup. “The lass shows mercy. I’d have made ye sit till Michaelmas.” He drank. “And how is she, then? Yer bonnie thorn.”
“Furious. Frightened. Hidin’ both, and hidin’ them well.” Ragnall sat down heavily in the chair across from him and scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “She thinks I am a monster,Alastair. And by the only light she has been given to see by, she isnae wrong.”
“Daenae start down that road. Ye will be at the bottom of it by midnight and nay good to anyone.”
“How is Kate?”
The lightness went out of Alastair’s broad face at that one name, like a cloud crossing a hayfield.
“The same,” he said. “The healer got a little broth into her this mornin’, and a few spoons of porridge after. She didnae speak. She didnae ask for the bairn. She turned her face to the wall when I looked in, like always.”
He slowly turned the cup in his big, scarred hands. “Brigid says her bones are knittin’ well enough now, the arm and the ribs both. But it isnae her bones I lie awake over.”
“Nay,” Ragnall said quietly. “Nor I.”
He did not say the rest of it aloud. The weight of it pressed on his chest like a flat, cold stone through every waking hour and most of the sleeping ones.
He had been so absorbed in duty, the river, the grain, the boundary stones, and the endless petty wars of small proud men that he had not seen what was being done to his own sister under his roof until she was carried home with her arm broken inthree places and the light completely gone from her like a candle pinched between two wet fingers.
He had promised his mother, with her thin hand cold and failing in his, that he would keep Kate safe from all harm. It was the one task she had ever asked of him in her whole gentle life, and he had failed it utterly.
The door opened, and for a moment, the failure was lifted from him, as it always was, by the only person in all of Cairn who had no idea who he was.
A maid came in with a small bundle balanced against her shoulder, jiggling it as she walked. “Beggin’ yer pardon, me Laird. She willnae settle for any of us. She has been girnin’ the whole day long, fit to bring the roof down, and she will have nay one but her uncle.”
And there she was. Rosie. Half a year of chubby outrage, cheeks like two ripe crabapples, a fat fist already reaching for his face before she was even properly handed across the space between them.
Whatever was hard inside him went quiet and soft when he took the weight of her.
“There now,” he murmured, and the fierce Laird of Clan Cairn, terror of the borderlands, made a noise no man under his command would ever have believed of him, low and foolish, crooning against the top of a baby’s downy head. “There now, what’s all this, hm? Did ye miss me? Did ye miss yer uncle, yewee tyrant, ye loud and shameless thing? Aye, I ken. I ken it’s a hard world. I ken.”
