She looked back.
The castle stood gray and silent on its hill, giving nothing away, and the high study window was a blind black square that told her nothing at all.
Nothing. Not a shadow, not a movement, not so much as a candle. He had not even come to the glass to watch her go.
She faced forward again with her jaw set and her eyes stinging, and told herself it was only the wind off the hills, and rode on toward Blythe, toward home, toward the whole long rest of her life without him.
It’s better this way. It’s safer. It’s the sensible thing. I’ll say it enough times, and one of these days, I’ll believe it.
He willnae let himself want me. He told me so to me face, and he never once lied about it, and I’ll nae make a liar of him now just to comfort meself.
And I am a fool, and it’s over, and it’s better. And oh God, why does it feel so much like dyin’?
CHAPTER 27
Her mother wasin the courtyard before the litter had properly stopped.
Elspeth Arran, who did not run, ran. She had her daughter out of it and folded into her arms and was holding on hard enough to hurt the bad shoulder. Olivia let her and did not say a word about it.
“Ye’re thin,” Elspeth said into her hair. “What have they been feedin’ ye?”
“Maither—”
“Ye’re thin, and ye’re gray about the mouth, and ye’ve been greetin’ the whole road home.” She held her at arm’s length and looked her over the way she looked over a frost-bitten seedling, thoroughly and without sentiment, deciding whether it would live. “Right. Ye’ll eat, and ye’ll sleep, and ye’ll nae tell me a single thing until ye’re ready.”
“I daenae ken where to start.”
“Then daenae start,” she said. “There’s nay hurry. Ye’re home.”
And that was the thing that nearly undid her—that her mother could say the wordhomelike that, plainly, as if it were still true, as if it had not become the most complicated word in the English language in the space of a fortnight.
Lucas came out to greet her more slowly.
He looked older somehow. Not in years, perhaps. But he looked more mature. That was the first thing she noticed. And it hurt, because he had done it while she was away and she had not been there for it.
He stood in front of her in their father’s ring with his shoulders squared and his jaw set, and she watched him try to be a laird about it, and watched it fail. And then he was just her little brother, with his arms around her neck, saying her name into her shoulder.
“I’ll kill him,” Lucas said thickly. “Say the word, and I’ll ride out immediately. I daenae care if it’s war. I daenaecare, Olivia?—”
“Ye’ll do nay such thing.”
“He let ye come home with a hole in ye?—”
“He didnae put it there.” It came out of her far too fast, far too hot, and she felt her mother go still behind her. She made herself slow down. “One of his men put it there, Lucas. And Ragnall killed him for it in me own chamber with his own hand, and then he sat on the floor and washed the blood off me arm and never once let me see his face.” She heard what she was doing. She could not seem to stop doing it. “So ye’ll nae ride out. Ye’ll nae ride out for me.”
There was a small, dreadful silence in the courtyard.
“Aye,” said her brother slowly. “Well.”
He looked at her a moment longer, and there was something in his young face she liked very little, because it was the look of a boy doing arithmetic and arriving at a total.
“Come inside,” Elspeth said briskly. “Both of ye. It’s freezin’ out here.”
Blythe Castle stood just as she had left it, and that was the strangest part of all.
The same gray walls, the same drafty hall, the same well in the same courtyard where she had scraped her knees as a girl. Her own chamber, with her books, her bed, and her window facing south toward the river and the lands beyond that had cost her father and her brother their lives.
Everything was in its place. Everything was as it had always been. And she walked through it like a ghost walking through a house that had forgotten her.
