She had been gone a fortnight. It should not have been enough to make a stranger of her home. But she had left this place a furious girl with a clean, clear hatred to keep her warm, and she had come back a married woman with a half-healed wound in her shoulder and a husband’s silver brooch she could not make herself stop carrying about in her pocket, and Blythe had not a single room in it that fit the woman she had become.
The quiet was the hardest to bear. She had not known, till she was without it, how much noise there had been in her days at Cairn. The endless glad racket of a castle full of life. Rosie’s shrieks, and Tattie’s great clumsy bulk knocking into the furniture, and Maisie’s cackle, and Kate’s slow returning laughter, and under all of it, always, the low steady weight of him. Of Ragnall. Never far. Never quite looking at her. Never quite not.
Here, it was only silence. Her mother’s soft quiet, the servants’ careful quiet, and her own dark, roaring quiet in the night, alone in a bed that did not smell like anyone at all.
She did not speak much during those first weeks home. Her mother did not press her. Elspeth Arran had buried a husband and a son, and knew the shape of grief well enough to leave it lie, to set a cup of warm milk at her daughter’s elbow of an evening and ask nothing, and wait.
It was her mother, in the end, who put it into words.
They were sitting by the fire one night, the pair of them, Elspeth carding wool and Olivia staring into the flames, seeing another hearth altogether, when Elspeth said without once looking up from her work, “Ye’re pinin’, me darlin’.”
“I am tired, Maither. That’s all it is.”
“Mm.” The cards went on, scratch and pull, scratch and pull. “I pined just so for yer faither, the year he went off to the long war. Couldnae sleep for the want of a man I spent half of me wakin’ hours wishin’ to the devil.” A small, sad smile.
“I am nae… I daenae…”
“I ken. It’s a particular misery, lass, the missin’ of a body ye arenae even sure ye like. I’d nae wish it on me worst enemy.” She looked up then, gentle and shrewd. “And I’d nae waste it either, were I young again and had it to spend.”
Olivia said nothing. There was nothing safe to say.
I willnae miss him. I willnae. I am allowed to miss the bairn, and the daft dog, and Maisie, and Kate. But I willnae waste one tear on a man who looked me dead in the eye and told me he felt nothin’ at all. Then why is it his face I see the moment I close me eyes? Why is it his voice in the dark I am listenin’ for, every blessed night, in a castle he will never once set foot in?
The letters were the one thread that held. Kate wrote nearly every week, in a careful mending hand, of Rosie’s new tooth and the first word she’d very nearly said and how Tattie still pined at Olivia’s old door and would not be coaxed away from it.
She never once mentioned Ragnall, and Olivia never once asked after him. They were both, she thought, stepping wide and carefully around the one name that mattered.
She read them in the garden, most weeks, because her mother was always in the garden.
That was the thing she could not find a way to live with. Elspeth would be three feet away with her hands in the dirt, and Olivia would be sitting on the wall with a letter in her lap that said,She has her first tooth through and she bit Maisie with it,and she would fold it up and put it in her pocket and say nothing at all.
She has a granddaughter. She has a granddaughter with her son’s eyes, and she is kneelin’ in the dirt nae three feet from me, and I have the whole of it in me pocket.
Every week she did not say it, it became harder to say, because now there was the not-saying to explain as well.
I’ll tell her when she’s stronger. When I’ve found the words that daenae have Magnus’s crime buried in the middle of them like a stone in bread.
That’s a lie, and I ken it’s a lie, and I tell it to meself every Tuesday when the letters come.
It was a full month before the day that changed it all came.
She was in the kitchen garden with her mother, both of them kneeling in the cold, turned earth, planting the late kale, because Elspeth believed that no grief on God’s earth could not be eased a little by planting living things in the ground. And across the courtyard, behind a closed door, her brother sat in council with their clan’s elders for the fourth time since she had come home wounded.
She wondered, not for the first time, what they could be at in there, hour upon hour, the door shut and the voices all pitched low.
She found out when Lucas came out.
He crossed the courtyard to them slowly, a young man trying with all his might to carry a weight too heavy for his shoulders. Olivia sat back on her heels in the dirt and watched him come, and read the war in his tired face before he ever said a word of it.
“What’s happened?” she asked. “Lucas, what is it?”
He crouched down beside her in the cold garden and rubbed both hands hard over his face.
“They want war,” he said simply. “They’ve wanted it since the day ye came home with a cut in yer shoulder. They call it proof. Proof the marriage was a trick from them, that Cairn never meant the peace, that they tried to murder ye in yer bed and send ye home in pieces to spite the whole clan.”
“Who said that?” Elspeth asked in shock.
His jaw worked. “Noah’s the loudest of the lot. The eldest of them all. He’s been at the council day and night this month, drivin’ them on, and they’re near enough driven. They’d have me call the men up afore the first snows.”
