Cairn had not helda festival in living memory that did not end with blood on the grass.
For a month, Ragnall had thrown himself headlong into changing that. He had ridden the borders twice over and settled three disputes before they could fester. He had sent good oatmeal and better ale to the two villages that shared the river crossing, so that Cairn folk and Blythe folk might raise the festival ground together and learn, God willing, that the other clan did not in fact eat its own young.
He had worked past exhaustion every day of it, because a man who worked to the bone did not lie awake half the night thinking about red hair spread across a pillow that had been cold for a month.
A month. A month and three days, nae that I am countin’. A man who counts the days is a man in trouble, and I am in trouble enough without the arithmetic of it.
The boy had agreed. That was the wonder of it. Ragnall had sent his reckless proposal down the glen, near certain it would come back with a Blythe arrow through the heart of it. But young Lucas Arran had written in a careful, overly formal hand that he would bring his clan to the river at the turn of the season and that he prayed, as Ragnall did, that they might all learn to dance on the same bank for once instead of dying on it.
A good lad. A better laird than his years had any right to make him. And Olivia’s blood in every careful line of it.
“Ye’ve torn that letter near to rags,” Kate drawled.
She sat in the window of his study, with Rosie on her knee and the light coming in golden around both of them.
The sight of her there, out of her bed and out of her black silence, with color in her face and the baby’s fist knotted in her hair, was a wonder Ragnall did not think he would ever learn to take for granted.
“I am committin’ it to memory,” he said.
“Ye’re frettin’.” She bounced the baby, who shrieked her approval of the world. “Ye’ve fretted the length of a month, Braither. Over the ale and the games and whether Blythe folk will take offense at our piper. And nae once have ye said the name of who ye are truly frettin’ over.” She tilted her head, and the mischief in it was their grandmother to the bone. “Shall I say it for ye?”
“Nay.”
“Olivia.”
“I said nay.”
“She will be coming over the hill tomorrow.” Kate smiled down at her daughter. “Will she nae, Rosie? Tomorrow, yer favorite aunt will come back to see ye, and yer poor daft uncle willnae ken what to do with his own two hands.”
Ragnall said nothing to that, for there was nothing safe to say.
He turned the letter over in his fingers and looked out down the glen toward the river he could not see from the study yet always felt the way a man felt a sore tooth with his tongue.
I daenae ken what I will do when she comes. I drove her away to keep her safe, and I’ve nae slept right since, and tomorrow she will stand on the far bank of the river lookin’ at me, and I will have to keep me promise and me distance, and smile, and keep the peace, and nae let one living soul see what the sight of her does to me.
From the door came the thump of a stick and the particular wheezing cackle that meant his grandmother had decided to grace them with her presence.
“He’s got that face on him again,” Maisie announced to the room at large, hobbling in twice as feeble as she had been in thecorridor. “The constipated one. The one he gets when a lass has tied his innards in a bow, and he is too proud to thank her for it.”
She lowered herself into a chair with a great show of frailty and sharp, bright eyes fixed on him. “In me day, a man who wanted a woman simply told her so. We hadnae the leisure for all this broodin’. Half of ye would be dead of the plague by spring.”
“Yer comfort is a wonder to me, Grandmaither,” Ragnall said.
“I am a wonder all over, laddie. Ye should listen to me while ye’ve the chance.” She reached for Rosie, who went to her gladly, and the cackle softened into something else as the wee one patted her wrinkled cheek. “Bring the lass home, Ragnall, however ye have to do it. This keep was a tomb afore she walked into it, and I am too auld and too bonnie to die in a tomb.”
He was spared the need to answer, which was just as well since he had no answer to give her, when Alastair entered the room without the courtesy of knocking, as he had since they were boys.
Ragnall could tell from his friend’s face, even before he spoke, that whoever was working this feud from the shadows had made another move.
“The crossing,” Alastair said. “Somebody’s been at the crossing in the night.”
“What happened?” Ragnall was on his feet. “Say it.”
“The bonfire stack. The great one that the two villages built together on the near bank, which was to be lit the next day to open the festival…” Alastair’s jaw was a hard line. “It’s burned. Burned to black ash before it was ever lit. And a Blythe plaid was pinned to the post beside it, nice and plain, for our folk to find at first light.”
He let that sink in.
“So Clan Blythe rides tomorrow to a burnt welcome and their own colors hung up as a confession. Somebody means for this peace to die in the first hour of it, Ragnall. And they’ve nearly made certain it will.”
