Olivia had crossed this glen once before, a bride in a cart with her head high and her heart in pieces, certain she rode toward a prison. She had not expected the second crossing to be so much harder than the first.
“Ye’re doin’ it again,” Anne murmured from beside her.
“Doin’ what?”
“Worryin’ a hole in yer pocket with that wee brooch.” Anne’s dark eyes were gentle behind her spectacles and far too knowing. “Ye’ve had it out and back a dozen times since the ford. Whoever gave it to ye, I’d say the poor man never stood a chance.”
Olivia took her hand off the silver brooch as if it had bitten her. “Nobody gave it to me. It was pinned to a gown that got torn, and I forgot to give it back, and that’s the end of it.”
“Mm,” said Anne, maddening as only a friend of twenty years could be.
They came down to the river in the clear, golden light of the morning, the entire Blythe party stretched out along the waterway. Olivia saw the festival ground spread across both banks and felt her breath grow strange in her chest.
Booths and trestles. Bright awnings fluttered in the wind from the hills. A field prepared for the games stretched out, with the dark river beyond—the boundary that their two clans had fought over for three generations. And on the near bank was a great black scar of ash where a great fire had burned and died.
She felt the change run through the Blythe party like a current. Heard the low growl of it, men’s voices going hard. Saw on the far bank the Cairn folk gathered in a wary knot and the burnt bonfire between the two clans like an accusation laid out on a table.
“What is it?” She leaned from the cart. “Lucas, what’s happened?”
Her brother rode back to her, his young face grim under the weight he carried so carefully.
“Somebody burned the festival fire in the night,” he said, “and left our plaid beside it so it would look like we did it.” His hand was white on the reins. “Half me men are already saying we should turn the horses around and go home, that it’s a trap, that Laird Cairn means to shame us on our own land and call it a feast. And I cannae rightly say they’re wrong.”
“They’re wrong,” Olivia said before she had decided to. “Ragnall didnae do this. He’d sooner cut off his own hand than burn the one peace he has spent a month buildin’. Somebody’s done it to him as much as to us. Somebody who wants exactly what yer men want, Lucas, which is for us to turn the horses around.”
Lucas looked at her for a long moment, that sad, knowing look he had learned somewhere in the last hard months. “Ye’d stake the clan on it. On him. How could ye do that?”
“Nay. I’d stake meself.” Her heart was pounding, and she could tell how much of it was the burnt fire and how much was the distant bank. “Ride in. Daenae give whoever did this the satisfaction of seein’ us run.”
And so they rode down to the very edge of the water, where the two banks came closest and a broad, flat ford was the only place within twenty miles where a body could cross dry-shod.
The Cairn folk came down to meet them on their side, and for a long moment, the two clans simply stood and stared at each other across the shrinking water, with the burnt fire smoking faintly between them and the air growing thick enough to cut.
Then the Cairn folk parted, and Ragnall came through them.
Olivia had spent a month telling herself she had built him up in her memory, that no living man could be what the empty nights had made him.
She watched him come down to the water’s edge in the golden light, tall and dark and unhurried, his plaid tossed over one shoulder, his black hair loose, and the pale scar on his brown face prominent. She understood, with a sudden jolt that knocked her certainty loose, that she had not built him up at all. She had been kind to herself and had left things out.
His eyes found her across the ford in the first second, the way they always had, as if no number of clansmen between them had ever made the smallest difference. And he did not look away. And neither, God help her, could she.
He stopped at the very edge of the water, where every soul on both banks could see him, and he raised his voice so it carried clean across the river.
“Olivia.” Not me Lady. Not a word for the clans or the Council or the burnt fire between them. Just her name, said plainly, in front of three hundred staring people. “Ye came.”
CHAPTER 29
She came.Over the hill and down to the water with her chin up and her clan at her back and that red hair catching the climbing sun like a struck match.
For one breath, Ragnall forgot the burnt fire, forgot the watching clans, forgot every careful word he had meant to say.
He had said her name clear across the river before he had thought better of it, and now it was said, and both clans had heard him say it, and he found he did not care.
Then the moment passed, and the duty came back, because it always did.
He turned away from her, focused intently on what mattered first. He walked along his side of the river to the spot where the burnt stack still smoldered. Then he bent down, picked up the Blythe plaid that had been pinned there for his people to find,and held it high in both hands so everyone on both banks could see.
“There’s some folk,” he called out, “on both banks, who have been waitin’ all day for me to do a particular thing with this. To hold it up and name it Blythe treachery. To say there’s the proof, there’s the enemy’s true face, and send ye all home to sharpen yer dirks.” He let his gaze sweep across the silent crowd, the way his father had taught him, face by face. “I willnae give them the pleasure.”
