“I make nay promises,” Olivia said.
She stepped off the Blythe bank to walk beside her husband, and the two clans watched their enemies cross the water and did not, for once, reach for their steel.
Olivia had intended to speak her mind at the water, in front of everyone, and he had taken that from her with just three gentle words and a walk into a cold river. So she bided her time.
She bided it through the rebuilding after the fire and the first awkward mingling of the clans, through a cup of Cairn ale pressed into her hand by a woman who could not quite meet her eyes, through the length of a walk around the booths with her hand not quite touching her husband’s sleeve and half the festival pretending not to watch them.
And when the piper led a knot of dancers off toward the green and the press of bodies thinned, she put her hand on Ragnall’s arm at last, light as anything, and steered him without a word into the cool green shadow of the alders where the festival ground gave way to the river path.
He went where she steered him. That was the first surprise. Laird Cairn, who bent for no living soul, let a Blythe woman walk him out of the sight of his own clan as biddable as a led horse, and when they stood alone in the dapple with the noise of the festival soft and far behind, he turned to her and waited, and said nothing, and let her have the ground.
“Ye said ye’d hear me speech later,” Olivia said. “Well, it’s time.”
“Aye,” he said. “It is.”
“Then hear it.” Her heart was pounding hard, and her voice came out lower and fiercer than she had planned, a month of it pressing up behind the words. “Ye married me to stop a war. I kent that goin’ in, and I willnae fault ye for it, for I did the same. But the mornin’ after, ye put me up in that cold tower like a sword hung back on the wall, and ye barely gave me the time of day for a fortnight.
“And when a man came into me room in the night and nearly put me in the ground, ye didnae sit at me bedside and ask if I was afraid. Ye decided me fate. Ye looked at me lyin’ there with me blood barely dry on the bed, and ye decided all on yer own that the safest thing was to send me back to Blythe like a parcel posted to the wrong house.”
“That’s unfair. I would never treat ye like a parcel.”
“Aye. Do ye want to ken the moment I understood exactly what I was to ye? The mornin’ ye sent me off. I stood in that cold yard with me trunk loaded in the cart, and I waited, like the very fool ye took me for, for ye to come down those steps and say one true word to me that wasnae safety nor duty nor the good of the clans. One word. That’s all I wanted, Ragnall.Stay.One word from ye, and I’d have climbed out of that litter and never given it another thought as long as I lived. But ye couldnae find it. Ye couldnae find one single word.” Her voice cracked, and she let it. “Ye didnae even come down.”
He said nothing.
“I stood in yer courtyard with me shoulder still bleedin’ and yer grandmaither holdin’ me hand, and I asked her, ‘He isnae comin’ down, is he?’ and she said nay. Yer own grandmaither had to tell me. Ye couldnae be bothered to come down yer own stairs and tell me yerself.” She was shaking now. “And I looked back at the bend. God forgive me, I swore I wouldnae, and I did it anyway. I looked back like a fool, and there was nothin’ at that window. Nae a candle. Nae a shadow. Nae athing. Ye couldnae even come to the glass, Ragnall. Ye couldnae give me that much.”
Her laugh was devoid of mirth.
“A fortnight yer wife, and a man come into me room in the dark, and yer own sister broke on the stones below yer tower, and at the end of it all, ye’d nothin’ left to give me but the depth of the cursed river.”
“Olivia—”
“I am nae done.” She took a step closer, chin up, and he gave back not an inch.
She was close enough now to see his pulse fluttering in the scarred column of his throat.
“Ye stood in that nursery, with me hand on yer face, and ye told me the feud ended that day, that it was business, a treaty and nay more. Ye looked me dead in the eye, and ye lied. I ken ye lied, Ragnall, for nay man holds a woman the way ye held me in that room and feels nothin’.”
Her voice cracked clean across the middle, and she hated it, hated the wet heat behind her eyes, yet she pressed on.
“Ye made me a piece on yer board. A hostage with a weddin’ ring. I will spend the rest of me days at Blythe in peace, and I will be glad of the peace, but I came all this way to stand in front of ye one last time and tell ye that I ken exactly what ye did to me. And then I will be done.”
Ragnall did not defend himself.
That was what broke her, where a hundred arguments could not. He did not straighten up and call it duty. He did not mention the war, nor the Council, nor the safety of the two clans.
He stood in the green shade and took every word of it full in the chest with his dark eyes steady on her face, and when she had spent every word of it and stood there shaking, he was quiet for a long moment and then said, “Every word of what ye said is true.”
Her breath rushed out of her.
“Every word,” he said again. “I put ye in the tower because I didnae trust meself to have ye any closer. I sent ye home because the sight of ye bleedin’ did somethin’ to me that I’d sworn years ago I’d never let happen again, and I was too much of a coward to look straight at the why of it.
“I told ye what I did in the yard for the very same reason, for it was the one safe word I had left in me mouth, and if I’d opened itto say what I truly meant to say to ye, I’d never have let that cart roll through me gate at all. And I lied to ye in that nursery with yer hand on me face, aye.”
His jaw worked. Something moved behind his eyes, there and gone, a crack in the stone sealed over before she could read what lived in it.
“I lied to ye because the truth wasnae mine to say. Ye’d been handed to me to settle a debt. A man doesnae take a woman who’s been handed to him and tell her—” He stopped himself and turned his face half away toward the water, and the silence after it rang louder than any shout.
