The word hung in the warm darkness between them.
She bent again over his arm, her cheeks flushed, and wrapped the fresh linen around it slowly and carefully, over and under. His free hand lifted of its own accord, and his fingers brushed once, gentle as a moth, against the back of her wrist where she worked. She felt the touch go all the way to the soles of her bare feet.
Neither of them moved. The candle guttered. The whole keep seemed to lean in close around the two of them in the small ring of its light.
Olivia lifted her face. He was so close, and his eyes were on her mouth now—dark, certain, and undone. She understood that all she needed to do was stay exactly where she was and let it happen at last.
A coal cracked and fell in the dying hearth, loud as a shot in the stillness, and Ragnall drew back his hand as if her wrist had burned him, and the moment shattered into pieces on the kitchen floor.
“Ye should go to sleep,” he said roughly, rising, not meeting her eyes. “It’s late, and ye are owed yer rest more than most. I will see ye in the mornin’, lassie.”
And then he was gone into the darkness of the passage before she could find a single word to call him back, leaving her alone at the scarred table with the guttering candle, her thundering heart, and the fresh-bound truth of him still warm beneath her fingertips.
Tomorrow, then. Or the next day, or the next. Ye cannae run from me forever in yer wee keep, Ragnall Crawford. Ye held me wrist tonight like a man holdin’ the one thing he was afraid to want, and I felt yer hand shake doin’ it. Whatever it is that lives behind that locked door of yers, it’s comin’ loose. I’ve only to wait and nae flinch when it does.
Cairn woke the next morning to a quiet it had not known in three generations.
Olivia stood at the window of the Great Hall in the early light, watching her husband’s people discover it slowly, one by one—like a body waking from a long fever and lying still for a moment, half afraid to trust the cool of its own brow.
There was no dread in the yard. That was part of what made it strange. No watch was doubled on the south wall, no one was muttering about Blythe sails on the river, and no hand was reaching for a weapon with the creak of the gate. People went about their usual morning routines, with hens clucking, the byre busy, and smoke rising straight and gray from the kitchen chimney.
The quietness blanketed the whole keep like the first snow of winter.
And then a watchman’s call came down from the wall, not the muster, only a single voice, puzzled more than afraid. “Riders. Off the south road. Blythe colors.”
Olivia’s heart climbed into her throat. She was in the yard with the rest of them by the time the gate was opened, and her brother rode through it at the head of a half-dozen men, under no flag of truce nor parley, carrying nothing in his hands.
He had come openly into the heart of a Cairn keep, a Blythe laird with his head bare, because a man did not ask permission nor carry a white flag to ride to a friend’s home. The meaning of it was not lost on anyone standing in that yard. Olivia saw it land on the Cairn faces around her, the slow dawning wonder of it, and her eyes stung.
“I’ve brought yer dead home to ye,” Lucas said to Ragnall, swinging down from the horse, “to bury with yer own, in yer own ground, with Blythe standing bareheaded at the gravesides if ye’ll have us there. And I’ve come to ask to bury ours the same, on our bank, with Cairn lookin’ on. It seems to me…” His young voice caught, then steadied. “It seems to me that both our clans have buried enough men in secret and in anger. I’d see these last three put down in the open, and in peace, with the other side bearin’ witness that we meant it.”
They did it that afternoon at the ford, where the river flowed shallow and clear between the two clans’ territories. The three were laid to rest in sight of each other, two on the Cairn bank and one on the Blythe, and the people of both clans performed the long rites on their own shores, bowing their heads over the flowing water. The priest’s words echoed clearly across it, the same words spoken for Cairn and Blythe alike.
Maisie walked down alone afterward to the old boundary stone above the ford, the gray weathered stone where a skinny laddie had once laid his whole heart down in the gloaming and had it handed gently back to him, and she stood there for a long while with her hand on its cold surface, and what she said to it, if she said anything at all, she kept to herself.
Olivia found herself beside Ragnall at the water’s edge as folk drifted back up the banks, the two of them left for a moment in the hush with the river flowing between the newly turned graves.
“It’s a strange peace,” she murmured, “that is bought with this much buryin’.”
“Aye.” He was quiet for a moment, his bound arm stiff at his side, his dark eyes fixed on the water. “Lassie, there’s a thing I’ve been meanin’ to say to ye since?—”
“Me Lady!” Greer was puffing down the bank toward them, red-faced and apologetic. “Beggin’ yer pardon, but the kitchen’s at sixes and sevens with the Blythe folk stoppin’ to sup, and Cook’s in a state, and… Would ye come?”
The moment shattered like a reflection disturbed by a stone hitting the water.
Ragnall swallowed his words.
Olivia climbed up the bank to tend to the kitchens, carrying the tension lingering in the air behind her, heavy as a held breath.
CHAPTER 37
Ragnall could not settleafter the burial.
He spent the evening meal in his hall as if on guard, choosing his words carefully in front of the Blythe folk beneath his roof. He watched the ale being served and the wounded being fed, all the while carrying the words he had wanted to say at the graveside, which stayed lodged behind his teeth like a stone he couldn’t swallow or spit out.
He had confronted armed men on wet ground with a calmer heart. He was ashamed of this, a laird who had become a coward in his own home over just a few words, yet he could not bring himself to care.
He attempted to ascend the tower stairs twice, but each time he turned back, cursing himself. He paced the dark hall like his own hound until the fire in the grate turned into a red eye.
