Page 74 of The Shape of Silence

That earned a fuller laugh from Morggán.

“I've offended her somehow,” he admitted after a moment. “Or perhaps nae. I canna rightly say. One day she's content enough in my company, and the next she looks upon me as though I've become a stranger.”

Lucas was quiet for a time, his gaze remaining upon the brush and bracken ahead while their horses picked their way between towering pines.

“Cora does that,” he said at length. “Disappears into her own thoughts for hours sometimes. Ask her what’s wrong and she’ll swear naught is amiss, though any fool with eyes can see otherwise.”

“And what do ye do?” Morggán asked, rather hoping a man wed now several years had the answer.

Lucas’s mouth curved faintly. “More often than not, the wrong thing first. I’ve spent years thinking if I asked enough questions I’d eventually stumble upon the right one.”

Morggán seized on that. “Avery was asking questions I canna make sense of,” he confessed, even as it felt...odd to be discussing this with Lucas Thain. He was fairly certain their conversations over the years had rarely stepped outside the boundaries of war, politics, and estate management. Still, he continued. “Strange questions. Then she seemed frightened by the answers.”

Lucas nodded as though nothing about that surprised him. After a moment, he said, “Cora is most direct, but aye, I sometimes find that the question I hear is nae the one she wants to ask, which tells me that whatever burdens her is greater than her fear of keeping it from me.”

Morggán digested this, wondering if Avery had been leading up to something, and if his impatience had not allowed her to ask what she truly wanted to know.

“So I tell her only this,” Lucas went on, “that whatever trouble she’s carrying, it will be halved if she shares it with me.”

Simple enough counsel, Morggán supposed. And then he was almost embarrassed by the simplicity of it, since it had never occurred to him that perhaps she was not seeking answers so much as someone willing to stand beside her while she searched for them herself.

She had spent years alone. The thought alone had troubled him often enough. No man and no kin, no one with whom to share fear or grief or simple conversation at day's end. Whatever life she had known before arriving in the forest had been swallowed by solitude until she had come to believe such loneliness ordinary. He guessed that should account for why she guarded herself so fiercely now—if she had carried every burden alone for so many years, why would she suddenly think to place one in another's keeping?

And when she had—or tried, if that were the case—he hadn’t responded well at all.

Shite. He would need to fix that first, he guessed.

Chapter Eighteen

Later that morning, hours after the riders departed again toward the eastern ridges, Avery carried her snares looped over one arm and headed deeper into the forest with Charlie trotting ahead through the undergrowth. The woods had grown quieter immediately after the army’s departure, though not truly silent anymore. A smaller contingent always remained behind now: guards, wounded men, several cooks, and boys tending horses.

At first Avery did not realize she was being followed.

Donnchadh moved far more quietly than most men. She only noticed him after Charlie glanced back once toward the trees behind them with the mild acknowledgment of a creature already aware of another presence nearby.

Avery straightened from where she had been examining a disturbed snare line near a cluster of brush and turned fully at last.

Donnchadh stood perhaps twenty feet away beside a pine trunk, broad-shouldered and entirely unapologetic at being discovered.

“Why are you following me?” she asked.

“Laird tasked me with keeping ye safe.”

His tone suggested this should explain everything.

“I am safe.” She gestured vaguely around them at the forest itself. “Donnchadh, I’ve lived here by myself for years.”

“Aye.” He pushed away from the tree and walked toward her, no need to keep his distance now.

“Wouldn’t you rather be with the others?” she pressed. “Fighting with them?”

Something flickered briefly across his face then. Not embarrassment precisely, but acknowledgment. Of course he would rather ride with the others. She’d heard Alastair yesterday in passing, say something to the effect of, every man in camp knew the larger forays against the English offered greater danger, greater glory, and infinitely better stories afterward beside the cookfires.

Still, Donnchadh merely shrugged one heavy shoulder.

“Laird asked for me, lass.”

Avery frowned faintly at him.