Page 18 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

"Greer said ye helped with the big baking," Isobel called out over the whistle of the gale, not looking up from her hands. "She told Dougal that ye dinnae drop a single grain of flour on the floorboards. I think she’s considering letting ye touch the salt-pork next week."

"I am honored," Grisselle said, leaning her elbows against the rough, salt-crusted stone of the wall. She looked out over the vast, empty green of the braes stretching toward the peaks. "Your kitchen is warmer than the study."

"Everything is warmer than the study," Isobel said, setting the bowl down on the flagstones. She shifted over, patting the cold stone beside her. "Sit before the wind carries yer hair completely into the firth."

Grisselle dropped onto the ledge, her shoulder brushing Isobel’s wool shawl. They sat in silence for a long minute, watching a pair of grey gulls drift motionless against the updraft from the cliffs.

"It wasnae always so grim here," Isobel said softly, her eyes tracking the birds. "When our father was living, the hall was full of people from the lower glen every Sunday. There was piping. Alpin used to play the small pipes until his fingers bled, just to keep up with the old men."

"He doesn't look like a man who plays music," Grisselle said, her fingers tracing a deep crack in the stone.

"He threw them into the sea the day after our father’s funeral," Isobel said, her voice flat, the lightness completely gone from her face. "He said the noise made his head ache. He was seventeen, and he had to sit at that high desk with six old men telling him the MacCarrons were going to move the border-dyke if he dinnae look fierce enough." She stopped, her jaw tightening as she looked down at her small, neat boots, her fingers bunching into the fabric of her shawl.

Grisselle didn't push. She knew the shape of that silence; she had lived in it for three years while her mother counted the lace collars on her sisters' gowns and calculated the cost of another winter in town.

Isobel turned her head suddenly, her dark eyes fixing onto Grisselle’s face with a strange, unblinking intensity. "Do ye want them, Grisselle? Children?"

The question didn't make Grisselle flinch. She didn't look away toward the water, nor did she soften her voice to sound polite. "No," she said plainly.

Isobel’s brows lifted slightly, but she didn't interrupt.

"I have never had the patience for them," Grisselle continued, her gaze moving back to the high, empty ridges where the sheep looked like tiny white stones against the green. "My mother spent ten years telling me that a woman’s only business is to produce an heir and then sit in a parlor until she dies of the vapors. I have no desire to spend my days wiping noses and listening to small voices in a nursery. I am better suited to the open sky, Isobel. I always have been."

Isobel nodded slowly, her fingers loosening their grip on her shawl. She picked up a single rosehip from the bowl, turning it over and over between her thumb and forefinger.

"Alpin willnae ask," Isobel said quietly, her voice nearly swallowed by the roar of the wind from the glen. "He’ll keep his word on the contract."

"I know," Grisselle said.

She sat with her chin high, her hands steady in her lap, her face turned fully into the freezing northern air.

She didn't say that when her sister Mary had been born, her father had bought a new carriage to celebrate, or that when her brother went to the academy, her mother had wept for a week. She didn't say that by the time she was seven, she had learned to walk through the parlor without anyone looking up from the embroidery frames.

The certainty in her own voice stayed in her ears—hard, cold, and fixed as the iron hinges on the keep's door, the tone of a girl who had figured out very early that if she didn't look after her own space, there wasn't a soul in the house who would remember to do it for her.

"The wind is rising," Isobel said, standing up and picking up her basket. "If we stay out here any longer, Greer will claim we've let the damp into our wits."

"Let her claim it," Grisselle said, though she rose with her, her green cloak snapping sharply against the stone as they turned toward the stairwell.

The spiral stairwell of the West Tower was narrow enough that Grisselle had to turn her shoulders sideways to clear the rough granite protrusions. The air here was thicker than in the great hall, smelling faintly of dried mustard seed, vinegar, and old mutton tallow.

She had just reached the third landing when a small shadow fell across the stone steps above her.

There was no sound of leather boots or the rustle of heavy wool. Instead, a tiny woman appeared around the curve of the masonry, moving with an unhurried, drifting stride that seemed entirely unconcerned with the steep incline. She was small—barely reaching Grisselle’s shoulder—and her face was a map of deep, sunbaked wrinkles that puckered around a pair of pale blue eyes.

Draped completely across the back of the woman’s neck, like a living collar of wrinkled grey leather, was a hairless cat.

Grisselle froze, her hand clamping tight onto the cold iron ring of the wall-latch. She had seen Persian cats in London, sitting on silk cushions in Mayfair parlors, but she had never seen a creature like this. Its skin was the color of wet slate, covered in fine, velvety folds, and its massive, bat-like ears twitched toward the sound of Grisselle’s breath.

The old woman stopped one step above her. She smelled sharply of elderberry wine and dried moss.

"Well," the woman said, her voice surprisingly deep for her size, a slow, gravelly rumble that carried no southern politeness. "So the sea sent him a wife instead of taking him after all. Ye'll want to watch it doesnae change its mind."

"I don't intend to give it the chance, mistress," Grisselle said, her chin lifting as she held the old woman's unblinking stare. "I am Grisselle."

"Mòr," the woman replied. She didn't offer a hand, nor did she bow. Her pale blue eyes moved slowly from the dirt on the hem of Grisselle’s green wool skirt, up to the flour smudge still lingering on her forearm, and finally to the wild, uncombed mass of her copper curls. "The clan has been waiting for a woman who doesnae mind the grease on the table. Ye’ve got the look of the old braes in the eyes. That’ll do for the frost."

"I am not afraid of the cold, Mòr."