Page 40 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

They walked on toward the chapel, and Alpin said nothing further about it, though he carried the image of her with that bairn quietly against her shoulder the rest of the afternoon.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

They left the forge with the smell of scorched iron still clinging to Grisselle's cloak.

Old Fergus red-faced and pleased with himself after showing her how a horseshoe was properly set. The chapel after that — small, cold, smelling of stone and old candle wax, the same chapel where his own parents had married and where, in three weeks, he supposed he would stand at the front of it himself.

"It's smaller than I expected," Grisselle said, once they were back out in the lane.

"Ye keep saying things are smaller than ye expected. Ye'll want to adjust yer expectations, living up here."

"Or perhaps everyone in London simply builds things larger than they need to be, to make up for something."

"That sounds like an insult aimed at an entire city."

"Well…" She said it without apology, tugging her cloak tighter as the wind picked up, the light already beginning its slow slide toward evening. "I didn’t mean it as one."

They started back up the track toward the castle as the sky over the water turned the color of a bruise, going yellow at the edges, walking rather than riding for the first stretch, the horses led behind them, unhurried.

"Ye did well today," Alpin said, before he'd quite decided to say it.

"I only spoke to people."

"Ye spoke to people the way most folk daenae manage, even after years of trying. Half that village has kent me since I was in short clothes and still greets me like they're waiting to see what mood I'm in first. They dinnae wait with ye."

"Perhaps they simply liked me."

"Perhaps." He considered it a moment longer. "Or perhaps ye daenae carry the same weight I do, walking into a room. They ken what it costs to disappoint their Laird. They daenae ken yet what it costs to disappoint ye, so they've nae reason to be careful."

"That's either the saddest thing you've said to me, or the most honest."

"Might be both."

They walked on, the track climbing steadily, the village shrinking behind them into a scatter of lit windows against the dark.

"Tell me something about the clan," Grisselle said. "Something that isn't in any ledger. Something Isobel wouldn't think to tell me because she's too close to it to notice it's interesting."

Alpin thought a moment. Alpin thought a moment, his eyes scanning the open expanse of the glen stretching below them. The afternoon sun was cutting through a break in the heavy grey clouds, painting the heather along the hillsides in deep streaks of purple and rust. A cold breeze blew off the loch, rustling the tall yellow grass along the track and carrying the sharp, damp scent of wet bracken and pine.

"Every MacKay born in the last four generations has the same crooked left ear,” Alpin said, his low voice carrying easily over the sighing wind. “Nobody kens why. Old Mairi swears it's a curse from a wronged fisherman's wife two hundred years back. The MacKays themselves just call it the family ear and daenae much care to explain further."

"That's an excellent fact,” Grisselle said, her dark hair blowing across her cheek as she pulled her tartan tighter around her shoulders against the gust. “I want more like it."

"The Frasers up the glen willnae eat rabbit,” Alpin continued, pulling his horse to a slow walk as the path narrowed near a rushing mountain burn. The cold water spilled over dark, moss-covered boulders, spraying a fine mist into the air. “Any of them. Ask why, and ye'll get five different stories depending which Fraser ye've asked, and every one of them will insist theirs is the true version."

"What's your version, if you had to choose one?"

"I daenae ken. I've never asked. Some things are better left as five stories than one answer."

Grisselle laughed at that, low and unguarded, and the sound of it settled somewhere in his chest the same way it had in the hall days before, warm and entirely unwelcome in how easily it had made itself at home there.

"What about the Herstons?" she asked. "Do we have an unexplained ear, or a rabbit we won't touch?"

"We have a sea we cannae leave alone," Alpin said, before he'd thought better of it, "and a temper that skips a generation and then comes back twice as strong to make up for it."

"Which generation did it skip?"

"Mine, apparently, if Isobel's to be believed. She says I got Grandda's temper and me father's stubbornness, and neither in a proportion anyone finds convenient to live with."