Page 48 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

"Hasnae it?"

"She has no one." Her hands, which had been still at her sides, found each other, her fingers pressing together. "That's what it's got to do with it. She has no one, and she's a few weeks old, and I'm not… I can't…" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. Started again. "You can be as cold as you like to me. I made that bargain with my eyes open. But she didn't make any bargain. She just arrived."

He didn't have an answer for that. She left.

Isobel appeared in the armory doorway approximately four minutes later, which meant she'd been waiting in the passage, which meant she'd heard most of it.

"Daenae," he said.

"I wasnae going to say anything."

"Ye were, so get it over with."

She came in, pushed a saddle that had no business on the worktable off to one side, and sat on the corner of it. "Do ye remember the summer after grandfather died, when father brought that injured gannet in from the shore and said it was just until it healed?"

"I remember."

"Ye were the one who fed it every morning. Four weeks. Ye'd nae let anyone else near it."

"It was a bird, Isobel."

"Aye." She looked at him steadily. "And ye were ten. And ye'd just lost someone. And it turns out that's nae a complicated thing, wanting something small to be all right." She let that sit a moment. "She's nae asking ye to be its father. She's asking ye to stop acting like it offends ye that the child exists."

He crossed his arms and said nothing.

"She's good for this house," Isobel said, getting up. "Both of them are. And ye ken it. Ye've kenned it for a while now, and it terrifies ye, and that's the thing ye should be thinking about instead of standing in the armory moving things." She was already at the door. "Go and find her."

He found Grisselle in the small room off the east passage that had quietly become Nora's room over the course of five days, a transformation he hadn't registered until he was standing in the doorway of it. The cradle was there, with its new side-pin. A chair had appeared from somewhere. There was a second blanket he didn't recognize folded over the arm of it, pale yellow, something Isobel must have found.

Grisselle was sitting in the chair with Nora tucked against her, not humming this time, just sitting, her chin tipped down to rest on the top of the small head.

"I was wrong," Alpin said from the doorway.

Grisselle looked up.

"About the maid." He came in, not far, far enough. "It was a poor idea, and I kenned it was a poor idea when I said it."

"Then why did you say it?"

He looked at Nora. The small fist working against Grisselle's collar. The way Grisselle's hand curved over her back without thinking.

"Because it's easier," he said, "to hand things off than to—" He stopped. Tried again. "I'm better with things that can be managed. Fixed. Nailed down."

"She's not a loose side-pin."

"No." Something in his chest did a thing he had no vocabulary for, looking at the two of them in the chair in the room that hadn't existed as a room five days ago. "She's nae that."

Grisselle watched him cross to the cradle and stand over it, looking down at the empty, neatly-made interior, and didn't say anything.

He put his hand on the side of it, rocking it once, testing the new pin Niall had fitted. It held solid.

"She can stay," he said. "Here. As she is." He glanced over at Grisselle, and then at the bairn, and then at some middle point between them. "All of it can stay as it is."

Grisselle shifted Nora against her shoulder. "Was that an apology?"

"It was close enough to one."

"It was," she said, "barely in the same county as one."