Page 83 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

“Ye’re jesting with me.”

“I am nae jesting. That bird chased me the length of this land for the better part of three years. I couldnae walk to the well without it coming after me, wings out, hissing like the devil himself had sent it up from below. I took to carrying a stick everywhere I went, just to ward it off.”

“Did the stick help?”

“Nae in the slightest. It only seemed to make the creature angrier, as though I’d insulted it personally by daring to defend meself.” He nodded at the scar. “It caught me once, proper. I was ten, maybe eleven. Bled for the better part of an hour, and me sister laughed so hard at the sight of me running that she nearly fell into the loch trying to catch her breath.”

Elspeth pressed her lips together, fighting it, and lost badly enough that a small, helpless sound escaped despite every effort to hold it in.

“Ye may laugh,” he said dryly. “Everyone did. Duncan still brings it up whenever he wants me in a foul mood.”

“I’m nae laughing.”

“Ye are very plainly laughing, Elspeth.”

“I am simply breathing oddly.” She gave up and let it out, and he watched her do it without any real irritation behind his eyes, which told her plainly enough that he’d expected exactly this reaction and had made his peace with it some years ago.

But the laugh faded when his face didn’t follow it, when whatever had been almost-fond in his expression a moment before settled into something considerably stiller, more careful.

“I hated it,” he admitted. “The fear. Flinching back from a bird because of something that happened when I was a lad of ten.” He picked the brush back up and turned it over once in his hand. “I hate it still, if I’m being honest. Which I suppose is why I didnae laugh along with the rest of ye this morning and let the whole thing lie easy.”

“There’s no shame in it, Magnus. Every living soul fears something.”

“Aye. And fear makes a man hesitate.” He said it flatly. “A hesitant man is a dead man, more often than nae. Or he’s a man who gets other men killed in his place, which is worse.”

Elspeth said nothing to that, only stepped a little closer, close enough now to see the muscle working in his jaw.

“After me family was slaughtered,” he said, quieter now, “I was afraid. For a long while after. Afraid of the dark. Afraid of a sound in the corridor that shouldnae be there. Afraid every single morning that I’d wake up and find it happening again to whoever I had left to lose.”

He set the brush down on the rail again and looked at it rather than at her while he said the rest.

“That was the last time I let meself be afraid of anything. I decided, somewhere in that year, that fear served no purpose I could find worth keeping. Nor grief. Nor much else in the way of feeling, if I’m being honest. They daenae keep a man’s people alive. They daenae mend a wall, or sharpen a blade, or stand a watch through a cold night. So I stopped allowing meself the indulgence of any of it.”

“All of it?”

“All of it I could manage to root out.”

“And the swan?”

Something almost like a real smile threatened at that, there and gone before it could properly land. “The swan I never quite managed to root out. Which I suppose ye now ken better than most in this household.”

Elspeth studied him for a long moment—the careful, deliberate stillness he wore like a second skin, the scar half-hidden under his sleeve, the brush he’d set down and hadn’t picked back up again—and found herself thinking of a boy who’d once laughed hard enough at his own sister’s teasing that he could still recall the exact sound of it all these years later, buried somewhere beneath thirteen years of a man who’d decided joy was an indulgence he could no longer afford.

She didn’t say any of that aloud. Instead, she reached for the brush he’d abandoned on the rail and set to work on the gelding’s flank herself, matching the rhythm he’d used a moment before, stroke for stroke.

“Well,” she said after a while, “I shall have the swans returned to whatever considerably less personal loch they came from, with me sincerest apologies to whoever raised them.”

“I’d be obliged.”

“Though I make no promises regarding the goat. I understand ye two have an arrangement.”

“The goat and I have reached a mutual understanding built on tolerance. It isnae remotely the same thing.”

She smiled at that, small and private, and kept brushing.

She said nothing further about scars or swans or a boy who used to laugh so hard he nearly knocked his sister into a loch. Though she found, well after the moment had passed and the two of them had moved on to arguing about which side of the gelding needed brushing first, that she hadn’t stopped thinking about him at all.

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