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Neilina had expected that it would be a large ceremony. She had not expected the whole glen. Somewhere between dawn and noon an unbelievable number of people had arrived, crofters in their best plaids, shepherds with children on their shoulders, women carrying baskets of oatcakes and honey and whatever else they had managed to bring.

Someone had hung heather from the walls. They had dragged a table into the middle of the yard and covered it with an astonishing quantity of roasted mutton.

"They're all here," she said, stunned, at the top of the chapel steps.

"They came last night, some of them." Lachlan, at her elbow, was grinning like a man who had won a bet. "Walked through the dark tae be here. They've been calling ye the lady of the table leg since the second day."

"The what?"

"The lady who picked up a table leg and brained a MacRath." He offered her his arm with a flourish. "It's in the songs already. There's a verse. It rhymes, mostly."

"Lachlan."

"I'm only telling ye what the bards say."

"If I hear a verse," Neilina said, taking his arm, "I'll have ye thrown in the loch."

"It's a very good verse."

She was still laughing when she saw him.

Marcas stood at the foot of the chapel steps in the MacKinnon plaid, his dark hair damp and combed back from his face, his shoulders squared beneath a coat she had never seen. He had shaved. There was a pale, healing scar along his jaw where Cailleach's fist had opened the skin, and his left arm was still held a little stiffly at his side, and he was looking at her as though the courtyard were empty.

She stopped on the third step.

The noise of the crowd seemed to drop away, as it had on the night in the hall when she had first understood what he was. Not a kidnapper. Not a tyrant. Just a man who wanted her to be free, even if freedom meant she walked away.

"Ye came," he said, as she reached him. His voice was low and almost unsteady.

"Did ye think I wouldnae?"

"I thought about it." He did not smile, but his eyes did. "I thought about it on the battlements, every hour from the third bell. I thought, she's had a week tae think, she'll look at me and see the man who dragged her tae a war."

"Marcas." Neilina reached up and straightened the clasp at his shoulder, because her hands needed something to do. "I've had weeks tae think. I've thought about nothing else."

"And?"

"And I thought about it the night ye came through the door." Her fingers stilled against the wool. "I thought, if he gets me out of this, I might have tae marry him in the mud if I have tae. I didnae care where. Or how."

His breath caught.

"I didnae say it then," she went on, quietly. "I was too busy nae dying."

A laugh broke out of him, and the sound went through the crowd like a bell. Half the glen was grinning. Fearchar, standing at the chapel door with his arm in its sling, looked pointedly at the sky.

"Ye've the loveliest way," Marcas murmured, "of making a man feel like a fool."

"It's a gift."

"Aye. It is." He took her hand and lifted it, and pressed his mouth to her knuckles, and she felt the heat of it all the way down to her feet. "Come and be married tae me, Neilina."

"Aye," she said. "I think I will."

The words themselves, afterwards, were a blur. She remembered the priest's voice, thin and quavering, and the sun on the stones. She remembered Marcas's hands closed around hers, warm and scarred and entirely steady, and the plaid draped across their joined wrists. She remembered the moment he spoke his vows, and his voice had cracked on her name and the whole yard had gone quiet.

"I, Marcas MacKinnon, take thee, Neilina, tae be my wedded wife." He stopped. His thumb moved across her knuckles. "I've nae right tae ask ye for anything. I'll ask it anyway. Stay with me."

Not obey. Not belong. The priest blinked, plainly unsure whether to correct him, and Fearchar, from the door, said very clearly, "Let it stand."