Page 75 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

She moved quietly around the stone room, replacing them. She said nothing while she worked, and the fire ticked in the grate as the new candles bloomed one by one around the room, throwing long shadows.

She paused at the window.

“The castle has nae felt this alive,” she said softly, “in many years.”

He picked up the mill steward’s letter. “Nothin’ has changed.”

She did not argue the point. She set the very last candle in its iron holder and straightened it with two fingers. The braided wick caught the flame.

“Ye were eleven,” she said, her voice dropping into memory, “when ye learned to put yer own fires out at night. Because ye were afraid that if ye called for someone, they would nae come.” She paused. “Ye were twelve when ye started sittin’ in on the steward’s accounts, because ye believed that if ye understood everythin’ that could go wrong, ye would be ready for it.” Another pause stretched between them, shorter this time. “Ye were sixteen when ye⁠—”

“Mrs. Donnan.”

She stopped instantly. Not because she had been silenced by fear. Because she had said exactly enough, and she knew it.

“Ye have spent most of yer life survivin’, me Laird,” she said, her voice lacking its usual soft, formal coating. “Survivin’ is what ye ken. It is what ye are very good at.” She picked up the spent, melted candle stubs and collected them in her palm. “But survivin’ and livin’ are nae the same. And ye’ve been standin’ at the border of one of them for three weeks now.”

He said absolutely nothing.

“She carried flowers,” Mrs. Donnan said, her hand resting on the latch. “For a picnic. For ye.” She moved toward the open door. “I have worked in this castle for thirty-one years, and I have never once seen anyone carry flowers for ye. I thought that was worth remarkin’ upon.”

The door opened.

“Mrs. Donnan,” he said.

She paused on the threshold.

He looked down at the chaotic papers on his desk. At the mill steward’s letter. He had read the first line four separate times without advancing a single sentence further. At the small, dark ring on the wood where his tin cup had sat for an hour without being touched.

“Is her ankle better?” he asked. “Truly.”

A sharp beat of silence followed.

“Beathag says it is sound,” Mrs. Donnan said. “I checked it again this evenin’. She is well.”

He nodded once, his eyes returning to the papers.

The door closed.

He sat in the dark study for another long hour. The peat fire burned low. The candles threw their steady light across the unread parchments.

He thought about a small jar of preserved plum sitting crookedly in a willow basket. About a drifting cloud that was either a boot or a dog, and the ridiculous argument that had made him laugh before he could stop himself, and the specific way she had kept her eyes fixed on the sky just to give him the physical room for it.

He stood up. He went to the window and looked out at the dark yard, tracking the torches flickering at the iron gate and the massive hills beyond them, entirely invisible now against the black sky. Somewhere past those steep hills, and the road that wound through them, and the glen that opened out below, the sea was pushing relentlessly at the land, completely indifferent to everything, boundless.

She had said she had never seen it.

He had told her he would take her.

He decided to get some sleep. He lay on the narrow bench in the pitch dark, and the unfinished sentence sat heavy in his chest and would not be put down, and sleep came late and left early.

When the first pale gray light arrived at the window, he had already been awake for an hour and had, at some unknown point in the dark, made a definitive decision he could not precisely identify the moment of.

He rose. He dressed quickly. He went down to the stables and spoke to Tyler, and Tyler did not ask a single question, which was easily one of his more valuable qualities.

Then he climbed the turnpike stairs to find his wife.

He would take her to the sea today.