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"Taken how."

"Same way most land's taken." Tòmas's voice had the dry, unhurried cadence of a man who'd told this story more than once and had stopped finding it interesting decades ago. "War, and a bad harvest the MacRaths couldnae recover from fast enough, and the Chisholms pressing the advantage while it lasted. It was yer grandfather's time, laird, near enough. The MacRaths never got it back. Never stopped wanting it back, either, from what I've heard whispered over the years. Cailleach's own father used tae ride the old boundary line once a year, just tae look at it, they say. Grief or habit."

Marcas turned that over, a troubling suspicion beginning to take shape in his mind.

"Show me where the boundary ran exactly."

Tòmas traced it slowly, and Marcas pulled a second parchment from the stack he'd brought himself, of his own scouts' reports, the marked locations of the ambush on the border road, an attack near the river crossing, the sightings along the eastern boundary these past days and laid it over the old map, aligning the two by the river's bend, the only landmark that hadn't shifted in a hundred years.

The overlap showed all at once, plain and undeniable.

Every attack, every sighting, every place his men had found ash from a cold camp or the print of a boot that wasn't MacKinnon's, every one of them sat squarely within the old MacRath boundary, the ground Cailleach's family had spent generations failing to reclaim.

This isnae only about Neilina.

The thought landed cold and clear, and beneath it, fast on its heels, a second one considerably colder.

Or it's about her precisely because of this. A Chisholm bride wed intae MacKinnon land binds the Accord tighter around the very ground Cailleach's clan has never stopped grieving. Cailleach wasnae trying to keep her safe from a marriage she didn’t want. He took her tae keep this land from ever being fully lost. And when that failed, he's nae given up the cause. He's only changed his method.

"Laird?" Tòmas was watching him, something careful in the old man's face. "Ye've gone quiet."

"How long has Cailleach held the lairdship."

"Near twenty years now."

"And in that time, has he ever formally pressed a claim tae this ground? Tae the King, or through any proper channel?"

"Nae that I've heard. He's nae a fool, laird. He kens a formal claim would need proof he doesnae have, and a war he cannae win outright." Tòmas's eyes narrowed slightly, following the direction of Marcas's thinking without needing it spoken aloud. "But a man who cannae win a war outright can still bleed his enemy slow, if he's patient enough about it. And Cailleach MacRath has always been patient."

Marcas looked back down at the two overlapping maps, the old grief and the new violence sitting perfectly, damningly aligned, and felt the last uncertainty in him settle into something hard and certain.

"Keep this," he said, rolling the old boundary map carefully, "and the reports both, somewhere only ye and I ken tae look. I dinnae want this spoken of belowstairs yet, nae even tae the council. Nae until I'm certain enough of it tae act."

"Ye think he means tae take it back by force. Under cover of the trouble with the lady."

"I think," Marcas said, "that a man who's spent twenty years watching his own father grieve a stretch of river grass will find any excuse at all tae reach for it again, and I'd rather ken the whole shape of his reach before he closes his hand." He rolled the second map, tucked both beneath his arm. "Say naething of this, Tòmas. Nae yet."

"As ye say, laird." The old man's eyes lingered on him a moment longer, something almost sympathetic in it. "Ye've a great deal riding on ye at once, these days. The land. The lady. The both of them tangled thicker than I've ever seen a laird have tae manage at once."

"Aye," Marcas said, and found, turning to leave the dusty, tallow-scented room with the old maps heavy under his arm, that the old man had put the whole of his week into considerably fewer words than he'd have managed himself. "That they are."

Marcas was crossing the inner ward the next day, still turning the old boundary map over in his mind as that occupied most of his thought for the most part of the day, when he spotted the small procession forming near the stable. There were half a dozen ponies, half a dozen children, and Neilina moving between them checking girths and reins with laughs in between.

"Where's this lot off tae," he called, crossing to them.

"The village." Neilina didn't look up from the strap she was adjusting on the smallest girl's saddle. "They've mastered the paddock well enough. I thought they might benefit from riding somewhere with actual traffic tae manage with…er…carts, dogs, folk underfoot. It's poor practice teaching them tae ride only in a field with naething in it tae spook them."

"That's sound thinking."

"I have moments of it." She glanced up at that and swung up onto her own horse with an ease that still, somehow, caught him slightly off guard each time he watched her do it, the same woman who'd nearly broken her neck dropping from a window at MacRath's, now sitting a saddle like she'd been born to it.

He should have simply wished them well and gone back to his maps. He was aware of that even as the words that came out of his mouth went an entirely different direction.

"I'll come with ye."

She raised an eyebrow. "Will ye."

"Aye."