Frederick, curse him, had the audacity to look amused. “Just as yer maither has said, lass.”
“Okay…” Jamie said and lifted the dress slightly with one hand and frowned down at the fastening near the side. “I need help.”
Iona let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a laugh and crossed at once to her daughter, grateful for the interruption and somehow not at all.
Behind her, she could feel Frederick still watching.
And now, at last, nothing about that felt uncertain.
22
“Lassie, if ye tie that ribbon any tighter, the flowers will look as though they regret blooming.”
Caitlin did not so much as glance up from the arrangement in her hands. “And if ye say lassie to me one more time, I may begin pretending I do nae hear ye at all.”
Erin gave a satisfied little sound from the chair by the window, where bundles of greenery and dried herbs had somehow taken over half the room. “That would require discipline.”
“It would require patience,” Caitlin corrected.
“Same thing, in yer case.”
Iona stood in the middle of the chamber with a length of pale cloth draped over one arm, watching the two women with a kind of stunned amusement she had long since stopped trying to hide. It had been scarcely a day since she had agreed to marryFrederick, and already the keep had transformed into something busy and bright and faintly unruly.
Caitlin moved through it all with the delighted purpose of a woman whose hopes had been answered far more generously than she had dared ask. Erin, rather than removing herself from the fuss as any sensible person might, had inserted herself into the middle of it with the authority of an old queen and the sharp tongue of a crow determined to improve everyone in sight.
Somehow, against all reason, it worked.
“Should the flowers hang there or there?” Iona asked, lifting the end of the garland slightly as though that might make the choice easier.
“Neither,” Erin said at once.
“There,” Caitlin said at the exact same moment.
Iona looked from one to the other. “That is helpful.”
“It is there,” Caitlin said with complete confidence, crossing the room to take the garland from her. “Erin thinks every decorative thing should look as though it grew by accident.”
“Because that is how the finest things grow,” Erin replied. “Naturally. Nae strangled into shape by noble hands and too much ribbon.”
Caitlin adjusted the greenery with careful fingers. “And yet here ye sit in me chamber telling me how to decorate it.”
“I am improving it.”
“Ye are criticizing it.”
“Aye,” Erin said. “That too.”
A laugh escaped Iona before she could stop it.
The sound drew both women’s attention for a moment, and Caitlin’s expression softened at once.
“There now,” she said. “That is better. A bride ought to laugh at least once each morning, or everyone around her becomes unbearable.”
“Then we are all doomed,” Erin muttered.
Across the room, a small wooden cup tipped over and rolled beneath the table.
Jamie gasped as though a kingdom had fallen.