“A walk.”
“That again?”
“Aye.”
Iona let him draw her only a few steps into the corridor before she stopped. “Frederick.”
He paused and turned back toward her.
“I cannot simply leave all of that,” she said, gesturing toward the room they had just quitted, where Caitlin’s voice could still be heard arguing with Erin over whether greenery ought to drape or loop.
“Ye can,” he said. “Watch.”
He stepped back to the doorway. “Maither, she is with me for a quarter hour.”
Caitlin waved a hand without even turning. “Take an hour. I have Erin and Lennox.”
Lennox looked deeply offended. Erin looked delighted.
Frederick returned his attention to Iona with quiet satisfaction. “There.”
She shook her head as she went with him, unable to stop smiling.
They walked no farther than the southern gallery overlooking the lower court, but even that short distance seemed to thin the noise of the keep around them. Sunlight spilled over the stone, warming the wall beneath her hand when she rested it there. Below, a pair of stable boys crossed the yard carrying tack between them. Somewhere farther off, someone was singing badly while hauling water.
For a few moments, neither of them spoke.
Then Frederick said, “Daenae fash yerself over the expense of any of it.”
Iona turned slightly. “Any of what?”
“The wedding. The feast. The flowers. Whatever else me mother and Erin decide is necessary for the proper joining of two people who might have done this quietly and spared us all.”
She looked at him, and the teasing in his tone eased the question before she had fully realized it lived in her.
“I was nae thinking on expense,” she said.
“Ye were about to.”
His certainty would have annoyed her once. It only made her smile now.
“And if I had been?”
“Then I would tell ye the same.” He rested one hand against the stone beside her, “Choose what ye like.”
Iona opened her mouth to answer and then found, unexpectedly, that she could not.
Choose what ye like.
Such simple words. So plainly said. Yet they moved through her with a strange, quiet force. Her gaze drifted past him into the courtyard below, though she no longer truly saw it.
Jamie, with dolls spread about the bed as if such things had belonged to her all along.
Caitlin, laughing before luncheon, ribbons looped over one arm.
Erin, insulting half the keep while guarding them all more fiercely than any soldier.
Lennox, grumbling and obeying anyway.