Now she caught it again.
He rose slowly from where he had been seated and brushed the grass from his hands.
“Ye have that look,” Iona said.
Frederick glanced at her. “What look?”
“The one that means ye have been planning something without telling the rest of us.”
Lennox let out a short breath that might have been a laugh. “That narrows it down not at all.”
Frederick ignored him and instead looked toward the stretch of open ground between the rise and the loch. For a moment, his attention remained there, and when he spoke again, it was not only to her.
“I have decided what is to be done with this land,” he said.
Caitlin’s brows lifted. “Have ye now?”
“Aye.”
Jamie sat up straighter at once. “Is it a swing?”
“Nay.”
Her face fell in exaggerated disappointment.
Frederick’s mouth shifted, though only slightly. “It will be a village.”
The words settled over the blankets with surprising force.
Even Lennox stopped pretending boredom.
“A village?” Ariella repeated.
Frederick nodded once. “For the women and children who had nowhere to return after what was done to them. For those Iona once helped. For those who have since been found and freed. For any among them who wish for a place where they may live without fear of being driven off, claimed, traded, or hidden away again.”
Iona felt the breath leave her. She looked at him, certain she must have misheard some part of it, that perhaps she had let hope grow too quickly from a simple sentence.
But he was looking only at her now.
“I have written to them,” he said.
Her throat tightened at once.
Frederick reached inside his coat and drew out a packet of letters, tied with dark ribbon and already worn faintly soft at the edges from travel and handling. He crossed the short space between them and placed them carefully in her lap as though they were breakable.
“All of them answered,” he said.
Iona stared down at the bundle.
For a moment, she could do nothing else.
The letters were real. She could feel the shape of them through the paper. Different hands. Different folds. Different weights of ink and silence and years now somehow gathered into one place before her.
“Ye found them?” she said quietly.
“Aye.”
“How?”