“There is a great deal to address before the weddin’.”
“There is,” Alasdair said. “The northern boundary dispute. The winter wool assessment. The Invermohr delivery that arrived three grades below what was promised.” He looked at him steadily. “Ye havenae mentioned any of those things.”
Malcolm’s jaw moved slightly. “Those are important matters, certainly. But the question of?—”
“Ye speak as though I care nae for the clan.” Alasdair let the words sit for a moment. Not loudly. He had never needed volume. “I have led this clan since I was seventeen years old. I have buried men for it. I have made decisions for it that I will carry the rest of my life.” He looked around the table, slowly, meeting each pair of eyes in turn. “I ken me duty. I have always kenned my duty. I will nae be swayed by fear or whispers, and I will nae sit at the head of me own table and be told what me priorities should be.”
The room was very quiet.
Malcolm’s hand on his notes had tightened, the knuckles whitening slightly. His eyes moved around the table, quick and controlled, searching, and he found nothing to take hold of. No one spoke. No one leaned forward. No one offered him the opening he was looking for.
He looked back at Alasdair and smiled, a perfectly gracious smile. “Of course,” he said. “Forgive me. I spoke out of concern, nae criticism.”
“I ken,” Alasdair said. He held Malcolm’s gaze for a moment longer than necessary. “We’ll take the boundary dispute next.”
* * *
The great hall had not sounded like this in years.
Behind him, two of the kitchen girls moved between the tables flagons of mead, their voices low and bright beneath the noise.
“Three more barrels from the cellar and Cook says if anyone asks her for the spiced wine again before supper is served, she’ll use the ladle…”
“She said that last Hogmanay…”
“Aye, and Tam has the scar to prove it.”
Alasdair sat at the head of the long table and watched as it stretched out. Long tables were brought in to accommodate all those gathered. Candles lit in abundance, making the room warm and golden. The smell of roasted meat and spiced wine mingled with woodsmoke and the familiar warm noise of a castle that had let go of its breath.
He had forgotten it could sound like this.
His grandmother was laughing at something at the far end. His sister, three days out of her sickroom and furious at the languid pace of her own recovery, was arguing cheerfully with Fergus.
Alasdair was pleased with all he surveyed. That was the thing he kept noticing—the absence of the grief and burdens he had carried so long he had stopped registering it as weight.
The centerpiece of the main table was a roasted rabbit, arranged with some ceremony on a bed of winter herbs.
She did this.
“When Miss Graham and I first met, she won the right to tear the leg straight from the haunch,” Alasdair said to Hamish, who had appeared at his shoulder with two cups.
“Aye.” Hamish sat down beside him and handed him a cup. “At the summer feast.”
“Ye were faster than me then as was Callum.”
“Callum? Laird of Klehln? He couldnae outrun an old woman.” Hamish drank deeply from his cup. “But as for the two of us? I was faster than ye then, and I am faster than ye now, and I will be faster than ye when we are both old men, and ye still willnae admit it.”
“Ye tripped me,” Alasdair said, “at the MacAlister gathering. Ye put yer foot out deliberately so you might send me sprawlin’ into the dirt.”
“I was runnin’,” Fergus said with dignity. “Me foot was where me foot was.”
“Ye were seven years old, and ye already kent how to cheat.”
“I prefer to think of it as usin’ available terrain.” Hamish laughed. “Ye caught me anyway. Ye always caught me. Ye were just slower gettin’ there.”
Alasdair looked at the rabbit and thought about the summers before everything changed—the running, the shouting, and the unique freedom of being young enough that the world had not yet demanded anything irreversible from him. He had not thought about those summers in a long time. He had not allowed himself to dwell in the past.
His grandmother’s laugh carried from the far end of the table again, and he looked up. She was watching Isobel.