She was quiet behind him.
When he turned, she got into bed.
The silence held for a moment, heavy and thick.
"I'm nae going tae pretend I’m fine with only one lit candle," she said, from beneath the covers, looking at the ceiling.
Her voice was steady, but he heard the work in it, the same quality he'd heard in her breathing at the three-quarter mark of the dark passage. "It's nae fine. Me heart is doing something fairly unreasonable right now, and I'm choosing tae ignore it."
He crossed to the bed and sat on the edge of it.
"Then why?" he said. Quietly. Not challenging. He genuinely wanted to know the heart of it.
She turned her head toward him.
"Because I feel safe with ye," she said. Simply. "And I'm tired of letting the fear be louder than that." A pause. "It's been louder than everything fer eight years. I think it's had enough time." She held his gaze. "I'm nae saying it'll work. I'm saying I'm trying."
He looked at her for a long moment, the sheer force of her trust hitting him harder than any physical blow. Then he got intobed beside her, close enough that she could feel the radiating warmth of him and lay back and looked at the ceiling with her.
The last candle burned on the far table. The fire was low and warm. The room was as close to dark as she'd allowed it in since she had come to the keep, and she was still breathing, her hands flat on the covers rather than reaching for flint.
"I've got ye," he said. Low. It wasn't a question; it was a fact.
"I ken," she said. "That's the whole point."
They lay in the amber dark and listened to the wind moving around the walls, and he stayed awake long after her breathing told him she'd found sleep.
He watched the last candle burn, thinking about the four days and Callum's plaid and the way she'd cupped her hand around the flame and blown it out like it was simply a thing she did.
When the candle guttered low, he didn't replace it.
He let it go dark, because she was sleeping, and she was fine, and some things only needed doing once to become true.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
She heard him in the training yard before she saw him.
The punishing rhythm of it reached her through the upper window while she was pinning her hair. The measured, repetitive crack of wood on wood that vibrated through the stone.
It was the sound of a man running drills alone, something he only did when the men had been dismissed, and he still had something stressful or heavy to work through.
She'd learned the difference between his training-with-purpose and his training-as-thinking. This was the latter. A relentless effort to exhaust a mind that was moving too fast.
She finished her hair, the silver pin catching the dim light, and went down.
The yard was a hollow of flat, grey dusk. The last of the afternoon color had been stripped out of the sky, leaving the world in shades of charcoal and slate.
Ivar was a dark silhouette at the center, moving through a sequence of strikes against the practice post. He wasn't moving with his usual predatory speed. His strikes were clean, hypnotic, and repetitive. The kind of drilling that lived in the muscle and the bone, designed to bypass the mind entirely.
He stopped the instant he heard the scuff of her boots on the stone steps.
"Training's done fer the day," he said.
He didn't turn around immediately, his chest heaving with a slow, controlled effort, the wood-on-wood echo still hanging in the cold air.
"I ken." She crossed the yard toward him, her skirts brushing the packed earth. "I came tae watch ye hit a piece of wood."
"It's less entertaining than it sounds."