It wasn't easier. She lay in the amber dark with the warmth of Ivar beside her and her heart doing that unreasonable, frantic thing. She breathed through it. She counted. And eventually, the counting stopped, and the dark was just dark and not a cage.
She woke before him and lay still, listening to the steady, rhythmic pull of his breath. She thought of Kinlochaline and the dark storage room. She thought of the passage she'd walked without a light and the dagger at her left hip.
She thought about the morning of the gathering and realized she was not afraid. The realization was so sharp it surprised her, and she lay with it until it became her truth.
When the sun rose, she dressed in her blue gown. The good one with the MacInnes border that her mother had had made for her. She braided her hair with the silver pin Ivar had left on her table three days ago.
She found him in the outer passage, already dressed, speaking in low, clipped tones with Torvald. He finished the conversation and turned toward her, and for a moment, he just looked at her. The same look from the yard, contained and briefly not.
"Ready?" he said.
"Aye."
They walked toward the courtyard gate. The sound of voices and the rustle of the crowd grew louder, pressing against them.
At the threshold, she stopped.
It wasn't fear; it was the breath before a dive. It was the specific weight of a moment that would either hold their future or break it. She reached down and took his hand.
He looked at her. Genuine surprise flickered across his face. Then he laced his fingers through hers, his grip steady and certain. He looked at her with an expression that had no name and required none.
She turned toward him.
He kissed her. Brief, quiet, the kind of kiss that wasn't a performance. Just his mouth on hers for a moment, his hand firm around hers, and the world waiting just beyond the gate.
He pulled back, his eyes dark with a new kind of resolve.
"Taegether," she said.
"Aye," he said, his voice a low vow. "Taegether."
They stepped forward into the light.
CHAPTER THIRTY
He’d been inside the walls for two hours before anyone looked at him twice.
That was the primary rule of gatherings, people expected crowds, and crowds meant strangers. A man in good wool with his hood pulled low against the biting Hebridean wind was an invisible thing, a shadow among shadows. He’d learned this years ago in the border wars; most men revealed themselves through a frantic sense of urgency. The trick was to move like a man who belonged exactly where he stood, a man who had already been there long enough to be bored by the spectacle.
He moved like that now, slipping along the cold stone of the inner courtyard wall. He held a wooden cup in his hand, the ale inside untouched. He kept his face angled sharply away from the flickering torchlight, let the shadows of the battlements do the work of hiding him.
The castle grounds were gorged.
There were more islanders than he’d anticipated. Duart’s own folk, fishermen from the harbor with the scent of salt still on their skins, and farmers from the inland. All of them were drawn by the promise of free food and the irresistible pull of an event that felt significant without yet revealing its teeth. They didn't know what this gathering was truly for. They knew only that their laird had called it, and that the King's men were present, and that both of those things together meant something worth witnessing.
Fools. All of them.
He stopped near the gate arch, his back pressed against the damp stone, and watched the world assemble.
The royal observers were positioned near the dais at the courtyard's center. Three of them, draped in the Crown's colors.
They wore the careful, practiced neutrality of men paid to see everything without appearing to see anything at all. He recognized the one in the middle, Henry. He'd dealt with Henry's type before, ambitious men in minor positions, far more dangerous than the powerful because they had more to prove and significantly less to lose.
Henry would write what he saw tonight. Callum had been banking on that since the beginning.
He'd been banking on a great deal.
The harbor fire should have been enough. It had tipped the Crown's suspicion past the point of recovery and brought the hammer of the decree down with enough force to remove the Raven from Mull entirely.