"He has strong opinions about the world fer someone who's been here four minutes."
"He comes by it honestly," she said, her eyes meeting his.
He looked at her then, and the look on his face was undisguised. It was the way his face only looked when he'd run out of resources for managing it, when the laird was gone, and only the man remained. She held that look carefully.
"Are ye all right?" he said.
"I'm very tired," she said. "And I'm completely all right, Ivar."
He exhaled, a short, quiet sound. She felt the length of the hours in that breath. The corridor, the pacing, the hell of being a manwho could fix anything with a blade but was useless against the forces of life and death.
"Dae ye want tae hold him?" she said.
He looked at the child. The boy had stopped being furious and had achieved a state of focused, intent concentration, staring at a point near Ivar's shoulder with the unnerving, ancient certainty of the very new.
"Aye," Ivar said.
She transferred the small, warm weight of him with care.
Ivar received his son with his large, calloused hands and settled him against the broad expanse of his chest. He moved with the instinctive, adjusting care of a man handling the most fragile glass in the world. The child blinked once at the new arrangement, considered the scent of salt and wool, and decided it was acceptable.
She watched Ivar hold his son.
Our son.
Matilda was warm and exhausted in a way that went deeper than language, but none of it touched the light that had expanded in her chest.
"Theo," she said quietly.
Ivar looked up at her, the name hanging in the air.
"His name," she said. "I ken we spoke of others, but, look at him. He's Theo."
Ivar looked down at the child again. The boy, as though following the conversation, moved his tiny fist against Ivar's tunic and resettled with a soft sigh.
"Theo," Ivar said, testing the weight of the name. Then, quietly, with the certainty he applied to things he'd decided were true: "Aye. Theo."
She smiled.
She didn't try to manage the expression or direct it into something composed. She let it arrive and stayed with it, the same way she'd leaned into him in the library, the same way she'd reached for his hand at the gate. She chose the joy, plainly and without apology.
"He looks like ye," she said.
"He looks like a very small, very irritated person."
"Aye," she said, her eyes drifting shut. "Like I said. He looks like ye."
He looked at her, he smiled brighter than ever.
"Rest," he said, his voice a low vow. "I have him."
"I ken ye have him." She shifted against the down pillows, letting the tension leave her limbs. "That's why I'm resting."
The candles burned in every corner of the room, gold and steady. The fire was a warm hum.
She closed her eyes and listened to the wind outside and to Ivar's steady breathing beside her. She listened to the small, snuffling sounds of a new person making his peace with the world, and found, without planning to, that she was not counting.
She did not need to count the seconds anymore.
She was twenty-three years old and in a keep on the Isle of Mull. The door was not locked. The people she loved were in the room, and the room was full of light.
She followed the warmth down into the deepest, most unguarded sleep she'd had in eight years.
Outside, the November wind moved around the ancient walls of Duart. The torches along the harbor path burned defiant against the dark, and the island was quiet and cold and entirely, finally, at peace.