"Aye," he said. "They dae."
"How long have ye been laird?"
"Eleven years."
"Ye were young."
"Aye."
"Was it..." She stopped. Started again. "Did ye have family tae help ye? When ye took it on? Anyone?"
He felt it land before she'd finished the sentence.
The shape of that question, innocent and practical on the surface, and underneath it, the exact place he didn't let people look.
"Nae anymore," he said.
The words came out even. He made sure of it. But the silence that followed had a different quality than the ones before it.
He was thankful that she didn't push. She didn't soften it with something careful and well-meaning that would have made it worse. She just let it sit there.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly.
He said nothing. He looked at the path and kept his eyes there, and they rode on.
The problem announced itself approximately an hour later and Matilda dealt with it the way she dealt with most uncomfortable things, by deciding firmly that it wasn't happening and waiting for it to resolve itself.
It did not resolve itself.
It got considerably worse.
She shifted in the saddle. Then shifted back.
She made herself stop, which helped for approximately four minutes before the awareness returned with renewed insistence and she shifted again.
"What's wrong?" Ivar asked.
"Naethin'."
"Ye've moved six times in the past ten minutes."
Matilda adjusted again in the saddle, then went still out of sheer spite. "I'm uncomfortable. It's the horse."
"Ye were fine on the horse an hour ago."
"People change."
The answer came out crisp, but another shift betrayed her immediately. She bit the inside of her cheek. The blasted saddle had become unbearable. Every step of the horse seemed to jolt directly through her bones and into the last scraps of her composure.
"I'm fine," she added, because dignity, once cornered, was best defended with lies.
He went quiet.
She felt that more than if he had answered. The stillness of him behind her. The steady line of his chest at her back. The reins stayed loose in his hands, his breathing even, his body maddeningly at ease while she was slowly being murdered by embarrassment.
She fixed her gaze on the dark between the horse's ears and tried to think of literally anything else. Rain. Battlefields. Death. A convent.
"Dae ye need tae stop?"