Her father had been quiet for just a beat too long.
He kens ye are a MacInnes daughter and that ye are an honorable match.
She'd looked up then.
Faither.
He kens enough.
She’d whispered the word ‘Father’ in a fragile plea for the truth he’d been shielding from her for eight years. He only squeezed her hand, his silence confirming that for a MacInnes daughter,enoughwas all a Norse laird required.
He'd reached over and covered her hand with his, and she'd let him because he was her father and he was frightened for her and she understood both things, even when they made her want to scream.
She pressed her thumbnail into the mortar between two stones until she felt the bite of it.
What her father called safety, she called a different kind of cage.
The guards who followed her through the market at three paces. The door to her chamber that was never locked from the outside but somehow never felt fully open either.
The way every man in the castle looked slightly past her, as though she were made of something that might shatter if met directly.
The way conversations stopped when she entered rooms, then resumed at a different pitch. Softer. careful.
She understood why. She even understood the love behind it.
That didn't make the walls any lower.
And now a Viking laird was coming at first light to take her to an island she'd never seen, to a keep she didn't know, to sleep in a bed beside a man whose name the maids spoke like a warning.
Black. Like there's naethin' kind livin' behind them.
She exhaled slowly.
The cold air steadied her.
She should go back inside. Her father's standing instruction was absolute, no wandering after dark, no exceptions. She'd agreed to it years ago, when it had seemed reasonable, when she'd needed the walls as much as he'd needed to give them to her.
But that had been a long time ago.
She stayed where she was.
Beyond the boundary of the low wall, the loch lay in a state of unnatural stillness, a mirror of black glass waiting for the storm she could already feel building in the atmosphere.
Somewhere in the hedgerow, a bird shifted and resettled with a soft complaint of wings. The torches along the battlements burned steady.
No wind yet, though she could feel the pressure of it building.
In the morning, a man would arrive who would have legal claim over every choice she made for the rest of her life.
A sound from behind the far hedge made her turn.
Nothing. A cat, perhaps, or the wind picking up. She turned back to the loch and watched it for a moment.
Somewhere past it was the sea, and past the sea, an island, and a keep full of people who had never heard of her and did not yet have opinions about what she could and couldn't endure.
The thought was, unexpectedly, almost interesting.
She was still turning it over when the stillness came.