It had a pattern.
The clash and pause of drilling rather than fighting, regular and controlled. Every so often, a voice cut through it.
She couldn't make out the words, but she didn't need to. The tone was enough. Sharp, short, final. The kind of voice that said a thing once and expected it done.
She knew that voice.
She got up and crossed to the window.
The glass was cold against her forehead, but the sight below made her breath hitch. The yard was a sea twenty men or more, moving in pairs, steel catching the early light. She could see their breath in the cold air, the controlled violence of the drilling, the way corrections landed and were applied before the next one came.
And at the far end of it, Ivar.
He had his back to her. Dark tunic, no cloak despite the cold, moving down the line of men with his hands behind his back.
He stopped in front of a pair and said something, and both men adjusted immediately, and he moved on. She watched him stop again. Demonstrate something with a blade, slow and precise, broken into pieces. Step back. Wait.
She had her hand flat on the cold glass and didn't notice until she looked down at it.
She straightened. Looked back at the yard.
He was moving again, and the morning light was on his shoulders. She was standing at a window in her nightgown, watching a man she'd known for less than a day drill his warriors before dawn, and her pulse was doing something she needed it to stop doing immediately.
I am simply observin’ a group of professional men and their laird in training.
She was allowed to observe. She was allowed to note, from a perfectly reasonable distance, that he moved like water finding the easiest path. No wasted steps, no hesitation, just the next thing and the next.
That he was broad across the shoulders in a way that the dark tunic did nothing to hide. That there was something about theway he waited after a correction, still and patient, that made the men want to get it right before he had to say it twice.
She watched the sheer, raw heat of his exertion that seemed to radiate even to the glass. She watched the way his hand moved to his sword hilt, deliberate and entirely masculine.
A sudden, treacherous heat coiled in her stomach, a physical awareness so sharp it felt like a transgression. She was standing in her nightgown, watching him through a pane of glass, yet she felt as though his gaze might burn through the stone and find her there.
He turned his head to the side, saying something to one of his men, his jaw in profile, and she took a step back from the window.
She told herself it was the bannocks and changed before going to find the kitchen.
She passed the corridors and followed the smell of bread.
The kitchen was warm and smelled of woodsmoke and oats, and bread that had just come off the stone.
Two of the kitchen women looked up when she came in and then looked at each other with the swift communication of people who had already been talking about her and had no intention of stopping.
"Me lady," the older one said. "I'm Marta. This is Betha." She was already moving toward the stone. "First batch is just done. Sit yerself down."
"I'm fine standin'," Matilda said. "Thank ye, Marta."
Marta handed her a bannock wrapped in cloth and looked at her with the frank assessment of a woman who fed people for a living and had opinions about all of them.
"Ye're smaller than I expected," she said.
"Marta," Betha said.
"I'm just sayin'. They said the Raven had chosen a Highland lass and I expected someone big." She made a gesture that encompassed something larger. "Nay offense meant, me lady."
"None taken," Matilda said. "I'm told I'm deceptive." She took a defiant bite of the bread. The honey and oats burst across her tongue, and for a moment, she forgot to be regal. "God’s breath, Marta. If the rest of the food is as good as this bread, I might never leave the kitchen."
Marta looked at her for a moment. Then she laughed and turned back to her stone. "Aye," she said. "I imagine ye are."