Page 37 of The Merciless Laird
Matilda ate the bannock standing at the kitchen window.
It was good. Better than good. Warm all the way through, the outside just slightly crisp, the inside soft enough that it gave when she bit into it.
She took another bite.
"There's more," Marta said. She was already moving toward the stone. "Sit down, lass. Ye're making me neck ache, standin' there like ye're ready tae bolt."
"I'm nae."
"Ye're standing at a window with yer cloak on." Marta set a second bannock on the cloth and held it out. "Sit."
Matilda sat.
She took the bannock and looked out the window, which faced the yard, which was, she told herself, purely a coincidence of architecture.
The drilling was already well underway.
Even through the glass, she could read that the men were good at fighting. Not performing effort but actually working, adjustments landing and being applied before the next correction came. The yard was loud with steel and cold breath and the controlled energy of men being pushed past comfortable.
And at the far end of it, moving down the line with his hands clasped behind his back, was Ivar.
She'd seen him fight. She'd watched him work in her father's courtyard with a cold efficiency that had made two trained men look clumsy by comparison. She'd thought she understood what he was.
She hadn't understood this. This was him on the other side of it. The part that made the fighting possible. The part that made twenty men better than they'd been the morning before, and the morning before that, and every morning going back as far as he'd been doing this.
He stopped in front of a pair of men. Matilda couldn't hear the words, but she could read the shape of it. Ivar’s short question, followed by the younger one's answer.
She watched Ivar take the man’s practice blade. He demonstrated the arc—once, twice, three times—his movements fluid and patient. He stayed there, his body close to the lad’s, guiding the steel until the boy finally caught the rhythm.
There was a quiet, unshakable strength in that patience that was far more intimidating, and far more drawing, than anger.
He stepped back and waited.
The young one tried it and got it wrong.
Ivar showed him again. Same pace. Same precision. No impatience in the line of his body, no shortening of the demonstration, just the same movement offered again as many times as it needed to be offered.
The young one finally got it on the fourth attempt.
Ivar moved on without ceremony, which was its own kind of acknowledgment. She realized she'd been holding the cloth the bannock had come in so tightly that she'd creased it completely.
She put it down.
She was at the yard door before she'd made a decision about it.
The cold air came at her face. Two of the men near the door noticed her immediately, their eyes moving to her with the attention of people encountering something unexpected in a familiar space.
She didn't acknowledge it. She moved to the low wall on the near side of the yard, positioned herself where she could see the full line of them, and watched.
Up close it was something else entirely.
The authority she'd read from the window had a physical weight to it here, a presence.
Ivar moved through the yard with the absolute certainty of someone who had never once in his life needed to prove what he was. When he spoke, men adjusted before he'd finished the sentence. When he stopped walking, the nearest pair stopped working.
He hadn't smiled. Not once. His face was still and cold and entirely focused and she was looking at the Raven of Mull, the real one. The one the maids in her father's garden had whispered about, and she understood now, completely and without question, why they'd said what they'd said.
She also couldn't look away.
