Page 12 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

Seven days.

She had rebuilt an entire clan’s broken trade system from rubble in less time than that. She opened the first ledger, dipped her quill in ink, and began.

Chapter Five

The argument had been going on for the better part of an hour.

Alba stood in the center of the village square with rain settling softly across her dark cloak, listening to Tavish the tanner explaining for the third time already, why the MacGregor soldiers currently occupying the cottage beside his workshop were an affront to everything he held dear.

Beside him, his wife nodded.

Across the square, two MacGregor men stood with their arms folded and their chins up, understanding enough of the tone to know they were the subject even if they could not follow every word.

Behind them all, snow kept falling, soft, quiet, entirely unbothered.

“They took the good well,” Tavish said, gesturing aggressively toward the stone structure. “The close one. Me wife has to walk to the far well now; and in this weather!”

“Both wells belong to the village,” Alba said, her voice cutting through the chilled air. “Nae to yer workshop and nae to any particular family.”

“Aye, but before they arrived, we used it.”

“Before they arrived, the well had a cracked surround that three different men promised to repair, and none of them did. I believe one of those men is standin’ in front of me.” Tavish’s mouth snapped shut at Alba’s words. His wife’s nodding slowed considerably. “The MacGregor soldiers using it have repaired the surroundings. I saw the fresh mortar meself this mornin’.”

She let the silence hang for a moment. Then she looked past Tavish to the others. About a dozen MacLaren villagers in various states of cold and grievance, and behind them, half as many MacGregor faces watching from a cautious distance, sensing the sharp change in the wind.

An older woman with a child pressed into her skirts. A young mother holding an infant, tightly wrapped in wool so that only its face was visible, pale and pinched from the cold. A man with hollow cheeks and cautious, watchful eyes, who kept his gaze on the ground.

Something moved through Alba’s chest. Not strategy. Not calculation. Something older and simpler than either.

She had hidden in a dark passage on her wedding night while men died on the other side of the stone. She had emerged at dawn into a castle that was then hers by marriage rights, into a grief that was not yet real, and the only thing that had kept her upright was the knowledge that people were depending on her to be so.

These people across the square had not even had a passage to hide in. They had stood in the open and watched everything burn.

She looked at Tavish. Then at the crowd.

“These people lost their homes,” Alba said. She did not raise her voice; she had learned early that volume was the wrong tool for an angry crowd. “Everythin’ they owned. Their children are sleepin’ in unfamiliar beds in an unfamiliar place, same as yer children would be if yer roofs burned over yer heads tonight.”

She paused, letting the image take root in the biting frost. “So ye’ll show them the same kindness ye’d want shown to yers. Because this clan,allof it, MacLaren and MacGregor both, survives winter together or it does nae survive it at all.”

The square went entirely quiet except for the soft hiss of falling snow.

Tavish shifted his weight, suddenly fascinated by the mud on his boots. His wife found something absorbing to study in the gray tree line in the middle distance.

Old Catriona from the far end of the lane began nodding slowly. She did not join in the general murmur of the crowd. Instead, she stood perfectly still, her thin fingers sinking deep into the shoulder of the small child who had buried his face in the thick wool of her skirt.

She did not smile, and her shoulders did not relax from their rigid, defensive set. Her eyes, sharp and heavily lined with exhaustion, tracked Alba’s face with a heavy, unblinking intensity.

She looked at the MacLaren crest pinned to Alba’s cloak, then up to the curve of her jaw, and finally straight into her eyes. Her hand tightened fractionally on the boy’s shoulder, pulling him an inch closer to her side. Alba met her gaze and nodded once, briefly, woman to woman.

The MacGregor woman dipped her chin in return.

“If anyone has a genuine complaint about resources or accommodation,” Alba said, turning her attention back to the gathered villagers, “ye bring it to John O’Connor before the end of the week. Ye daenae bring it to the square, and ye daenae take it out on people who’ve already lost more than any of ye have.” She gave them one last, unyielding sweep of her eyes. “Are we understood?”

A general murmur of assent rippled through the crowd. It was not warm, but it was present, and that was enough for now.

She turned and walked back toward the castle before anyone could find a new grievance to air.

The biting cold followed her the whole way up the hill, pressing at the back of her heavy cloak.