Page 31 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

"Aye." He looked at her rather than the view. "I thought ye might need somewhere naebody would trouble ye either."

She was quiet a moment, turning that over, and then, unexpectedly, she huffed something that was almost a laugh.

"Fearchar would never have thought of that," she said. "He'd have found another way tae be certain I was safe and then he’d be worried all the while."

"Tell me about him." He leaned his forearms on the cold stone, watching her rather than the sea. "Nae the version ye gave me on the road. The truth of him. Yer brother, before all this."

"He was away for most of it," she said finally. "Our mother died when I was nine, and Fearchar was barely grown himself when the trouble started. By the time I was old enough tae really know him, he was already leaving for one conflict or another. Years of it." She wrapped her arms around herself against the wind. "The Fearchar I grew up with was mostly letters. Pages of instructions and worries and things he wanted me tae know and things he wanted me tae dae, all of it written by a man who was trying tae look after a sister from the other end of a battlefield." She paused. "He meant every word of it. That's the thing about Fearchar. He's never once done anything that wasnae entirely sincere."

"And when he came back?"

"Different." She said it simply, without embellishment. "The war does that. He came home and he was still Fearchar, still the same eyes, same jaw, same way of walking intae a room as though he intended tae hold it." Something moved across her face, fond and complicated at once. "But there was weight on him that hadnae been there. Things he'd seen that he wouldnae tell me about, though I could see them in him." She looked at the water." He became—careful. About me specifically. As though he'd spent those years watching things go wrong and had come home determined that nothing would go wrong here, within reach, where he could stop it."

"And ye find that⁠—"

"Suffocating," she said, and then caught herself. "That's nae fair. He loves me. I know he does. And he isnae wrong that the world is less kind tae women than it ought tae be." She turned the word over carefully. "He looked at this marriage, and saw every way it could be used against me, and his answer was tae act first. That's Fearchar. When he fears something he moves toward it. He's always been that way, even in the letters."

"But he moved toward MacRath," Marcas said, keeping his voice even, "and placed ye behind a bolt."

"I dinnae think he knew the bolt would be there," she said, and there was something careful in how she said it, something that she was still deciding. "Cailleach offered and Fearchar accepted, and I think my brother saw a solution where he should have seen a cage, and the difference between those two things is something he and I are going tae need tae reckon with." She paused. "When I'm home. When all of this is—whatever it becomes."

She looked at the sea.

"He'll have realized by now," she said quietly. "What it looked like from the inside. Fearchar isnae a man who can look at something honestly and nae be troubled by what he sees." The almost-smile again, the complicated one. "It's one of the better things about him."

Marcas looked at her profile against the gray sky.

She was defending the man who had sent her to be locked behind a stranger's door, and she was doing it without illusion, without pretending the wrong thing wasn't wrong. She was holding both things at once and not dropping either of them and, he thought, not for the first time since the postern gate, that she was considerably more than Fearchar Chisholm deserved to call his sister.

He did not say that.

"He'll come after ye," he said instead.

"Aye," she said. "He will." She didn't sound afraid of that. "And when he does, I intend tae be the one who decides what happens next. Not him. Not ye." She glanced at him sideways, the grey eyes direct and without apology. "Nae anyone but me."

He held her gaze.

"Noted," he said.

She looked back at the water.

He looked at her and thought about a woman who had climbed out of every window she’d found, not out of recklessness but out of the determination of someone who understood that if she didn't keep moving under her own authority, the world would happily move her under someone else's. He thought that whatever Fearchar had feared about this marriage, he had perhaps been fearing the wrong thing.

The wind came in off the sea and moved her hair across her face, she pushed it back without looking away from the water, and Marcas looked at the horizon and said nothing, and the silence between them was the warmest thing about the night.

She turned to look at him, and he thought, not for the first time this week, that honesty seemed to be the only currency that ever actually bought him anything with her.

"What of ye?" she said, after a moment. "Ye ken the whole of my grievances now. I know naething of yers."

It was his turn to look out at the water now, rather than at her, because this was easier said to the sea than to her face.

"My parents' marriage was a contract too," he said. "Nae so different from this one. It was a border alliance, sealed before either of them had a say. My father loved her, I think, in his own fashion. My mother never loved him at all. She told me so herself, when I was old enough tae understand what she was telling me. She’d spent thirty years in a marriage she'd never chosen, doing her duty, and calling it a life because there was naething tae be gained by calling it anything else." He turned the ring on his smallest finger, an old habit he wasn't aware of doing until he noticed her watching his hands. "I watched that, growing up. Two people sharing a table and a bed and naething else at all, for thirty years, because a piece of paper said they must. I told myself, verra young, that I'd nae do that tae a woman if it were ever in my power tae choose otherwise."

"And is it?" she said, quiet. "In yer power tae choose otherwise."

"The Accord's nae mine tae undo," he said. "But what happens inside it, whether it's thirty years of a shared table and naething else, or something a man might actually call a life, that part, I think, is still ours tae decide. Both of ours. I've nae interest in building what my parents built."

She was quiet a long while after that, looking out at the dark water, and he let the silence sit, because he'd learned already that she needed room to turn things over before she'd hand back an answer.