Page 36 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

"I didnae imagine ye would be." The wryness was back in her voice, steadier now. "Ye’ve nae been gentle at anything I've seen ye do yet."

"I can be," he said, before he'd weighed whether it was wise to say, and watched it land somewhere behind her eyes that told him she was thinking of the same firelit room he was.

She said nothing further to that, only picked her skirts up out of the yard's dust and turned back toward the keep, and he watched her go, and did not immediately follow, needing a moment alone with the unfamiliar quiet that had settled over the morning's anger and left heat in its place.

While putting away the last of the gowns Elspeth had brought her the first day Neilina arrived, she found a small embroidered cloth, soft with age, tucked between two folds of wool as though it had been placed there and forgotten, or placed there on purpose and never retrieved.

She almost set it aside without looking properly, taking it for a scrap of packing linen, until her fingers caught the stitching along its edge and she paused.

It was fine work. Old work, the thread gone soft and slightly faded, a pattern of thistle and rowan worked around the border of what she now saw was a small kerchief, and in the corner, worked in careful, deliberate stitches, a single set of initials.

I.M.

She sat very still on the edge of the bed, the cloth held loose in her hands, and felt something in her chest tighten, at the intimacy of what she’d found.

Could it be his mother?

She turned it over once, twice, looking for some further clue, maybe a date, another mark. She found nothing but the initials and the soft, worn evidence of something frequently handled, carried or kept near for reasons that had nothing to do with its usefulness as a kerchief at all.

This wasnae meant tae be in my things.

She carried it down through the keep still folded small in her palm, and found Elspeth in the still-room, sorting dried herbs into jars with the brisk efficiency of a woman who'd done the task ten thousand times and no longer needed to think about it.

"Elspeth."

"My lady." Elspeth looked up, wiped her hands on her apron. "Is something amiss with the gowns?"

"Nae. I found this among them." Neilina held out the small square of cloth, and watched, with some surprise, the change that came over Elspeth's face the moment her eyes landed on it. She went very still. The same stillness Neilina had learned to recognize in her own reflection whenever she was working hard not to show what she felt.

"Where did ye find that," Elspeth said, and her voice had gone tight in a way it hadn't been a moment before.

"Folded intae the wool gowns. It has initials worked intae the corner—I.M. I thought it might have been left there by mistake."

"Aye." Elspeth's hand had come up, not quite reaching yet, hovering somewhere between her apron and the cloth in Neilina's palm. "It was. A mistake, I mean. It shouldnae have been packed with anything given tae ye."

"It belonged tae his mother?"

"Aye." Elspeth's mouth pressed thin. "The laird's mother, Isobel MacKinnon. I'll…I can take it, my lady, and see it put back where it belongs. Ye needn't trouble yerself further with it."

She reached, fingers extending toward the cloth. There was something in the quickness of it that suggested she was eager to have the thing out of Neilina's hand and out of the conversation, andNeilina close her fingers gently around it instead of releasing it.

"Ye needn't take it from me," Neilina said, careful, watching Elspeth's face for whatever was sitting behind the discomfort there. "I can see this troubles ye tae speak of. I willnae press ye. But this was folded in with the clothes he provided for me, and I think—" she paused, turning the thought over as she spoke it, finding it true only as she said it aloud, "I think I'd rather return it tae him directly, than have it disappear back intae a drawer somewhere without his ever kenning it was found."

Elspeth studied her a long moment, something working behind her careful eyes, and whatever she saw in Neilina's face seemed, slowly, to ease the tightness in her own.

"He disnae speak of her," Elspeth said finally, quiet, glancing once toward the still-room door as though the walls themselves might carry word of it. "Nae tae anyone, in all the years I've served this house. I'll say naething further than that, my lady, because it isnae mine tae say. But if ye mean tae bring that tae him yerself, I'd think carefully on how ye do it. Some doors want opening slow."

"I'll be careful with it," Neilina said, and meant it, folding the small cloth once more and closing it safe in her own palm. "Thank ye, Elspeth."

Elspeth nodded, some of the old warmth returning to her face, though her eyes lingered a moment longer on Neilina's closed hand before she turned back to her jars.

Neilina left the still-room with the kerchief held carefully against her palm. As she walked back toward her chamber, she thought of Marcas turning the ring on his smallest finger on the battlements, an old habit he hadn't seemed aware of, and of the flat, controlled way he'd spoken of his mother's unhappiness that nightshe told me so herself, that she'd spent thirty years in a marriage she'd never chosenand understood, that whatever this small piece of cloth meant to him, it was not a thing to hand over lightly, or in passing, or without giving him the room to decide what he wanted her to see.

I'll give it tae him myself, she thought. And I'll let him tell me the whole of it, or naething of it at all.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

His study door stood ajar when she reached it, a thin blade of firelight cutting across the corridor stone, and she stood there a moment with the folded gown over one arm and the small, embroidered kerchief tucked safely in her palm, gathering the nerve Elspeth's warning had made necessary.