Page 63 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

“Anything else?”

Neilina thought. “The men who came and went didnae all wear MacRath colours. Some looked like hired swords. They ate with his men, but they didnae move like men who belonged there.”

They're listening tae me, she thought, something warm and unfamiliar rising under the lingering ache at her temple. Nae as the Chisholm bride tae be managed. As someone who kens something useful.

The men around the table exchanged looks, and this time no one seemed surprised when Baird asked, “How many?”

“Four that I saw. Perhaps more.”

“And ye remember their faces?”

“Some of them.”

Baird gave a slow nod. “Then we may have more tae work with than a scrap of plaid.”

Marcas said little through the rest of it, though she caught him watching her more than once with an expression she couldn't quite name, pride, she thought, though she didn't trust the thought enough to hold onto it too tightly.

It was later, once the council had dispersed and the recovered items had been carried off for whatever further use they'd serve, that he found her alone in the small solar off the great hall, and the look on his face told her immediately that whatever he'd come to say wasn't more talk of MacRath.

"Ye were remarkable today," he said, quietly, crossing to stand near her at the window.

“I remembered a gate that sticks.”

“Ye remembered twenty men, their movements, two entrances, a guard change and enough of MacRath's household colours tae give us our first real proof.”

She glanced at him. “When ye put it like that, I sound considerably more impressive.”

“Ye are considerably more impressive.” He thought for a moment and added "I'd nae have thought tae ask ye what ye remembered of your time at MacRath’s.”"

"I'm nae entirely useless, whatever the Accord seems tae assume of me."

"I never thought ye useless." He was quiet a moment, and she watched something gather behind his eyes that made her breath go unsteady before he'd said a single further word.

"Neilina. I want tae ask ye something, and I'd have ye answer it honestly, whatever the answer costs either of us."

"Ask, then."

"I want tae marry ye." He said it plain, no laird's careful phrasing left in it at all. "Nae because the Accord requires it, and nae because any council or king expects it. I'm asking because I want ye, properly, as my wife, for the whole of whatever life we've got left tae live. Dae ye feel the same."

Her heart had gone very loud in her own ears, the whole room narrowing down to the plain, unguarded weight of the question, and she opened her mouth to answer it honestly, the way he'd asked.

"That's a fine question," she said, "from a man who once told me his own parents' marriage was arranged the same way, and look how well that turned out for the pair of them."

She meant it lightly. She meant it, she thought afterward, as nothing more than the kind of dry, half-teasing remark that had become easy currency between them, a reminder that she hadn't forgotten the shape of what he'd told her on the battlements, nothing more cutting than that.

She watched his whole face close over, the warmth draining out of it so fast and so completely that she felt the loss of it as something physical, a door slamming shut in a room she hadn't realized she'd only just been let properly into.

"Marcas—"

"We should go back tae the hall," he said, already turning from the window, from her. His voice had gone terribly level. “It’ll be near time for dinner.”

"I didnae mean⁠—"

"I ken what ye meant." He said it without heat, which was somehow worse than if he'd shouted. "Come. "

He walked beside her back to the great hall, but the easy warmth that had been between them only moments before was gone. Neilina turned her careless remark over and over in her mind, trying to find the exact shape of what she'd stepped on. Whatever it was, it went far deeper than an unhappy arranged marriage. And for the first time in days, she had no idea how to reach him

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE