“What if something happens to you?” Yvaine murmured. “Who is next in line for succession? Who am I to go to if something befalls you because you stubbornly refuse to have a guard?”
“Sidra,” Torin said. “If something happens to me, speak with her. The lairdship passes to her first, and then to Maisie.”
“Not your father?”
Torin thought of Graeme. His father lived on the croft next to theirs, but he had become a recluse, ever since his wife had abandoned them.
“My father declined his right to rule long ago,” he replied.
“And Sidra knows she’s next in line?”
Torin rubbed his brow. No, Sidra didn’t know. They hadn’t talked about this yet, and it was just one more thing on his list of heavy topics to broach with her.
Yvaine sighed. “Go home, Torin. Go home to Sidra and speak to her. The two of you are carrying enough as it is, but I think living in the castle will make things easier and safer for you both.”
“Easier?” Torin scoffed. “Do you understand that my wife is fond of her croft and her kail yard? That she grew up in the vale and needs her space?”
“As many of us understand and also feel,” Yvaine said gently. “But sometimes we have to make do with the hand fate deals us.”
Torin was too tired to argue. He merely nodded to the captain before she left to return to the barracks for the night.
He took up his quill and marked the Ranalds’ croft with an X on the map. Another pocket of blight. Another person sick.
The east was changing, molting into something Torin didn’t recognize.
It felt like the beginning of the end.
He poured himself another glass of whiskey, which gleamed in the slant of moonlight. Soon he poured another, and then another. Before long, he felt nothing at all. He would not remember falling asleep with his face pressed to the map.
The full moon arrived on a cool, cloudy night in the west. Adaira opened her bedroom windows, the air sweet with petrichor as she read Jack’s letter by the hearth fire.
I did imagine your reaction between the lines. You can imagine mine, now.
She smiled. He knew then. He finally knew their correspondence was being read, and she couldn’t express how relieved and thrilled that made her. She bent over the parchment to reread his every word, wondering if he had hidden a message for her to decode, when a rap sounded on her door.
Adaira quickly folded the letter and tucked it into Joan Tamerlaine’s half-bound journal. She rose to answer the knock, but she knew who had come to see her. She had been waiting for this visit, ever since the hunt had ended.
Innes stood in the corridor, dressed in her customary tunic, leather armor, and enchanted blue plaid. A sword was sheathed at her side, as if she had just come from the wilds, but her silver hair was bound in damp braids and her skin scrubbed clean of dirt and sweat, confirming that she had visited the cistern. A golden circlet gracing her brow winked in the torchlight.
“How was the hunt?” Adaira asked.
“It was fine,” Innes replied tersely. “David told me he wounded your arm.”
“It’s nothing—”
“Let me see it.”
Adaira stifled a sigh and drew up her sleeve. Innes gently unwound the bandage to survey the sutures, which had started to itch as they healed. She pressed her thumb to them, and Adaira was uncertain what she was doing until the laird nodded and rebandaged the wound.
“No fever, but you’ll tell me if it begins to fester?”
Adaira nodded, noticing the crosshatching of scars on Innes’s hands and fingers, on her forearms. Some of them were nearly hidden in her interlocking blue tattoos, but others seemed to be framed by the woad, as if to commemorate them.
Adaira wondered if there were scars hiding beneath her raiment. Scars that could testify to near-mortal wounds she had received. Deep cuts and punctures that had endured for moon phases and taken patience and wrung prayers to see heal.
“Did that happen to you once?” Adaira asked. “Did you have a wound that almost killed you?”
“What makes you think so?” Innes countered, but her voice was wry.
“David told me how the two of you met,” Adaira began quietly. “About that one night you slept in his bed so he could watch over you, because he was worried you might stop breathing and he couldn’t bear the thought of it.”
Creases gathered at the corners of Innes’s eyes. The beginnings of a smile. Adaira had never seen such an expression on the laird’s stoic face, and she waited to see it transform her.