Two years later
Two years had done something entirely remarkable to the light.
Or perhaps, she considered as she watched the soft descent of the day, it was only that she noticed its behavior differently now. The specific way the late afternoon sun broke across the vibrant green meadow below the eastern ridge, falling low and long at this time of year, turning the high grass a color that didn’t possess a precise name in either the English or the Gaelic tongue.
It was an ethereal hue resting somewhere between bright gold, deep clover, and the particular, rich amber of late afternoon in a place that had finally, painstakingly learned how to be peaceful. She noticed the light now the way she never had during her structured years at Croft Estate.
Small abundances. A ledger of quiet mercies.
The baby had found a stone.
He was sitting perfectly upright in the thick grass. He was gripping this particular granite stone with both of his small, chubby hands, examining its rough surface. He turned it over meticulously. Looked at the dark underside. Turned it back to the sun. Appeared to reach a profound intellectual conclusion.
Then, with absolute efficiency, he put it directly into his mouth.
“Alasdair,” Rosalind said, her voice laced with an affectionate sigh.
The boy looked up at her, his dark eyes wide. He slowly took the stone out of his mouth, considered it in the palm of his hand, and then promptly shoved it right back in.
Bethany leaned over from the wool blanket beside him and removed the wet pebble from his mouth.
“That is distinctly not food,” Bethany told him, her voice maintaining the perfectly level, conversational tone she utilized for everything regarding the baby, as though they were two equals engaged in a highly reasonable parliamentary discussion. “We have talked about this choice several times this week, Alasdair.”
Alasdair looked at her. He looked intently at the stone now resting safely in her hand. Then, he looked straight back up at her face
“He’s incredibly sure of himself,” Lachlan noted from the grass.
“He gets that entirely from you,” Rosalind replied, looking down at her husband.
“He gets that from his maither,” Lachlan said, his voice a low rumble completely stripped of heat. “I’m never that certain about anything in this life.”
She looked at him sidelong, a smile touching her lips.
He was lying flat on his back in the deep clover with his large arm folded behind his head and his dark eyes half-closed against the low glare of the sun, entirely at rest in the way he had slowly, painfully learned to be at rest over the past two seasons.
It was a transformation that had taken longer than anything else in the valley. Longer than the structural rebuilding of the cracked granary, longer than the grueling administrative work of hunting down and dismantling what remained of Graham’s border network, longer than any of the external, military tasks. The internal things always took the longest. The rebuilding of a man’s spirit was slow mathematics.
“You’re entirely certain about most things, Lachlan Buchanan,” she said.
“I am decisive,” he corrected, opening one dark eye to look at her. “That’s a different variable entirely.”
She considered the distinction, smoothing her skirts over her knees. “Is it?”
“Aye. Decisive is when ye make a choice quickly because a situation requires movement. Certain is when ye ken fer a fact that ye’re right.” He closed his eye again, a trace of a smile tugging his jaw. “I’m often wrong, Rosalind. I just commit meself fully tae the path I’ve chosen.”
She handed him a thick piece of fresh bread from the cloth laid beside her. He took it into his large hand without even bothering to sit up from the grass.
The meadow was exceptionally quiet around them. A pair of high birds crossed the blue sky above the eastern ridge, their wings catching the amber light. Somewhere further below them, toward the dark tree line of the valley, the burn was running over the rocks. She could hear the steady murmur of the water if she stopped paying attention to everything else, the low, constant rhythm of the wild land moving over its stones.
Alasdair had accepted the tragic loss of his stone with surprising equanimity, immediately moving on to the far more accessible project of pulling at the grass. He extracted a messy handful of roots, examined the dirt clod with fascination, and then held the green offering out toward Bethany.
“Thank you,” Bethany said with complete seriousness, accepting the handful of dirt and grass into her palm.
He appeared thoroughly satisfied with the transaction and immediately began looking for more grass to conquer.
Rosalind watched the child’s profile. There was a strange thing that occurred sometimes—not often, but sometimes in the quiet spaces of the day—when she looked at him and the entire world seemed to tilt slightly on its axis with the simple, breathtaking improbability of his existence.
The mere fact of him. That he existed at all, specifically. This particular, tiny human being possessing Lachlan’s stubborn jawline, her own father’s expressive eyes, and a fierce personality that appeared to be entirely his own, emerging daily in new, small ways that neither of them could have ever predicted.
She remembered thinking, months before he was born, that she would be profoundly frightened by motherhood. She had worried that the sheer scope of caring about something so remarkably small and so utterly undefended would feel exactly like the carriage ambush. Like raw exposure, like a terrifying vulnerability with no available castle protection. She had braced her soul for that familiar anxiety.
But it hadn’t felt like that at all.
It had felt, instead, like standing on solid bedrock. Like ground that went all the way down to the center of the earth.
“He’s going to walk soon,” Bethany noted quietly.
She was watching Alasdair pull at the roots. “He’s been looking at the ground differently these past three days.”
“How does a baby look at the ground differently?” Rosalind asked, amused.
“Like it’s a structural problem he’s currently working out in his head.” Bethany glanced up at her, her eyes bright. “He also gets that look entirely from Lachlan.”
Lachlan, who had appeared to be nearly asleep beneath the sun, murmured, “I heard that, Bethany,” without moving a single muscle.
Bethany simply smiled up at the clear sky, unbothered.
The picnic food was simple, rustic fare. Fresh, crusty bread, soft white cheese, dried winter fruit, and something the castle kitchens had sent up wrapped carefully in linen cloth that turned out to be small, sweet oat cakes baked with wild honey.
Lachlan had already consumed most of them before anyone else had even a single chance at the basket, claiming absolutely no knowledge of the theft when asked directly about the empty cloth.
Alasdair was given a small, broken piece of the oat cake, which he received into his hands. He managed the consumption with impressive focus, utilizing both hands and smearing a great deal of the honey directly onto his cheeks and chin.
Rosalind patiently cleaned his face with the corner of a damp cloth.
Later, when Alasdair had entirely exhausted his investigation of the immediate patch of meadow grass and had been shifted gently into Bethany’s lap, he became engaged in the grueling process of falling asleep. Rosalind lay back down on the wool blanket, her shoulder resting securely against Lachlan’s side.
The sky above them was that brilliant, particular blue that only appeared in the late afternoon at this time of the autumn season. Deep, clear, and infinitely far away. A lonely white cloud moved lazily across the upper edge of the eastern ridge, appearing to change its mind about its direction, and drifted slowly back toward the peaks.
“Kenina wrote to me,” Rosalind said softly, her eyes on the cloud.
“I ken. Tristan brought the runner’s letter up tae the keep this morning.”
“She and Peadar are coming north fer Michaelmas.”
“Aye,” Lachlan murmured, his hand resting in the grass. “Alpin and Mhairi are traveling with them too, and so are Hamish and Isobel, according tae Tristan.”
“All of them taegether again,” Rosalind said, a wave of warmth washing over her. “The Great Hall will be incredibly loud.”
She could feel the physical shift of his smile beside her without even having to turn her head to see it. She had learned that about him too. The small physical facts of his presence, the slight, comfortable shift in the air beside her whenever something landed correctly in his heart.
The distant burn moved steadily below them in the valley. The birds had gone wherever birds retreated to in the early Scottish evening. The high meadow grass bent in a sudden, cool breath of wind and then gracefully straightened itself against the light.
“My father would have loved this place,” she said quietly.
Lachlan went quiet for a long moment, the silence respectful. “The meadow?”
“All of it. The hills, the peace.” She looked up at the vast blue expanse. “He would have liked you, Lachlan. He had a particular way of knowing immediately which people were truly worth knowing in this world.”
She paused, a soft laugh escaping her. “He would have made you talk significantly more than you wanted to, and he would have been entirely unapologetic about the intrusion.”
“Most people make me talk more than I want tae,” Lachlan noted dryly.
“He would have been exceptionally good at it.”
She felt Lachlan’s large, rough hand find her fingers in the grass between them. It wasn’t a grand gesture, just a placement, a solid fact of her life, his long fingers aligning perfectly alongside hers.
“I ken,” he said simply.
And in those two short words she heard, as she had thoroughly learned to hear over their years together, the full and specific understanding of exactly what she meant. It was a language that contained not only the words she spoke, but the profound shape beneath them. The grief of her past, the absolute fact that the loss was bearable now, and the beautiful, undeniable truth that it was bearable here, in his arms.
A small, soft sound came from Bethany’s direction. Rosalind lifted her head slightly from the blanket to look.
Alasdair had finally lost his long battle with sleep. He was nestled securely in Bethany’s arms, his round cheek pressed flat against her grey wool sleeve, both of his small hands curled loosely into fists against his chest. His face was entirely smooth, all the solemn investigation and stubborn defiance of the afternoon gone somewhere deep behind his closed eyes.
Bethany met her eyes across the child’s head.
Rosalind looked back at her loyal friend for a long, silent moment. Two years ago, during the terror of the siege, she had held a single, fraying thread of Bethany in the dark of Graham’s tower. She thought sometimes about how thin that thread had been. She thought sometimes about how miraculously it had held against the weight of the world.
Bethany gave her a small, simple nod through the amber light.
I know, Rosalind.
Rosalind laid her head back down against the soft grass, her fingers laced tightly with Lachlan’s.
The ancient meadow held them securely. All four of them, bathed in the long, beautiful amber light of the setting sun, the stone castle visible on the ridge above them and the wild burn moving endlessly below. The sky above was enormous, calm, and going slowly, slowly golden at its edges as the afternoon completed its work and the evening began its patient, unhurried arrival.
She closed her eyes against the sun.
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