Page 59 of A Highland Healer Captured
They quit the market after collecting the rest of the items on the supply list, save for a few that she knew she would have to get from the cart vendors along the road to the keep.
Zander guided them down a narrow path back—not the road they used to get to Balmachrie. The track should have made her wary, but there was something about his uncharacteristic calm and collected behavior that made her feel comfortable instead.
“Ye’ve brought me along the long road,” she said.
“Aye, but it’s the right one,” he answered, quiet.
They walked until the market sounds had gentled to a hum. Skylar kept the parcel of linen tucked in the crook of her arm, as if it might jump free and run, and the bags hooked tightly on her shoulder.
Zander’s hand brushed a twig aside before it could snag her braid; he didn’t touch her hair, only moved the world out of its way. Her breath did something foolish and she talked to keep it in order.
“Ye and Cora,” she tried, casual and failing at it. “She minds ye as if ye were a difficult uncle.”
“She minds everyone,” he said, with the faintest smile.
They reached a bend where the burn narrowed into a rill and leapt glossy over a stone lip. He stopped there, as if the sound of water set a boundary he’d meant to find. “Skylar.”
She looked up sharply, braced because his breath had shifted. “Aye?”
“I feel like I should tell ye a few things,” he said. “If ye’ll hear it.”
She nodded. He didn’t move closer; he didn’t reach. He stood a pace away and stared past her shoulder, as if the words would come easier if he spoke them into the distance.
Zander’s mouth pressed tight before he answered. “Because I believe ye should ken it all. Ye’ve kept me boy breathin’. I feel the debt in me bones. If ye’re to stand at our hearth and carry his life in yer hands, ye deserve to ken more of us than just the whispers and guesses. Ye deserve knowledge.”
She hesitated, shifting the parcel. “And if I daenae wish to hear it?”
“Me marriage,” he said, calling her bluff. “It was for convenience,” he said, the word falling clean. “And for peace. Alliances make men behave if love willnae.” His mouth twisted. “I didnae care for love. Never trusted it. But I wanted companionship, a hearth with two chairs, a child at the fire. She wanted… quiet. Safety. Her own door.”
He breathed slowly.
“We were friends,” he said. “Good ones. We laughed. Ate the same bread. Slept under the same roof.” A longer pause. “We did our duty first. I asked that of her plain. I’m nae proud of that sentence, but it’s the right one. I wanted an heir, and I wouldnae pretend I didnae.”
Skylar felt the words go through her, stubborn and square. She didn’t judge him; she weighed him, which was worse. “And after?” she asked, quieter.
“After,” he said, and he turned then, as if he owed her eye to eye for the next piece. “She told me the truth of herself. Said she had nay hunger for men. Had loved a woman before me, and grieved her like a widow. She’d been forced to trade that life for a safe one because the world we’ve is cruel to women who choose their own roads. She said the word ‘sorry’ until I couldnae bear it.”
Skylar’s hand tightened on the parcel. “And what about ye?”
“I told her a safe road was still a good one,” he said. “I told her she’d given me a son. That was gift enough for the rest of a life. We never touched after he was promised in her belly.” He looked away toward the hawthorn, the thorns set with red. “We were… peace.”
Peace. The word sat in Skylar’s ribs and made a new room there, one with a table and two chairs that never tried to be a bed. She didn’t know whether to be grateful or sad or both.
“She died,” she said, because he had not yet said it.
“Aye,” he said, loosing a breath almost gratefully.
Skylar stood in the small hush that follows kindness when it isn’t expected and found that the parcel in her arms had grown heavier. Not with linen. With the weight of a man’s honesty, clumsy as a gift and precious as one.
“Thank ye,” she said simply.
He nodded once. “Ye’ll judge me later — when ye’ve had time to think on it all.”
“Mayhap,” she said, feeling wickedness rise to save her from drowning. “Or I’ll just make a list.”
“Aye,” he said, and the faint smile returned like a swallow finding its ledge. “Do that as well, lass.”
They turned toward the keep by a different curve of path, neither eager to crowd the quiet they’d made. The hawthorn watched them pass, thorns bright as needles, berries like prayer beads, the day drawing its breath for whatever came after.
