Page 97 of A Highland Healer Captured
“Aye,” Zander said, voice low and worn.
Skylar slid her hand into his again. He looked down at their joined fingers as if they were a thing made by two craftsmen who’d never met and somehow cut their dovetails to the same measure. His sigh hitched in the middle and came out as the beginning of a laugh.
“Stay,” she said softly, the smallest smile tugging at her mouth. “I mean me. I’m stayin’.”
“Aye,” he said, voice breaking into warmth for the first time since the gate. “Aye, lass.” He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles in front of everyone. The hall pretended not to see, which is another way of giving a blessing.
They saw Hamish watching, eyes like a man tracking weather he cannot change but might yet live through. They saw Katie tilt her head and wipe a tear with the heel of her palm. They saw Grayson grin, the kind that bruises healers’ hearts because it is so pure.
“Right,” Zander said a little louder, squeezing Skylar’s fingers once before letting go. “We’ve a Kirn supper to finish, a head on a spike to keep the crows honest, and a glen to show that men who think themselves storms are only weather. To work.”
And the keep, battered and breathing, went on.
Kirn supper swelled like a tide that refused to be turned back by blood. The long boards went up again. Barrels thumped open. Trenchers steamed with meat and neeps. Someone found the piper and someone else found their feet. Children slept under benches, the safest tents in the world. Men who had spent the day as wolves remembered how to be men again.
Zander sat the head of the table because he could not be pried from it without a lever. He ate enough to keep strength, drank enough to be sociable and not enough to be foolish, and watched.
He watched his men grin with cracked lips and swollen knuckles. He watched Hamish tell three stories in a row, each of them true and none of them entirely accurate. He watched Skylar move like a light between needs—Katie’s cup, Grayson’s chair, a shy kiss to the top of the boy’s head that lit the entire end of the hall.
When the last bowl was scraped, when the last toast sank into the rushes, Zander rose and stood. The room quieted the way it does when a man who has bled for it takes breath to speak.
“To Kirn,” he said. “To the folk who brought us to it. To the folk who’ll see us past it.”
They answered with a rumble that shook the boards. Hamish thumped the table. Grayson, propped sideways in his chair, slept through it with his cheek on one fist and a crust in the other.
Mason drifted close. Zander angled his shoulder toward him. “I’ll walk,” he murmured. Mason’s eyes saidI’ll follow without following, and the man disappeared like good muscle disappears—felt, not seen.
Zander left by the side door. The yard was a dark bowl of embers. The spike stood like a warning and a lesson; Zander didn’t spare it a glance. He crossed to the stair, climbed, and went to a door he had sworn to keep shut until he had earned the right to knock on it.
He knocked.
“Enter,” Skylar called, voice steady and—God help him—warm.
Her chamber had learned her shape already: the small table neat, the cloak hung with care, the dirk in easy reach. She stood at the window-slit, watching the last of the bonfires write orange onto the undersides of the clouds. She turned when the door shut.
For a moment he forgot the words he’d prepared. She wore no crown tonight, no shawl, no armor but the braid coiled at thenape of her neck and the steadiness in her eyes. The mark at her cheekbone, left by the intruder’s skull, had turned to a faint smear of plum. He wanted to kiss it until it forgot it had hurt.
“Ye look like a man who’s carried a keep on his back and set it down without droppin’ it,” she said lightly, and his throat tried to learn how to laugh and failed halfway.
“I asked yer faither for yer hand at dinner,” he said, because he had never been a man for stepping around a thing he meant to do. “And he told me that it would be yer choice.”
Her lips parted, the smallest breath catching. “He… left it to me?”
“Aye.” Zander’s mouth tilted. “He said words I cannae repeat about yer maither. Then he said ye’ve always kenned yer own mind and he’d be damned if he’d tie a rope to it now ye’ve found work it likes.”
Skylar let out a shaky laugh that had the shape of tears at the edges, “Aye.”
He blinked. “Aye?”
“Aye,” she said again, stronger. “I’ll have ye.” A beat, wickedness flickering through the earnest. “If ye still want a woman who speaks of boils at table.”
“I’m mad for her,” he said, because some truths were better plain.
She came to him, slow for three steps, then quick the rest of the way, as if she’d remembered she’d already made the decision. He gathered her, careful of his shoulder, which she ignored by fitting herself under his arm like she’d been shaped there.
He kissed her, and the kiss had nothing of battle in it. It was warm and certain and built out of a hundred small mercies: the way she’d steadied his son, the way she’d forgiven a broken girl, the way she’d stayed beside a bed and spoke him awake. Her hands slid up his chest, over linen, over bandage, over scars that had never before been touched like something a heart might be grateful for.
“Ye’re sure,” he said against her mouth, not because he doubted her, but because the asking felt holy.
