She was asking a footman about marjoram, of all things, her voice carrying clean and clipped across the great hall’s cool stone in an accent that belonged to neither Highland nor Lowland Scotland and had no business, by any ordinary account, existing in this castle at all.
“Surely someone here grows marjoram,” she was saying, brisk, faintly exasperated, the particular tone of a person accustomed to competent answers and mildly affronted by their absence.
“I’ve asked three separate people and gotten three separate directions to three separate gardens, none of which apparently contain marjoram.”
Walter stopped mid-stride behind the footman leading him toward the courtyard door, and something in his chest gave the same soft, formless hiss he’d felt once before across a shop counter in early July static, unresolved, a signal his own attention threw up without his asking it to, arriving now with a force that landed considerably harder than the first time it had happened.
Tall.
Dark curls escaping whatever pins had tried to hold them.
A carriage that carried itself through this room the way a person carries themselves through a space they haven’t fully learned the rules of yet competent, unbothered by the not-knowing, the specific bearing of someone who’d clearly decided that confusion was no reason to stop moving forward.
I know, Margaret said, and there was nothing brisk in it this time, nothing instructional just two words, offered quiet and entirely without comfort dressed up as more than it was, which made it, somehow, the truest thing she’d said to him since a pre-dawn hostel a lifetime ago.
The order holds, Walter.
I wish I could tell you it cost nothing to ask it of you.
I cannot.
She glanced up as he crossed the hall’s far edge not seeking him out, simply the ordinary, unthinking scan of a person registering another body moving through a shared space and her eyes found his for the length of a single held breath.
Nothing in her face suggested recognition beyond the most basic kind: a stranger, noted, filed, dismissed.
Nothing in his own face, he made entirely certain, suggested anything at all beyond the courteous acknowledgment one traveler owes another passing through the same hall.
He inclined his head, brief, unremarkable the exact gesture he’d have offered any gentlewoman he’d never been introduced to and had no cause to approach and she returned it with the same economical courtesy before her attention moved on, back toward the footman, back toward her marjoram, back toward whatever ordinary, urgent, entirely mundane errand had brought her into this hall on an afternoon that meant nothing at all to her and everything, quietly and permanently, to him.
The loneliness of it landed harder than he’d braced for not the ordinary loneliness of missing something familiar, but a sharper, more specific ache: the single other person in this century who might have understood every joke he no longer let himself make, standing twenty feet away, and forever, by his own hand and Margaret’s order both, precisely that far and no closer.
He kept walking.
The page boy was waiting exactly where he’d been told to expect him, five minutes’ patience already visibly fraying into six, and Walter let the boy’s small, put-upon sigh pull him the rest of the way across the hall and out into the courtyard’s cooler afternoon air.
The pony stood saddled and ready, Castle-tea and signed contract both riding safe in his coat, and Walter mounted without looking back toward the hall’s open doors a discipline that cost him more in that one small motion than the whole ride north had cost him in blisters and caution combined.
You did well, Margaret said, once the castle’s outer gate had swallowed the last of the courtyard behind him.
I know that is a poor word for what it actually took.
It is the only one I have that doesn’t sound like flattery, and you’ve never once wanted flattery from me.
“I haven’t.”
He rode the first mile without letting himself think much past the road directly in front of him, the discipline he had learned three months and a lifetime ago: how to carry a weight without performing it for an audience that wasn’t there to see it anyway.
The ache sat where aches sat real, present, tended to later rather than now and somewhere past the second mile, with Leoch’s grey towers finally lost behind the first low rise, his mind turned, deliberately, toward the one other unresolved weight currently sitting in his chest: a three-day window that had likely closed sometime during his absence, and a woman in a shuttered parlor who owed him, by his own accounting if not by any promise she’d actually made, an answer.
Friday, he’d told her.
The word settled into the pony’s steady rhythm like a destination finally worth naming, and Walter rode south toward it with the whole of Castle Leoch, and the woman inside it he was never permitted to know, folded away behind him for whatever version of later his discipline could actually afford to give it.
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