Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 10: Married life
Three weeks into her marriage, Isolde decided that the most bewildering thing about Callum MacKinnon was that he was exactly as good as his word.
She had been waiting for it to break. That was the honest truth — she had been watching for the moment when the floor-sleeping and the promised patience and the careful consistent respect would crack open to reveal what she had been taught was always underneath: the expectation. The entitlement. The particular male certainty that said *I am waiting but I am waiting for what I’m owed and when I have waited long enough I will take it.* She had grown up in a world where promises were made as strategy and patience was a tactic, where men were generous right up until the moment they expected generosity in return.
He had not broken.
He slept on the floor. Every night, without comment or complaint, on his bundle of furs by the hearth. He rose before she was fully awake and had the fire rebuilt by the time she opened her eyes, and the first thing she saw every morning was the light he had made for the room, and she had decided not to think about that too carefully.
He was teaching her the land.
This had begun accidentally — she had gone to the stables on the fourth morning of their marriage to check on Rosalind, and he had been there too, seeing to his own horse, and they had ridden out together without planning it, without discussing it, simply because they were both going the same direction and there was no sufficient reason not to. They had not talked much. But he had shown her things: where the burn ran into the loch below the valley, the path through the birch wood where the snow held longest, the hill that gave the best view of the surrounding country on a clear day.
She had been remembering these routes. She told herself it was still for escape purposes. She was beginning to believe this less than she had.
“Ye’re learning fast,” Morag said one morning, watching Isolde sort the herb bundles that were the morning’s task — dried heather, yarrow, the rosemary that survived the Highland climate through sheer stubbornness.
“I learn quickly in general.” Isolde tied a bundle. “It’s one of my more irritating qualities, according to my governess.”
“Aye, I can see where it would irritate someone.” Morag sorted alongside her with the easy competence of decades of practice. “The clan is watching ye.”
“I know.”
“They’re changing their minds. Slowly. The way clans do.”
Isolde tied another bundle and did not look up. “Tam looked at me yesterday without contempt.”
“High praise from Tam.” Morag set aside a bundle of dried yarrow. “He lost three grandsons to the raids. He has reason for his feelings.”
“I know.” She set down the herbs. “I’ve been writing letters.”
Morag was quiet.
“To my father. To my brother James, who is a decent man and who will have been worried.” She had written them in the first week and Morag had told her they couldn’t be sent yet — not because MacKinnon forbade it, but because the routes south were being watched and an intercepted letter could give away exactly where she was, which was information that could bring soldiers. “There are people who will be frightened.”
“Aye. I know.” Morag sat back. “There may be a way soon. Callum’s working on it.”
“He’s told you that?”
“He tells me most things eventually. When he stops pretending he doesn’t need to.” She picked up another bundle. “He’s a proud man. Gets in his own way sometimes.”
Isolde thought about the word *eventually* and the kind of patience it implied. “He’s quite different from what I expected,” she said.
“What did ye expect?”
“I’m not sure. Something cruder. Louder.” She paused, sorting. “He’s very—” she searched for the right word and found something that surprised her with its accuracy. “Careful. He thinks before he acts. He manages himself.”
“He learned to.” Morag looked at her briefly. “He used to be louder. Before Elspeth and the bairn. After — he went quiet in ways he hasn’t come back from.” She paused. “Until recently.”
“He seems quiet to me.”
“Aye, well. Quiet is relative.” Morag smiled, small and private. “He was louder last week. Arguing with Fergus about the southern route. The week before that he debated the priest for an hour about a theological point neither of them were going to move on.”
“That sounds like him.”
“Aye. He’s finding his way back to himself.” Morag looked at her with the particular quality she always deployed when she had more to say than she was saying. “Interesting timing.”
Isolde set down her herbs. “Morag.”
“Lady MacKinnon.”
“I’m not—” she stopped. What was she going to say? *I’m not here to heal his grief.* That was true. *I’m not going to fall in love with my captor.* That was perhaps less certain than it had been. “I’m just surviving,” she said.
“Aye.” Morag nodded with the equanimity of someone who has heard this particular argument before and knows how it usually resolves. “Best thing to do.”
That evening, she went to supper in the great hall and sat at the high table and ate the stew that was put before her and listened to the conversation around her with the focused attention she brought to languages she was learning — which was exactly how she thought of Gaelic, as a language worth learning, not because it was required but because it was the language of the people around her and she had always believed you understood a people better in their own tongue.
MacKinnon was across the table, talking with Fergus about something involving the western ridge and a disputed boundary and a neighbor clan who had apparently been pushing their grazing lines. She was not following all of it — her Gaelic was not yet that good — but she was following enough, and occasionally she found his eyes across the table when he glanced her way.
It was not the hostile glance of a captor checking on a prisoner. She was not sure what it was, exactly, which was its own kind of uncomfortable information.
She ate her supper and went to bed.
He came in later — she was awake, had been lying awake as she often was these nights, though the quality of the wakefulness was different now, less frantic, less reaching for plans that weren’t ready to be made — and she heard him settle into his furs by the fire with the quiet efficiency of long practice.
“MacKinnon,” she said.
“Aye.” His voice was awake. He hadn’t been sleeping.
“The letters. Morag said there might be a route soon.”
“Working on it. I want to get word to your family that ye’re — safe. That ye’re — here.” He paused on what to call it. “With me.”
“With you,” she repeated, and it was a strange phrase. Not prisoner. Not wife, exactly, not yet. *With him.* Occupying the same space. Learning the same landscape. Sleeping in the same room with a fire between them.
“Isolde,” he said.
Her name. The first time he’d used it since the moor. She had thought about that, the way he’d said it on the moor when he was frightened, the slight roughness in it.
“Aye?” She used his word without meaning to, and heard herself use it, and did not take it back.
A pause. “Nothing.” A beat. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
She lay in the dark and thought about *with me* and about how the most bewildering thing was not that he was as good as his word, but that she was starting — very slowly, very carefully, with every available faculty trained on the honest appraisal of the situation — to be glad of it.
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