Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 14: I belong here
She was becoming someone she hadn’t expected to be.
It happened gradually, the way all important things seemed to happen — not in the dramatic single moment of the novels she had loved but in the accumulation of small ordinary ones. She learned to make bread in the Highland way, flat and fast, because the keep’s supply of wheat was variable and the clan couldn’t wait for proper risen loaves when the weather turned. She learned to read weather from the shape of the clouds over the eastern hills, which Callum had showed her one morning with the patience of someone who had grown up with this knowledge and never thought to name it before. She learned the names of every person in the village, which had taken several weeks and a considerable number of embarrassing mistakes, and she learned which clanspeople she needed to approach directly and which ones needed time to come to her.
She learned Gaelic.
This was the one she was most pleased with, in the private way of someone who values being competent at things. She had always had a good ear — her music teacher had said so, and languages had the same quality for her as music, the same pattern-recognition that made the thing audible before it was fully understood. By June she could hold a simple conversation in Gaelic without reaching for English words, and by midsummer she was thinking in it sometimes, which she considered a crossing of some invisible line.
“Ye’re fluent,” MacKinnon said, on a morning in August when she had been managing a supply dispute between two clanswomen entirely in Gaelic and had not noticed until after that she hadn’t switched languages.
“Almost,” she said. “The older idioms still lose me sometimes.”
He was looking at her with the expression she had gotten better at reading — not the professional assessment, not the careful guard, something warmer and less managed. “Almost is generous. That was fluent.”
She was going to deflect the compliment, as she usually deflected his — but she stopped herself, which was a thing she’d been practicing, and said instead: “Thank you.”
He almost looked surprised. She was keeping score.
She told Morag in August, sitting in the garden behind the keep where Morag was harvesting the last of the summer herbs before the cold came back.
She had been rehearsing it for weeks. She was not, as a rule, someone who rehearsed — she thought fast and she talked fast and she had always trusted her own mind to arrive at what needed to be said without extended preparation. But this was different. This was a thing that required care.
“I think I’m falling in love with him,” she said.
Morag didn’t pause in her harvesting. “Aye, I ken.”
“You know.”
“Everyone kens. But him.” She clipped a sprig of rosemary. “He’s decided he doesnae deserve it, which is its own kind of stupidity.”
Isolde sat on the low stone wall that bordered the garden. She had been sitting on this wall since her second week, when it had been cold and the herbs were new shoots and she had come out here to be away from the keep walls and found that the garden gave a view of both the valley and the hills and was the best place in the whole settlement for thinking. She had told no one this. She suspected Morag knew anyway.
“I didn’t want this,” she said.
“No. Ye were abducted and forced into it. That doesnae change what it is.” Morag looked up from her herbs. “People sometimes get to their true life through a crooked door, lass. Doesnae make it less theirs.”
“It would have been a great deal simpler if he’d had the grace to be terrible.”
“Aye, that’s usually how these things work. They’re never terrible enough.”
Isolde looked at the hills. The summer light on them was the warm gold of afternoon, and she thought about the morning they’d ridden up the west ridge together and he’d shown her the boundary stones, and the evening he’d read to her from the priest’s books in the Gaelic and corrected her pronunciation with the patient precision she’d come to recognize as his version of affection, and the afternoon she had come back from the south ridge, that afternoon in April when she had ridden up and looked at England in the distance and then turned Rosalind and come home.
Come home.
“What do I do?” she said.
“Tell him, ye daft lass.” Morag said it with the exasperated love of someone who has been watching two people be idiots about each other for five months. “Go find him and tell him.”
“He’ll—” she paused. “I’m not sure he believes I could mean it. Not given how it started.”
“Which is why ye have to say it.” Morag put her harvesting basket on the wall beside her. “He’s spent six years convincing himself he doesn’t deserve anything good. Ye’re going to have to be very specific about proving him wrong.”
Isolde looked at the herbs in the basket — rosemary, yarrow, the last of the summer heather — and thought about a man who had given her his furs in a cold camp before he knew what to do with her. Who had slept on the floor for five months and had not once, in all of that time, said a word about it. Who had told her about Seumas and let her say the name and sat with her hand over his in the firelight with his whole careful self present for it.
“He’s going to say something annoying,” she said. “He’s going to say he doesn’t deserve it, or that I’m only here because of the kidnapping, or some other variation of—”
“Yes,” Morag said.
“And I’m going to have to argue with him.”
“Aye. Ye’re very good at arguing with him.”
She looked at Morag. Morag looked back with the expression of someone who has been right about things for fifty years and has stopped being surprised by it.
“I belong here,” Isolde said. It came out simpler than she’d expected, which was the quality of the truest statements. “I’ve known it for months. I belong here.”
“Aye,” Morag said. “Ye do.”
Isolde stood up from the wall. She brushed the garden dirt from her skirt. She picked up the basket of herbs on automatic courtesy and then handed it back to Morag because she had somewhere to be.
“He’s in the stables,” Morag said, to her back.
She went to the stables.
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