Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 17: Burns
The letter arrived in October.
She recognized the seal before she broke it — the Whitmore crest, the same crest she had been seeing since the age of nineteen when the negotiations had begun, pressed into dark wax with the authority of a man who was accustomed to his correspondence being opened with deference. She sat with it for a long moment at the table in the chamber, with the autumn light coming grey through the window and the fire built up against the chill and the carved horse still on the windowsill where she’d put it in August.
She opened it.
*My dear Isolde,* Edward had written, in the measured hand of a man who had a secretary draft his correspondence and then added personal touches. *I trust this letter finds you — well, under the circumstances. I have been in communication with your father, who is naturally most distressed. I have arranged for ransom to be paid to the MacKinnon clan for your safe return. The matter has been discussed with the appropriate parties and passage has been arranged. You are free.*
She read it twice.
*You are free.*
She turned it over, as if the back of the paper might contain additional information that would change the meaning of the front. It did not.
*You are free.* Free to return to Whitmore estate, to the preparations for a wedding she had been unable to sleep before, to the life that had been assembled for her in the careful institutional way of English nobility — the right match, the right arrangement, the sensible and appropriate management of a woman’s future by the men responsible for managing it.
She set the letter on the table.
She thought about the morning she had stood in the south ridge looking south and had turned Rosalind around.
She thought about five months. About Gaelic conjugations and herb bundles and old Tam’s face the first time he had greeted her in the yard without visible resentment. About Morag. About a carved horse on a windowsill. About a man who had slept on the floor of his own chamber for five months, who had told her the name of his dead son, who had said *I love you* with the flat certainty of someone for whom saying true things out loud was an act of considerable courage.
She picked up the letter.
She held it for a moment.
She set it in the fire.
He came in an hour later and she was at the window, watching the valley, which was what she did when she was processing something she had already decided about.
He stopped when he saw her face. He read her the way she read him — completely, accurately, with none of the social conventions that permitted pretending you hadn’t noticed. “What happened?”
“Letter from Edward.” She turned. “I burned it.”
He went still. The grey eyes doing the working thing, processing, calculating. “What did it say?”
“That he’d arranged ransom. That I’m free to return.” She said it evenly, the way she said things she had already made peace with. “He thinks I’m a prisoner.”
“Ye were,” he said.
“I was.” She met his eyes. “Do ye want to go?” He asked it with the question she had heard in his voice a handful of times — the specific vulnerability of a man who has risked something and is waiting to find out whether he has survived the risk. “Do ye want to go?” he said, and his voice was different from his usual voice, rougher, held together with the effort it cost him.
She crossed the room. She stood in front of him, and she put her hands on either side of his jaw — the scar warm under her left palm, a thing she had long since stopped noticing as anything other than his — and she made him look at her.
“No,” she said. “I want to stay. With you. Forever.”
He looked at her.
“Ye’re sure,” he said.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything.” She held his face. “I stayed. I chose to stay — every morning, every morning on the south ridge, every morning I could have taken Rosalind and gone, and I came back. Because this is home. You are home.”
He put his arms around her and she put hers around him and they stood in the chamber with the fire going and the October cold outside and the window that looked over the valley and the hills, and she breathed in the smell of him — woodsmoke and leather and that clean outdoor thing she had never found a name for — and thought: *I have burned the letter.*
She thought: *that is the last of it.*
Not entirely, she knew. There would be consequences to this choice — consequences she couldn’t fully see yet, that would come in their own time, that would require things from both of them she hadn’t anticipated. Edward was not a man who accepted loss gracefully. Her father would need to know she was staying of her own will. There were practical realities that the burning of a letter did not make disappear.
But she had burned it. And she had meant every word she’d said.
“Isolde,” he said, into her hair.
“Aye,” she said. His word. Her word now, the same word.
“I love ye.”
“I know.” She pressed closer. “I know you do.”
She looked at the window where the carved horse still sat in the afternoon light, grey and perfectly observed, the set of Rosalind’s ears exactly right.
She thought about horses and stables and wrong places and the particular way the world sometimes gets you to the right place through a door you would never have thought to open on your own.
She thought: *I would choose this a thousand times.*
She thought: *I already have.*
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