Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 19: Mairead
She told him on a morning in February.
Not dramatically — she had known for three weeks, had been sitting with the knowledge in the careful way she approached things she needed to be certain about before saying aloud. She had spoken to Morag, who had confirmed what she already understood with the matter-of-fact brevity of a woman who had delivered many children and was not given to unnecessary ceremony. She had sat with it and she had decided how she felt about it, which required slightly longer than she had expected because the feeling was large and layered and she wanted to be honest about all of it before she spoke.
She felt: joy, which was clean and simple and underneath everything else.
She felt: afraid, which she was prepared for but was still real.
She felt: certain, which surprised her — the particular quality of certainty that doesn’t come from thinking about something but from knowing it, the bone-level kind.
She told him in the stable, because the stable was where they talked about things that mattered. She had noticed this about them, the way they returned to it — the place she’d been going to visit Rosalind on the night everything changed, the place she’d kissed him in August, the place they gravitated to when something needed saying in air that wasn’t inside.
He was tending his horse. He turned when he heard her.
“Isolde,” he said, reading her face.
“I’m going to have a baby,” she said.
He went very still.
She watched him work through it — the several layers of it, because she could see them moving through his face, and his face was a thing she had been studying for eleven months and could read well enough now to know: first the joy, immediate and undisguised, before any other feeling had time to arrive. Then, half a breath behind it, the shadow of the other thing. The fear.
She crossed to him.
“I’m strong,” she said. “I want you to hear me say that before anything else.”
“Ye dinnae know—”
“I’m strong,” she said again. “I’ve been healthy all winter. Morag says everything is as it should be. I’m not Elspeth.” She said it with the particular careful directness she reserved for things that needed to be said clearly even when they were hard. “What happened to her was a tragedy that no one should have had to survive. But I am me. I am here, in this body, in this year, and I am telling you I am strong.”
He looked at her for a long moment. The joy and the fear doing their work side by side, the complicated arithmetic of a man who has loved and lost and is being asked to love and risk again.
Then he put his arms around her and pulled her in, and she felt the breath leave him — not the usual exhale but the particular release of something held too long, the kind that happens when a person is finally allowed to put down a weight they’ve been pretending not to carry.
“I’ll no’ lose ye,” he said. Into her hair. “I’ll no’.”
“You won’t.” She held him as tightly as she could. “You are not going to lose me. I refuse to be lost.”
He almost laughed at that. “Ye’d refuse death on principle?”
“If it was impolite enough to arrive uninvited, yes.” She felt his arms tighten further. “Callum. We’re going to have a baby. I want you to be overjoyed.”
“I am overjoyed,” he said, rough.
“Then let the joy be bigger than the fear.”
“That’s no’ how fear works.”
“I know.” She pulled back enough to look at him. “But you can let both be there. You don’t have to choose. Just — let me see the joy. I want to see it.”
He looked at her face. Something shifted.
“A baby,” he said.
“Yes.”
“In autumn?”
“Morag thinks September.”
He was quiet for a moment, and in that moment she saw it arrive fully — the joy, undefended, the real version of his face when nothing was being managed. It was not small.
“Aye,” he said. “We’re going to have a baby.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m—” he stopped. His voice was different. “I’m going to be very irritating about this. Protective. Annoying.”
“I’m counting on it.”
He kissed her — carefully, with the particular tenderness he used now when he was most certain of her — and she kissed him back with the certainty she had been cultivating for months and which was, this morning, very large.
“I want to name her Mairead,” he said. “If it’s a daughter. My grandmother’s name.”
She thought about it. Said it aloud: “Mairead.”
“Aye.”
“And if it’s a boy?”
He looked at her. She held his eyes.
“Seumas,” she said.
He was quiet.
“If you want,” she said. “If you’d like to give the name to someone who can carry it.”
He looked at her for a very long time, with an expression that required all of his face and was still not quite sufficient for what it was trying to contain.
“Aye,” he said, finally. “Aye. Seumas.”
She tucked herself back against him in the stable in the February cold, and Rosalind pushed her nose over the stall door and Callum scratched the mare’s ears absently, and Isolde thought about the baby growing in the warm dark of her body and thought: *she is going to be extraordinary.*
She thought: *they are going to be a family.*
She thought it with the full weight of everything it meant, and it was not small, and it was not frightening.
It was everything.
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