Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 20: The army
They came on a Thursday morning in May.
She was in the kitchen garden — enormous now, seven months along, in the state she privately thought of as *undeniable,* moving with the adjusted gait of someone whose center of gravity had shifted significantly and who was no longer willing to pretend otherwise. She had been planting the early summer herbs with Morag, a task that required kneeling and had required debate, which Morag had won by the application of a cushion and the argument that lying about it was worse for the baby than doing it.
She heard the horn first.
Not the MacPherson alarm — different rhythm. And then voices from the main gate, which should not have been carrying from the garden, which meant they were very loud. She was up and moving before she fully understood what she was moving toward, Morag at her elbow and already calling instructions to the young woman who had been carrying the herb baskets.
The gate was open. The southern track that led down from the glen to the border country was visible from the keep yard, and on it, in the clear May morning, were men in red.
English soldiers.
At their head, on a grey horse, was a man she recognized from the shape of him even at this distance. The set of the shoulders. The way he sat a horse — correctly, carefully, with the calculated ease of someone performing competence. Edward Whitmore.
She had thought he might come. She had thought about it during the winter, had discussed it with Callum in the evenings when they talked about what was coming and how they would meet it. She had been less frightened of it in the abstract than she perhaps should have been. She was less frightened of it now, in the concrete, than she thought she was going to be.
Callum was already at the gate. He had come out with six of his clansmen, and they were positioned at the top of the track in the way of people who know their terrain and intend to use it. He was not armed for battle — he was a Laird meeting a formal party, and the distinction mattered. But his hand was at his belt and his clansmen were fully armed and the position made it very clear that the track ended here.
She came and stood beside him.
He looked at her. “Isolde—”
“Don’t,” she said, quietly. “I’m not going inside. This is my business as much as yours.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he looked back at the track, which was perhaps the answer.
Edward pulled his horse up twenty yards from the gate. He was in traveling clothes, English cut, and he looked at Callum with the flat assessment of a man who has come here with a specific intention and intends to see it through.
Then he looked at Isolde.
His face did something complicated. She watched him take in the Highland dress, the MacKinnon tartan, the significant evidence of six months of pregnancy, and work through what it all meant.
“Return Lady Isolde,” he said. “Or we attack.”
“She’s my wife,” Callum said. Not loudly. He didn’t need to say it loudly. “Lady MacKinnon.”
“She was kidnapped.” Edward’s voice was even, the voice of a man who has an argument and intends to make it. “By your raid. She was taken against her will and you’ve clearly—” his eyes went to Isolde’s abdomen. “Whatever has happened here, it was under duress. Come home, Isolde. I’ve come to take you home.”
She stepped forward.
Callum’s hand was briefly at her arm — not restraining, checking. She looked at him. He held her eyes and then let his hand drop. Because he knew. Because he understood, as he always understood the things about her that mattered, that this was hers to say.
She stepped to the front of the gate.
“I chose to stay,” she said. Her voice carried in the Highland morning. Clear, level, the voice she used when she needed to be heard without argument.
Edward looked at her. “You’ve been here a year. Whatever they’ve done to make you—”
“I burned your letter,” she said. “In October. You wrote that I was free to return. I burned it.” She held his eyes across the twenty yards. “I stayed. I stay every day. I am not a prisoner, Edward. I am Laird MacKinnon’s wife and the clan’s Lady and this—” she gestured, briefly, at the valley behind her, the keep, the hills — “is my home.”
“You’d choose savages over civilization—”
“I choose love over cruelty,” she said. It came out clean, without drama, with the particular quality of something that is true and requires no embellishment. “I choose him.” She turned and looked at Callum — at his face, at the grey eyes and the scar and the set of his jaw and all of it, every part of it, everything she had learned over fourteen months of living beside him. “I choose him.”
She looked back at Edward.
He looked at the soldiers beside him. She saw it — the calculation, the reading of the situation. The soldiers were English and they were here because they’d been commanded to be, but they were looking at her — at a woman who was clearly pregnant, clearly standing of her own will, clearly not a woman in the grip of duress saying anything other than precisely what she meant — and they were doing their own calculation.
“This is treason,” Edward said.
“This is my life,” she said.
She turned and walked back through the gate.
She stood beside Callum, who stood beside his clansmen, and she looked at the English party on the track, and she thought: *they are going to decide.* She thought: *Edward is not a man who accepts this cleanly.* She thought: *there is going to be more.*
She reached for Callum’s hand. His fingers closed around hers.
They waited.
Reader Reactions