Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 21: Don’t you dare
Edward attacked.
She had known he would. She had known it in the way she knew things about certain people — from fourteen months of accumulated observation of what people did when they couldn’t get what they wanted through words. Edward Whitmore was not a man who accepted outcomes he hadn’t chosen. She had seen it in the three weeks at his estate, in the small moments that had contributed to the walls-pressing-in feeling: the way he treated the servants who made mistakes, the way he spoke about the Scottish border as a problem to be solved rather than a place where people lived, the particular quality of his patience which was not patience at all but the management of impatience, held in place by the knowledge that he was going to get what he wanted eventually.
He had signaled his men within ten minutes of the gate conversation.
Callum had seen it coming. She suspected Callum had seen it coming long before today — had planned for it, which was what he did, which was one of the things she loved about him: the way his mind was always ahead of the visible event, running scenarios, accounting for variables. The clan had been on alert since the horn. There were positions already held. This was not going to be a surprise.
He had sent her inside — personally, with both hands on her shoulders and his face very close to hers and his voice very quiet. “Ye go inside and ye stay inside until I come for ye. Not Fergus, not Morag. Me. Do ye understand?”
She had looked at him for a moment, and she had understood from his face — the full, controlled intensity of it, the grey eyes not cold but very focused — that this was not the time for the argument about her right to make her own choices, because her right to make her own choices was exactly what they were fighting for and the best thing she could do for it was to remove herself from the battlefield.
“I understand,” she said. “Come back.”
“I’ll no’ leave ye.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “I promise.”
She went inside.
She did not go to the inner room. She went to the chamber, to their window, and she stood and she could see the gate and the track and the shapes of men and horses, and she pressed her hand flat against the cold glass and she breathed in the way Morag had taught her for the late months of pregnancy — steady, from the belly — and she watched.
The battle was not the forty-minute controlled thing of the MacPherson raid. It was larger, louder, and it went on for two hours that were the longest two hours of her life. She watched it from the window and she watched for him — for the specific shape of him, the height and the breadth of his shoulders, the dark hair — and she found him and tracked him through the chaos below with the fierce concentration of someone who has found the most important thing in their field of vision and is not going to lose it.
She saw the moment he was struck.
Not badly — she could see from the way he kept moving that it was not a killing blow, a hit to the shoulder, something that rocked him and that he adjusted to with the terrifying efficiency of a man who has survived injury before. But she saw it, and the breath came out of her in a sound that was not quite a word, and she pressed her hand harder against the glass.
He kept moving.
The clan drove them back. She could see it happening, could see the English soldiers’ formation breaking under the pressure of men who knew this ground and had every reason to hold it, could see the moment when the tide turned and Edward’s forces understood the position they were in. She watched Edward on his grey horse and she watched him understand that he had lost, and she watched the expression that crossed his face even at this distance — something that was not defeat but was the thing that happens to a man when he cannot accept defeat and has to live with it anyway.
He rode into the battle.
Directly, deliberately, toward Callum.
She was at the window with both hands flat against it and she could not breathe.
The two of them — her husband and the man she had almost married — met in the field below the keep in the May morning, and she watched it and she prayed in whatever capacity she had for prayer, which was not large but which she deployed with everything she had. It was brief. It was brutal. It was the kind of thing that required a man to be both technically skilled and entirely committed and not thinking about anything else, which Callum was, and Edward — who had soldiers to fight his battles and had perhaps forgotten the specific quality of doing it himself — was not.
It ended.
She saw Callum stand.
She made a sound she didn’t have a name for — part relief, part something that had no category — and she pressed her forehead to the cold glass and breathed, in the long slow way, until the shaking in her hands stopped.
It took a while.
When she heard his boots on the stairs she had herself mostly controlled. The door opened and he came in and he was — alive, present, blood on his plaid but moving, his own blood by the look of it from the shoulder wound, and she was across the room before he had fully gotten through the door.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
“I’m fine—”
“Don’t you dare nearly get killed and tell me you’re fine.” She had her hands on his face and was looking at him with the full force of two hours of window-watching, and she was not crying, she was not, it was the cold from the glass. “Sit down.”
“Isolde—”
“Sit. Down.”
He sat.
She examined the wound with Morag at her shoulder — shoulder, not deep, already clotting, the look of something that would take him off his feet for a few days and would heal. She pressed the cloth against it with considerably more force than was strictly necessary and felt him not flinch and loved him extremely.
“Whitmore?” she said.
“Dead,” he said. Quiet. “In the battle.”
She said nothing. She felt several things at once — relief, which she was not going to pretend she didn’t feel; grief for the waste of it, the entirety of it; the particular texture of a chapter ending.
“Are ye—” he began.
“I’m not sorry he’s gone,” she said. “I’m sorry it came to this. I’m sorry you had to—” she stopped. “I’m sorry.”
“Dinnae be. He chose it.”
She nodded. She kept the cloth pressed to his shoulder. The keep was coming back to quiet around them — the sounds of the aftermath settling into something more ordinary, the clan accounting for themselves, Morag already moving between the injured men in the yard below.
“I told ye I’d come back,” he said.
“You did.” She looked at him. She was still holding the cloth to his shoulder with one hand, and with the other she reached up and put her palm flat against his chest, over his heartbeat. “You did.”
He covered her hand with his.
They sat in the chamber while the May afternoon moved past them, and the baby moved — she felt it, the familiar shifting press — and she thought: *it’s over.* The English threat, the held-breath of these months, the knowledge that England might come.
It was over.
She pressed her hand harder against his heartbeat and felt it steady and certain under her palm, and she thought: *we are going to be all right.*
She knew it with the bone-level certainty she trusted most.
They were going to be all right.
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