Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 22: The fiercest lass
He was the worst patient she had ever encountered.
She had encountered precisely three patients in her life — one of the grooms at her father’s estate who had broken his arm and refused to stay still, the injured clansman she had helped treat in her first weeks here, and her husband — but she was confident that Callum MacKinnon, Laird of Clan MacKinnon, experienced Highland warrior, was nonetheless in a category by himself.
He got up on the second day.
“It’s been two days,” he said, as if this were a reasonable amount of time.
“The wound is three inches deep and you have stitches in it,” she said.
“Fergus needs—”
“Fergus is a capable man. He’s been managing without your supervision for three hours and the clan appears to be intact.” She pointed at the chair. “Sit.”
He looked at the chair. He looked at her. He sat.
She checked the wound — still clean, the edges holding, Morag’s workmanship as reliable as always. She was six months along now, which complicated the nursing on a practical level, and she moved around him with the adjusted navigation of the late months. He watched her with the expression he’d had since the attack — the focused, slightly helpless quality of a man who has had a scare and is doing what men who have had scares sometimes did: holding everything he could see very carefully in his field of vision.
She understood it. She had done it herself, from the window, for two hours.
“The clan is well,” she said, settling into the chair across from him. “Three men with wounds, all recovering. The English soldiers retreated after—” she paused. “After Whitmore. They’re gone.”
“I know,” he said. “Fergus told me.”
“Then you know there’s nothing that requires you to be vertical.”
“There’s the—”
“Nothing that requires you to be vertical today,” she said.
He looked at her. The grey eyes, the scar, the shoulder that was bandaged and would be stiff for weeks. She had been looking at him for fourteen months and had not yet found a point at which looking at him was ordinary in the way of ordinary things.
“Ye’re the fiercest lass I ken,” he said.
“I learned from the best.” She said it simply, which was how the truest things came out.
He looked at her for a moment. Something moved in his face that was not the present thing — a quick journey to some other time and back. “My mother used to say something like that,” he said. “To my father. About his stubborn streak.”
“What did she say?”
“That she’d learned to be stubborn from watching him and couldn’t be held responsible for the results.” He almost smiled. “He loved it.”
“Smart woman.” She put her hands on her knees and looked at the floor for a moment and then back at him. “I wrote to James.”
He looked up.
“My brother. I wrote in October and—” she had told him about the letter at the time, briefly, had not said all of what she’d said in it. “I told him the truth. That I was staying. That I was married and happy and that I wanted him to know I was safe. I told him what you are.” She paused. “What the clan is.”
“Did he write back?”
“Not yet. The routes are—” slow, difficult, uncertain. “But I think he will. James is a fair man.” She looked at him. “I’d like you to know him. Eventually.”
He held her eyes. “Aye,” he said. “I’d like that.”
The afternoon settled around them. Outside, the May clan went about the business of recovering from a battle — the practical, familiar work of people who have done this before and know what it requires. She could hear voices in the yard, the sound of Morag directing, the particular organized purposefulness of a community that moves through difficulty by moving through it together.
She thought about the window. About two hours of watching for his specific shape in the chaos below. About the particular quality of the prayer she had been capable of in those two hours, which was not elegant and not exactly certain but which had been very large and very focused.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
“About the window,” she said. “About watching the battle.”
“Ye shouldn’t have—”
“I know. I did anyway.” She met his eyes. “I watched you every second I could see you. I didn’t look away.”
He looked at her. She felt him understand what she was saying — not just the watching but the feeling behind it, the two hours of being unable to do anything except witness and want.
“Aye,” he said. “The same.”
“The same—”
“The whole battle,” he said. “Part of me was — elsewhere. Knowing ye were in the keep. Knowing—” he stopped. “I couldnae do the thing I was doing and be where I was with all of myself. Part of me was always with ye.”
She looked at him for a long time.
“Good,” she said, finally. “Stay where I can find you.”
“Always,” he said, without hesitation.
Outside, the Highland spring was going about its business — birds, distant water, the wind off the hills with the clean cold scent she had been breathing for fourteen months and could not imagine living without. Inside, her husband sat across from her with his bandaged shoulder and his grey eyes and his whole self present, and the baby shifted inside her with the particular emphatic movement of a creature with opinions about being stationary.
“She’s awake,” Callum said, watching Isolde’s expression.
“She’s always awake. I think she sleeps when I’m asleep and is vigorous whenever I’d prefer stillness.” She put her hand to the movement. “She’ll be stubborn. Like you.”
“Like me.” He came to crouch beside her, ignoring his shoulder, and put his hand alongside hers on the movement. “Aye. Or fierce. Like ye.”
“Both,” Isolde said. “Both is the dangerous combination.”
“Aye.” He looked up at her. “Both is what we’ll need.”
She looked at his face — close now, the grey eyes very near — and thought about the world their daughter was going to be born into. A Highland world, a border world, the complicated inheritance of a mother who had come through a crooked door and a father who had built his whole life on ground he’d had to hold by force. Both, yes. Both was exactly right.
She covered his hand with hers, both of them together over the movement of their daughter, and she thought: *this is what I chose.*
She thought it with the full knowledge of every step that had brought her here.
It was, quite simply, everything.
Reader Reactions