Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 23: Mairead is born
The baby came on a Tuesday in September.
Isolde had been expecting it for three days — the particular quality of waiting that Morag described as *the body getting ready,* the weight and pressure and general state of being thoroughly finished with pregnancy that she had been living inside for the past week. She had told Callum this, which had resulted in his becoming comprehensively, extraordinarily, magnificently annoying about it.
He had not left the keep in four days.
He had reorganized the firewood storage twice. He had found a reason to check the gate hinges on three separate occasions. He had sat in the great hall in the evenings doing paperwork that Fergus had eventually removed from him on the grounds that he was going to organize the clan’s accounts into a state of disorder from which they would never recover. He had come to stand in the kitchen doorway four times in one morning, looking at her with the expression of a man who has identified the thing he is most afraid of in the world and cannot make it stop by looking at it.
She loved him extremely. She also sent him to check the western pasture fence on Monday morning for his own mental health and everyone else’s peace.
He was back by noon.
The labor began in the early morning of Tuesday — she woke to it, recognized it from Morag’s descriptions, lay still for a while being absolutely certain before she reached across and put her hand on Callum’s arm.
He was awake in an instant. He was one of those people who moved from sleep to full consciousness in a single transition, no intermediate state, which she had found alarming in the early months and had come to understand as simply him.
“Aye,” he said.
“It’s time,” she said. “Don’t panic.”
“I’m no’ panicking.”
“You’re gripping my hand so tightly that my fingers have gone white.”
He loosened his grip. Slightly. “Better?”
“Somewhat.” She sat up. “Get Morag.”
He went. She heard him on the stairs — not running, which she appreciated; he had understood that running would frighten the household, but she could hear the pace of someone moving with purpose. She sat on the edge of the bed and breathed in the way of someone who has been instructed in this and is grateful for the instruction, and she thought about Seumas and Elspeth, and she thought about what she had said to him in February: *I am not Elspeth. I am strong.*
She was strong.
She was going to demonstrate this conclusively today.
Morag sent him out of the chamber three hours in.
He did not want to go. She could hear the brief argument — his voice, Morag’s voice, a pause, and then his footsteps on the other side of the door, which stayed where they were for several minutes before moving away. She thought about this as something to tell him later: that the sound of him on the other side of the door had been, in some way she hadn’t expected, a comfort.
It was fourteen hours. Not quick, not easy — Morag had told her it was entirely within the range of normal and that the word *quick* did not generally apply to first births, and she had filed this information and found it useful now. She worked through it with the focused endurance she brought to everything that required endurance, which was a quality she had been developing in the Highlands and which the Highlands had, it turned out, been very good practice for.
Morag was there. Three of the clan women were there. The fire was built up against the September chill.
And then: a sound.
Loud, indignant, entirely healthy.
She lay back and breathed and felt the peculiar overwhelmed quiet that comes after enormous effort, and Morag put something in her arms — small, red, furious, already clearly forming opinions — and she looked at her daughter.
*Mairead.*
She had known the name for months and it had been abstract until this moment, the way all things are abstract until they are real.
“There ye are,” she said.
Mairead, apparently satisfied with this greeting, settled into the kind of focused indignation that suggested she had a great deal more to say about her recent experience and intended to say it at length.
“She’s loud,” one of the women said, with the approval of a clan that valued strong voices.
“Good,” Isolde said. “She should be.”
She let Morag call him in.
He came through the door and stopped. She watched his face from the bed — the full journey of it, from the door to where she was, the relief of seeing her first, present and conscious and evidently intact, and then the shift to the smaller bundle in her arms, and then the complete dissolution of every controlled thing in his expression.
She had seen him fight. She had seen him angry and frightened and tender and funny. She had seen him cry once, briefly, when she gave him Seumas’s name, and she had not said anything about it because she understood the quality of that particular grief.
She had not seen him look like this.
He sat on the edge of the bed. She held Mairead out to him. He took her with the hands of a man who has held babies before and lost them, with the particular careful quality of someone holding something irreplaceable, and he looked at his daughter.
“Ye did it,” he said, his voice rough. “Ye’re both alive.”
“I told you I was strong,” she said.
He looked up at her over Mairead’s head. His eyes were bright with something he wasn’t trying to contain.
“Aye,” he said. “Ye did.”
She reached out and put her hand on his arm. He was looking at his daughter — at the small furious face, the dark hair, the particular expression of a creature who has arrived somewhere and has not yet decided what to make of it — and his face was entirely open.
“She has yer nose,” he said.
“She has your chin,” she said.
“God help her.”
She laughed. He smiled — full, unguarded, the real smile she had been cataloging since August of the previous year. Mairead, apparently sensing that she was being discussed, made a sound that was either agreement or complaint.
“Hello, Mairead,” Callum said, to his daughter. Low, the voice he used for things that mattered. “I’m yer father. I’m going to be very irritating about ye, I’ll warn ye now.”
Isolde watched her husband meet his daughter and felt the particular texture of a thing that could not have been predicted from any starting point she could have imagined for herself — not from the London drawing rooms of her girlhood or the Whitmore estate where she couldn’t sleep or the stable where she had gone to visit her horse in the wrong place at the wrong time.
All of it had led here.
She would not change any of it.
She would not change a single thing.
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