Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 26: Peace
The English soldiers did not come back.
She had not been entirely sure they wouldn’t. In the weeks following the battle she had kept a private watch on the southern track from the window she’d stood at during the fighting, had noted the absence of movement on it with the focused attention of someone who has learned that threats are not always finished when they appear to be. But the track stayed empty. The summer moved into September and September moved toward October and the only people on the southern track were MacKinnon clanspeople and the occasional trader from the border villages.
The clan exhaled.
She understood it — felt it herself, the specific quality of a held breath let out. She had not realized how much of the past year she had been carrying the awareness of Edward and what Edward represented, the English threat at the edge of consciousness. She had not let it change how she lived her life here, had not let the awareness become fear, but it had been present. And now it was gone.
What remained was simply the life itself.
She had a conversation with Callum in the evening of the first week of October, sitting in the great hall by the fire with the autumn wind doing its business outside. Mairead was asleep — she had fallen asleep in her father’s arms during the story and been transferred to her bed with the practiced efficiency of two parents who had been doing this for exactly the right number of months.
“Do you think it’s truly over?” she said.
He was quiet for a moment, in the working way. “Whitmore had connections,” he said. “But the pattern was always that the clan was the excuse, no’ the reason. He wanted the land and he wanted — influence. Without him pressing the case—” he paused. “There’s no one with sufficient motivation to take it further. We’re too far north and too little reward.”
“That’s a somewhat unflattering assessment of our value.”
“It’s strategic.” He looked at her with the slight edge of humor. “To the English Crown, we are inconveniently distant and not worth the cost of pursuit. I find I can live with that.”
She thought about this. Thought about the English Crown and the English law and the world that existed on the other side of the southern ridge. Thought about the fact that she no longer thought about it very much.
“My father wrote,” she said.
Callum looked at her.
“He asked if he might come.” She said it carefully, watching his face. “To see me. To meet—” she gestured at the hall, at the implied everything. “He said he’s been thinking about the letters. That he’s been—” she stopped. “He said he misses me.”
Callum was quiet.
“I said yes,” she said. “Before I told you. I’m sorry — I should have—”
“Dinnae apologize,” he said. “Ye said yes to yer father. That’s right.” He looked at her steadily. “When?”
“Spring. He wants to travel when the roads are better.”
He nodded. She watched him process it — the arrival of her father, an English lord, at a Highland keep. The particular social weight of it. “I’ll have the chamber prepared,” he said. “The good one.”
“He doesn’t need—”
“He’s yer father,” Callum said. “He gets the good chamber.”
She looked at him for a long moment. She thought about the man who had called the English his enemies and who had organized his life around the loss that English soldiers had inflicted, and who was now offering her father the good chamber, and she thought that love — the real kind, the kind that cost something — was made of exactly this: the small daily choices that added up to a life.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Dinnae thank me.” He reached across and took her hand. “This is your home. Your father is welcome in it.”
She looked at their joined hands — hers fair against his tanned, the worn gold of the ring he had put on her finger when she was still saying no, the one she had almost taken off twice in the first month and had never taken off again.
“Do you know what I think about sometimes?” she said.
“Tell me.”
“Rosalind.” She smiled at the fire. “I went to the stable that night to see Rosalind. Because she was restless and I couldn’t sleep. And if I hadn’t—”
“We’d never have met,” he said.
“Or we would have met differently. Later. Under different circumstances.”
He was quiet, considering this. “Perhaps,” he said. “But perhaps not.” He looked at her. “The raid brought me there. Ye were in the stables because ye and Rosalind have always understood each other. The rest—”
“Was the wrong place,” she said.
“The right place,” he said. “In the end.”
She leaned against him, her head at his shoulder, and thought about horses and wrong places and the particular wisdom of animals who know things before people do.
“Yes,” she said. “In the end, exactly right.”
The fire settled. The wind moved around the keep. Their clan was safe and their children were sleeping and the southern track was empty, and the peace had the particular quality of a thing that had been earned rather than given.
She held it carefully.
She intended to hold it for a long time.
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