Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 6: Wolves
She lasted eleven days.
Eleven days of learning the shape of her captivity — the keep, the village, the valley and the hills around it — while building what she privately called a map. Not just the physical geography, though she committed that too: where the horses were kept, which direction was south, how the guards moved in the early morning when the shift changed and the new men were still waking up, where the gate was and what it took to open it.
She was not an impulsive person. People who looked at her saw the composure and often made the mistake of interpreting it as passivity. She had learned early that the most effective strategy was almost always patience — wait, observe, act when the moment was right rather than when the feeling was loudest.
The feeling, lately, was very loud.
She liked it here. That was the problem. Not in the way of capitulation, not in the way of a prisoner who had given up on freedom — she was clear enough with herself about that distinction. But in the way of a person who had spent twenty-three years in a world that fit her like a coat two sizes too small and had found herself, accidentally and entirely against her will, in a place that fit differently. Morag had been teaching her things. Gaelic words, clan customs, the rhythms of a community that worked together with the integrated purpose of something that had no choice but to function or fail. She had been helping with the children — there were six of them in the village who were old enough to benefit from instruction but had no one to teach them, and she had fallen into it naturally, without planning to, because the children did not care that she was English and treated her Gaelic pronunciation as an opportunity for hilarity.
She had not expected to laugh.
She had not expected a great deal of things.
It was the thirteenth morning when she found the grey gelding saddled in the paddock behind the smithy. Someone had left him there — she never knew if it was an accident or if a sympathetic clansperson had made a decision and chosen to know nothing about the consequences. She stood in the early morning mist with the reins in her hands and thought: *this is the moment.*
She took it.
She rode south. Hard, because if she was going to do this she was going to commit to it, through the valley and up the ridge and onto the moor beyond, where the ground opened up and she could see the south in the distance as a smudge of flatter country. The morning was cold and clear and she rode with everything she had.
She made five miles.
She heard him behind her for the last half mile.
She knew it was him before she turned — there was a quality to the sound of his horse, something she had learned over the past twelve days, the particular rhythm of how he rode, and she thought: *of course it’s him, it was always going to be him* — and she pushed the gelding harder, because she was not going to make this easy, because she had a right to try.
He caught her at the edge of a stand of birch trees where the ground dropped into a shallow burn. Her horse balked at the crossing — unfamiliar terrain, uncertain footing — and then he was there, alongside her, his hand on her bridle, and the grey gelding stopped.
She sat up straight.
“Ye daft woman!” His voice was raw in a way she hadn’t heard before — not anger, or not only anger. Something underneath it. “There are WOLVES on this moor! Ye think that gelding would carry ye safe if—”
“Better than YOU!” she said, and she meant it, and she also hated that some part of her did not entirely mean it, which made her mean it louder.
He looked at her. His face was flushed from the ride, his dark hair loose from whatever he’d had it tied back with, and the scar along his jaw was more visible than usual in the cold morning light. He was breathing hard. So was she.
“Wolves,” he said, again, differently this time.
“I’ll take my chances,” she said.
“Ye’ll no’.” He kept his hand on her bridle. “Come back.”
“I’m not going back to that — I’m not going to stay there forever, MacKinnon, while my life collapses around me—”
“Yer life—” he stopped. Steadied himself in the visible way she had seen him do before, the deliberate drawing-in of a man who has learned to manage his reactions because the cost of not managing them is too high. “Isolde.” Her name, for the first time without the title. She felt it differently. “Come back. Let me sort this. I give ye my word I am working on a solution.”
“What solution? Every solution I can think of involves returning me to England and you seem constitutionally opposed to that.”
“There are solutions ye havenae thought of.”
“Name one.”
He looked at her. The grey eyes — she had thought them dark in the firelight, but they were grey, she had seen them now in daylight, the same grey as the Highland sky — were doing the working thing, the thinking thing. He was deciding something.
“No’ here,” he said. “Come back and I’ll explain. Properly.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then I carry ye back, and the gelding follows, and we have this argument at the keep where it’s no’ two degrees above freezing.”
She looked at him for a long moment. She was cold. She was genuinely cold, having ridden five miles in the Highland morning with nothing warmer than her cloak, and the burn below them was the kind of Scottish water that would be bone-cold even in summer, and the moor beyond it was wide and empty and she had been riding in a direction that was generally south without accounting for the fact that she didn’t know this country.
She hated that he was right.
She turned the gelding and rode back beside him in silence, and he did not say anything else, and she found the silence more complicated than it would have been if he’d lectured her. She had braced for lecture. Silence made her think about the undertone in his voice when he’d said her name, and she did not want to be thinking about that.
Back at the keep, he led her horse himself and then turned to her as they stood in the yard. His face had returned to its usual controlled expression, though the slight flush of the ride hadn’t entirely faded.
“Ye’ll stay there,” he said, pointing to the tower room above the east wall. “Until ye learn sense.”
“That is not a sentence that anyone has ever helpfully been improved by.”
“Aye, well.” He turned toward the keep. “Four walls and a locked door will have to serve.”
“You said there was no lock on the outside.”
“There is now.”
She stared at his back. The absolute audacity of it — to go from *come back, let me explain, I’ll tell ye my solution* directly to *locked in the tower* with no intermediate step—
“MacKinnon!” she called after him.
He stopped.
“You said you’d explain.”
He turned. In the early morning light of the keep yard, with the clan beginning to stir around them and the smoke rising from the cottage fires and the hills enormous behind him, he looked at her with an expression she couldn’t read — complicated, something that was working its way toward something else.
“I will,” he said. “Tonight.”
He went inside.
She stood in the yard fuming, and the clanspeople gave her a wide berth, and Morag appeared at her elbow with a cup of something hot that smelled of herbs.
“Could’ve been worse,” Morag said. “He didn’t tie ye to anything.”
“He’s locking me in a tower.”
“Aye. The tower room’s got a good view.” A pause. “He’s not a cruel man, lass. He’s a frightened one. There’s a difference.”
Isolde wrapped her hands around the hot cup and looked at the door through which Callum MacKinnon had disappeared.
*Tonight,* he had said.
She was going to hold him to it.
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