Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 8: Too bad
She had not slept.
This was not unusual — she had barely slept since the kidnapping, and before the kidnapping she had barely slept at Whitmore, and before Whitmore there had been months of difficult nights in her father’s house while the arrangements were being made, the negotiations between her father and Edward’s lawyers, the careful logistical assembly of a marriage she had agreed to because the alternatives were worse and because she had not, at twenty-three, found any better framework for understanding what her life was supposed to be.
She had spent the night at the tower window, watching the Highland dark and thinking.
He was not wrong about the practical problem. She had been thinking about it herself since the camp, since the conversation where she’d first understood what her presence here meant for the clan. If she returned to Whitmore — even voluntarily, even with MacKinnon’s cooperation — the story she returned with was the story of an abduction. Edward would make it a war. He had the connections, the resources, and she had seen enough of his character in three weeks of enforced proximity to understand that he was not a man who accepted loss gracefully. He would pursue it to whatever end, and the MacKinnon clan — the children she had been teaching, Morag with her herb knowledge and her dry, unimpressed kindness, the clanspeople who had looked at her with hostility but had not harmed her — would pay for it.
She was aware that this line of thinking was dangerous. That she was reasoning herself toward an outcome she was supposed to be fighting against. She was aware, and she reasoned through it anyway, because the alternative was refusing to think clearly in order to protect a feeling, and she had never been able to sustain that particular discipline.
The facts were the facts.
She also spent some portion of the night being furious, which was its own productive activity.
When morning came she dressed in the Highland clothes — they were warm and practical and she was not going to freeze on principle — and she braided her own hair with the practical efficiency of a woman who had often dressed without a maid, which was more often than her station technically required because she had always preferred to do things herself when possible.
The key turned in the lock at nine.
He was in the corridor. He was dressed with more formality than she had seen from him — his plaid pinned, his hair drawn back, the broad shoulders of him squared with the determined air of a man who has decided something and intends to see it through.
Behind him, she could see the beginning of a gathering in the yard below the tower stairs.
“Ye dinnae have to like this,” he said. “I’m no’ asking ye to like it.”
“Then what are you asking?”
“To say the words. And to trust that I’ll — that I’ll make it worth the saying. Over time.”
She looked at him. She had been looking at him for two weeks at close range, and she had assembled an extensive internal record of what she’d found. A man who was capable of violence and chose not to use it in the moments when it was available to him. A man who had lost people and had not become cruel about it. A man who slept on the floor rather than demand what the law and the custom gave him by right.
She was not going to make the mistake of thinking these things were sufficient reason to accept what she hadn’t been given a choice about.
But she was also not going to make the mistake of thinking they were nothing.
“If ye stay English, ye’re a prisoner,” he said, as he had said before. “If ye become my wife, ye’re clan. Ye have standing. Ye have—”
“I heard you the first time,” she said. “If it’s marriage, my answer is no.”
He looked at her with the flat patience of a man who has been expecting this and has decided what to do about it. “Too bad,” he said. “We marry this morning.”
She stared at him. “You can’t—”
“Ye’ll come down to the yard.” He stepped back from the doorway. “The priest is here. The clan is waiting.”
“This is—” she pressed her lips together. The words she wanted to say were not the words she was going to say, because she had spent the night thinking and the thinking had arrived at a conclusion that she was not ready to fully inhabit yet, but which was present, taking up space. “I despise you,” she said.
“That’s yer right,” he said.
She walked past him and down the stairs.
The ceremony was held in the keep yard with the sky above it the particular pewter grey of a Highland spring morning that might or might not produce rain and had not yet decided. The clan gathered around the edges of the yard with the expressions of people who have been ordered to witness something and are doing so with varying degrees of willingness. The priest was young and nervous and had the look of someone who had been briefed on the situation and was proceeding anyway because the Laird had asked him to.
Morag found her at the edge of the yard and pressed something into her hands — a small posy of early Highland flowers, white and yellow, completely incongruous in the circumstances and somehow exactly right.
“Ye dinnae have to be grateful,” Morag said, low. “But perhaps hold them anyway.”
She held them.
MacKinnon was waiting at the center of the yard. He had not looked at her since the stairs, or not in the way she was watching him — he was watching the clan, the priest, the yard, the particular instinctive monitoring of a man responsible for everything in his sight. But when she stepped into place beside him he turned to look at her and something moved in his face at the sight of the flowers that she could not quite read.
The priest began.
“Do ye take this man—”
“No,” she said, clearly, into the Highland morning. “But apparently I have no choice.”
A murmur through the gathered clan. The priest blinked. He looked at the Laird.
MacKinnon looked at the priest. “I’ll take that as aye,” he said, with the measured calm of a man who has anticipated this and chosen not to be rattled by it.
“And—” the priest swallowed. “And do ye take this woman—”
“Aye,” MacKinnon said. “Without reservation.”
She turned to look at him at that. *Without reservation.* Said with the flat, unhesitating certainty of a man who meant what he said.
The priest wrapped their hands together with a strip of MacKinnon tartan and said the words over them and it was done. She was Lady MacKinnon. She was clan. She had been married to a man she had known for two weeks, who had kidnapped her, who had given her his furs in a cold camp and built her fire and told her she had courage and looked at the flowers in her hands with something she couldn’t name.
The clan did not cheer. There was a respectful silence instead, the acknowledgment of people who understand they have witnessed something significant without yet knowing what to make of it.
MacKinnon turned to her. Up close, she could see his eyes — the grey of the Highland sky — and the scar along his jaw and the careful set of his expression.
He kissed her.
Brief, controlled, the brush of his mouth against hers with the restraint of a man who was managing something. She held still. She did not lean in. She did not pull back.
When he drew away she looked at him directly and said, very quietly, so only he could hear: “I will not forget that I said no.”
“I dinnae expect ye to,” he said. As quiet. “I’ll spend the rest of my life earning the yes.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she looked at the clan around them — her clan now, technically, by the letter of the law and the strip of tartan around their wrists — and she thought about the night she’d spent at the window, about the facts as they were rather than the facts as she wanted them to be, and she thought about what it would mean to be Lady MacKinnon rather than Lady Sutherland, and she thought, very carefully and with the full use of her intelligence, that this was not over.
It had, in some way she couldn’t yet name, just begun.
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