“You promise?”
“I swear to—what should I swear to?—God Himself?”
She pretended to consider. “I imagine that’s a high enough authority.”
Arm in arm, flared sleeves tangling, they walked out of the stables. “So who is here with all these wagons?” he asked.
“People I don’t know. Some are from Roxburgh, Melrose, and Selkirk.” Her grip tightened. “You need to know, there are some from Ercildoun.”
He stopped in his tracks. “Why is he hosting such a gathering?”
“The Epiphany. But mostly, I fear, it’s for us. Our union is being celebrated as if the three kings had visited you and me. There was no talking him out of it.” She looked him in the eyes, and he saw that there was something she had yet to tell him.
“What else?” he asked.
“The Ercildoun alderman is named Master Rimor.”
He tugged his arm free and stepped back. “I can’t go in there.”
“You can. You have to. He won’t know you.”
He glanced at where Rab stood at the door, took Janet by the arm, and led her farther away so that they couldn’t be overheard. “Because he is no longer my father, you mean? Are you willing to risk everything on that notion? He won’t have come alone. Most likely your father’s list will have included other skinwalkers, too. Maybe all of them.”
“You think my father—”
“No.” He gripped her hands between his. “I think as I’ve said—they’re all high-placed. Inviting his influential neighbors, your father can hardly avoid them. And ’twould look strange if he did.”
“But if Alderman Rimor’s no longer your father, you’re no longer his son, either. He has never seen you grown up, hasn’t set eyes on you since you were a skinny beardless youth following your brother. That’s what you told me. Isn’t that the case? No one could recognize you after so long. You’re the wrong age, and, well . . .”
He shook his head. “The difference of a few years becomes less of a distinction all the time, but say it is as you describe, what if I should succumb to a fit while in their midst?”
“Try not to?” She implored him, “If you don’t appear, my father will seek to explain your absence, and what he’ll say is—”
“—that I sometimes suffer seizures and spout gibberish. Yes, that should doom me well. Damn the yuletide.” He pulled at his lip. “If even one of them finds out . . .”
She pressed herself to him. “They are not looking, my love. Let them see a local husbandman who fought in far-off wars and knows no one hereabouts, of no importance to them, just as my father with his lesser demesne is of little importance. They humor him, being here. Some probably laugh up their sleeves at him.”
“May he never acquire enough land to make him of use.”
“Play the part, Tàm. For me.” She took his hands and placed them on her belly. “For us.”
He read the meaning in her gaze, and for a moment all of his worries about the Yvag evaporated. “You’re with child?” She nodded.
Thomas took her in his arms and swung her around, then pressed her to him a long moment, inhaling her thyme. “Now I must build the house even larger.” He laughed, but wished secretly that he were there right now instead of here. How many of those he’d watched from the hillside would be inside?
Across the yard, Rab watched them, a vague smile on his face as if he couldn’t be certain whether or not he was party to a lovers’ tiff. Thomas gave him a wave and Rab nodded back. Janet was right: There really was no choice. Stories would be told about him otherwise. With dread he tried to imagine what it was going to be like to look into his father’s eyes and find a stranger there.
He’d never seen so many people in the great hall. Tables that usually stood against the walls had been carried closer to the middle of the room to form a single three-sided eating surface large enough to accommodate them all, with two strong fires. Only a thin haze of smoke hung over them all. Seeing him enter, Cardden came and took charge of him, sending Janet off so that he could introduce Thomas to the feasters. No doubt it let him feel important and proud.
He led Thomas around among his friends first—the sheriff of Roxburgh, named Gospatrick, and then the young mill owner named Forbes from near Selkirk. They had met on numerous occasions, none in which the bushy red-haired miller was anything but reserved. There could be no doubt that he hated Thomas for sabotaging his reasonable plans to ask for Janet’s hand, although according to her there had never been any great pairing of spirits there—at least not on her side of the equation. She’d been grieving for her dead sweetheart that Forbes never quite grasped was an impediment and not an opportunity.
Trapped now in the Epiphany, Thomas welcomed a conversation even with such an enemy.
“Our Janet is well, then?” the miller asked him as if they shared her well-being between them.
“Oh, yes, quite well.” They watched her together, Thomas deciding immediately to say nothing of her being with child.
A long pause followed.
Then Forbes added, “Well, I am not about to say the best man won, you understand.”
Thomas, still smiling pleasantly, nevertheless winced a little. “Of course, though there really was no competition. I was not about seeking a wife.”
“No doubt,” Forbes agreed. “She was lost in grief over her soldier.”
“Kenny.”
“I should have seen it would take another such to draw her out again. I should have enlisted myself.”
Thomas only nodded, saying nothing. If Forbes needed to believe all that, then there was no point in trying to persuade him otherwise.
He was about to take his leave when a heavyset woman intruded on their conversation. He knew the face from the group that had toured the abbey site. Forbes introduced her as the widow Mac an Fleisdeir of Selkirk.
“And who’s this handsome young stranger, then?” she asked.
So, he thought, not a prioress after all, but the widow of a landowner, a woman with power the equal of the MacGilleans and the Rimors. She was ruddy-cheeked and seemed to be well into her cups. While Forbes was speaking, she gave Thomas a careful sizing up, a calculated look, then rubbed a hand over his shoulder familiarly as if he was a piece of livestock she might take home with her. She grinned loosely and with hardly concealed carnality. He eased himself out of her reach, then traded a look of recognition with Forbes. The redheaded miller’s glance essentially said “You’d do well to stay out of her clutches.”
She gave him one final open look of invitation, which he pretended to be too obtuse to read. Instead, smiling stupidly as though drunk himself, he toasted her and Forbes before retreating from the concupiscent widow. He wondered how her husband had died. An unfortunate accident, no doubt.
