Page 30 of I Loved You Then (Far From Home #12)
The Sky is Falling
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Claire rubbed her temples as she crossed the yard, the morning air crisp enough to sting her cheeks.
The remnants of last night’s wine clung to her head, not terrible but insistent, a dull throb behind her eyes.
She supposed it served her right. One night of letting go, of dancing and laughing and drinking with abandon, and she was reminded she wasn’t twenty-one anymore.
It was going to be a long day, she’d already surmised.
Even without the wine hangover, she knew she’d have trouble focusing today, since she’d been plagued since waking up by a dream she’d had last night, in which Ciaran had kissed her again.
Weird.
Obviously, she didn’t want him to kiss her again. Not after the first humiliating kiss—okay, the kiss itself wasn’t humiliating, but yeah, what followed certainly was, and she wasn’t looking to repeat that experience.
In her dream, she had kissed him back—a little too eagerly, if she was being honest—and then promptly remembered she had a husband. Talk about a bucket of cold water thrown on her sizzling dream.
And how ridiculous was she? To feel guilty over a dream.
Yet the guilt came anyway, a stubborn knot in her chest. Even knowing her marriage was already unraveling, it didn’t give her license to stray.
It didn’t excuse her from doing the very thing Jason had done, causing the betrayal that had gutted her love, her trust, and her hope.
Infidelity aside—Jason’s in the past or her own, even in thought, here—the truth was plain: their marriage might have been saved once.
She had always believed anything could be salvaged, if both people wanted it.
But neither of them had. Not really. And the fact that she hadn’t been heartbroken by the loss—not even before she’d been hurled through time—was only proof that divorce had been waiting at the end of their road.
She forced herself to face all this squarely, knowing it was the only way to keep her footing.
At the same time, she admitted to herself that it also, effectively, gave her permission to dwell on the dream.
And damn, that kiss. It had been so vivid, and had her wondering .
.. had she dreamed it? The answer came instantly—of course she had.
Brooding stares and previous toe-curling kiss notwithstanding, there was no way in hell Ciaran Kerr would have kissed her again after the travesty of their first kiss in that hole in the forest.
Was there?
She spent the day in the sick house, please at how quickly the blacksmith had made and installed the new spit in the hearth, though not any more than Cory, the one who would benefit most from the addition.
“?Tis naught but three and thirty steps from the well in the bailey to the hearth here,” Cory said with some excitement, pointing at the two kettles simmering over the low flames.
“?Tis one hundred and sixty-seven steps, mistress, all the way round the back of the keep and down to the kitchen. I dinna care if Diarmad is pleased or nae—he’s nae the one hauling all day long. ”
Claire smiled. “That’s right, Cory.”
She checked on Callum, unable to decide if what had been angry red coloring around his wound was maybe a little less angry today, if they’d finally gotten control of the infection.
His eyes followed her, dark and drained, as she changed the dressing.
“Tell me true...d’ye ken I’ll survive it? Or am I bound to die here?”
The raw fear in his voice cut straight through her. He was so young, barely more than a boy, and for all his effort to sound steady, the words trembled with dread.
Claire leaned closer, letting her hand rest lightly over his.
“You’re not going to die, Callum.” Her voice carried a certainty she wasn’t entirely sure she felt, but she willed him to believe it anyway.
“I’ve seen men pull through worse, and you’re stronger than you think.
You just have to keep fighting, and I’ll keep fighting with you. I promise.”
That same evening, Claire once again joined the house servants in the kitchen at suppertime.
Good-natured ribbing, she discovered, was not exclusive to the twenty-first century.
Mairi gave her a sly look as she set down a trencher and took her seat at the foot of the table.
“’Tis well ye dinna crack that fair face o’ yours on the stair last eve.
Would ha’ been a pity to spoil it wi’ bruises. ”
Claire’s eyes widened as her gaze swept from Mairi to the others at the table, catching the poorly hidden smirks and the glances exchanged over their bowls. She decided not to be humiliated, but to pretend she was truly among friends, and owned up to her big blunder.
“Ugh,” she groaned with a grin. “I was really hoping no one saw that.”
“Nae only did we see it, lass,” Mairi said with gleeful relish, “but ’twas all we spoke of this morn—yer tumble. And yer dancing besides.”
Claire smiled with pure joy now, not for being talked about, but for being included.
They weren’t hiding the fact that they’d laughed over her flop, and that was the very proof it wasn’t cruel —no sharp whispers behind her back, no mean-spirited gossip, just the easy teasing shared among people who had already decided she was all right.
The kitchen at suppertime was a world apart from anywhere else in Caeravorn.
When Claire slipped through the doors in the evening, she was met by heat, laughter, and the thick smell of broth and bread.
Pewter plates clattered as serving girls and scullions finally dropped to benches, filling their own plates with what remained after the laird and his soldiers had eaten.
She felt that this was a separate family from any other kinships inside Caeravorn.
At the head of the long table sat Mòrag, the matriarch, as Claire saw it, her slim back ramrod straight despite the fact that she must be at least seventy-five, her wiry hair bound in a kerchief.
She never raised her voice and yet when she spoke, she was always heard and heeded.
She reigned here, Claire realized, as much as Ciaran ruled everywhere else.
Mairi had told Claire that Mòrag had served three lairds before Ciaran, was the longest resident of Caeravorn.
When trenchers were filled, the chatter picked up again, unguarded, full of gossip.
A laundress teased Evir about catching the eye of a young soldier in the hall last night—Claire had some vague recollection of that.
Evir turned pink, swatting Mairi’s arm, which only drew more laughter.
One of the boys mimicked the bark of Mungan, the Kerr captain, making the whole table laugh.
Mòrag rapped the table once with her spoon. “Mind yer tongues, bairns. The walls have ears.” But her eyes twinkled as she said it, and the laughter only softened, wasn’t silenced entirely.
“Ye’ll be needin’ new clothes,” Mòrag said, her gaze sweeping Claire’s gown with a sharpness that made Claire flush. “Should nae have gone to Last Plenty garbed in that.”
Claire nodded, properly chastised, but not brave enough to remind Mòrag or anyone else that she had but two outfits, both somehow procured by Ivy.
“Ye’ll nae last the winter in that rag.” Mòrag predicted. “I’ll see what can be done.”
As the meal went on, talk turned to Caeravorn itself—old stories of battles, of lairds long dead, of feasts and funerals in the very hall above.
Mòrag told them with relish, her memory sharp, her loyalty shining in every word.
Claire listened, rapt, seeing the keep not as cold stone but as something living, layered with lives that had come before.
“I mind the feast of St. Martin, near on twenty winters past,” Mòrag said, “when the beasts were slaughtered and the ale flowed like a river. The laird’s father—God rest him—sat at the head o’ the board, a man broad as two.
The hall was fair bursting that night, every crofter and shepherd from here to the sea wedged in to take their share.
Aye,” Mòrag went on, “and in the midst of it, when the pipers had all but lost their breath, his lady wife—our laird’s mother—rose to her feet.
Pale and bonny she was, but wi’ a will strong as iron.
She took the pipes from the lad’s hands and played a tune herself, clear and bold, until the whole hall was stamping and shouting.
Nae ever had I seen the laird beam so wide, nae the people so wild.
And when the meat was done and the ale near gone, she bade them open the stores again—said nae man, woman, nae bairn would leave Caeravorn hungry on her watch. ”
Mairi laughed, setting down her spoon. “I was but a lass, but I mind it well. We near rolled ourselves home that night, and the laird himself—at his wife’s behest—carried two men to their beds afore it was done.”
The table stirred with quiet amusement, the memory warm as firelight.
Claire smiled, struck by the image, trying to picture Ciaran’s parents presiding over such a feast. Yet it was difficult—her mind kept turning them into caricatures, figures of legend rather than flesh-and-blood people.
She tried to imagine them as living, breathing Scots, proud and capable, the kind of leaders whose presence filled a hall.
She wondered if they had been loving, as Mòrag’s anecdote hinted—his mother laughing among the people, his father carrying men to their beds at the night’s end.
If so, what had Ciaran’s childhood been like in their keeping?
It was hard to reconcile that picture with the man she knew now: brooding, guarded, and alone.
Did he inherit that solemnity from them, or had it grown in the void their deaths left behind?
Was the grim, iron-hard laird the boy their laughter had raised, or the one grief and war had shaped in their absence?
***
The next morning, Claire had nearly reached the door to the sick house when a voice called her name.
“Mistress!”