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Callum came in high and fast. Evander caught the blade and turned it, but Callum was already moving, already spinning out of reach, as though he’d known exactly where that parry would go.

Because he had. He was his man-at-arms, after all.

She saw it with a slow, sickening understanding. They’d trained together for twelve years. Every feint Evander made, Callum answered before it landed. Every opening Callum found, Evander closed a heartbeat before the steel arrived.

They moved around the small room like two halves of the same dance, crossing and recrossing. Archer’s cradle rocked on its legs when Callum’s hip struck it, and a jug of water went over and shattered across the floorboards.

Freya stepped back, watching the fight with bated breath. The slightest wrong move could end Evander’s life.

“Ye’re slow,” Callum panted. “All those nights in a soft bed⁠—”

Evander said nothing. He hadn’t said a word since the fight began. His face had gone utterly still, the way it had on the road, a door shut from the inside.

Callum swung his blade. Freya cried out as it scored a line across Evander’s forearm.

Red bloomed through his torn sleeve. Evander didn’t even glance at it. He stepped forward instead of back, inside Callum’s reach where there was no room for the long blade, and drove his shoulder into the other man’s chest.

Callum staggered backward. His heel came down in the spilled water, and he slipped.

It was only a moment. Only the smallest stumble on a wet floor. But Freya had grown up with a brother who fought, and she knew that a moment was all it ever took.

Evander’s sword went in beneath Callum’s ribs.

The room went silent. Callum looked down at the blade, then up at Evander. His mouth opened, and what came out was almost a laugh.

“There,” he whispered. “There he is.”

Evander caught him as his knees gave way. He lowered him to the floor, not gently, not roughly either, and knelt beside him with one hand still on the hilt. He bent his head close.

“Ye should never have threatened me family,” he said, so softly that Freya barely heard him.

Callum’s eyes stayed on his face a moment longer. Then they stopped seeing anything at all.

Freya didn’t know how long she stood there. Long enough for the light to shift across the wall. Long enough to notice she was shaking so hard the doll’s button eye was rattling against her collarbone. She couldn’t make it stop. She couldn’t make anything stop.

Evander rose. He drew his sword free and laid it on the floor beside the man he had once called his brother. Then he turned to her.

He didn’t say anything. He unpinned the plaid from his shoulder, stepped over the spilled water, and wrapped it around her, all six yards of his clan’s wool, the same wool she’d stolen from him at the inn. He folded it close under her chin with hands that were bloodied and yet perfectly steady.

No one had ever wrapped her up so carefully, and she felt cherished down to her bones.

“Come away, lass,” he murmured. “Daenae look.”

He turned her, his arm firm around her shoulders, and steered her out through the broken door so that his body was between her and what lay on the floor. She let him. She didn’t have it in her to do anything else.

Footsteps pounded up the stairs. Jack appeared at the top, his sword drawn, with two MacArthur men behind him. He took one look past them into the nursery and went gray.

“Jack,” Evander said. “See to this.”

“Aye, me Laird.”

He paused. “I should have trusted ye more.”

Jack held his gaze for a moment. Then he nodded once.

Evander turned back to Freya.

Her legs had stopped feeling like they were her own. She was aware of the cold stone under her feet, of the rag doll still crushed in her fist, of Evander’s arm around her like an iron bar, but it seemed to be happening at a distance. It was as if she was watching another woman go through this.