“Then let me begin as you did,” said Adaira. “My greatest aspiration was the same as yours. I wanted to join the guard and fight at Torin’s side. He was like an older brother to me, and ever since I can remember, I have yearned for a sibling. I saw how the guard were like brothers and sisters, like one united family, and I wanted to be a part of that comradery.
“But my father swiftly cut that dream away. It was too dangerous for me to join the guard. Being their only living child and heiress … there were many things I couldn’t do. My mum saw the anger in me and tried to ease it in the only way she knew how. She began to teach me how to play the harp. She thought I might find myself in the music, but while it calmed the storm in someone like you, Jack, it only deepened the resentment within me.
“I was young and full of spite, and I scorned the lessons she tried to give me. The music would not take to my hands, and all I could think of was the guard I was not able to join. It is the greatest regret of my life now. To think back on those years and how I wasted those moments with her. There are some days when I can hardly bear to look upon her harp, because I am seized by the desire to find a way to step back in time, to choose differently. If I could only speak to my younger self … oh, the things I would say to her. I never once imagined I would lose my mum so soon, and I long for those moments with her, for the music she once tried to give me.
“These things I share with you, Jack … they are like thorns in my mouth. I rarely speak of my regrets and my heartache. As a laird, I am not to dwell on such things. But I also know that to hold my tongue and remain silent is sometimes the greatest regret of all for our kind. So let me say this to you: a small part of me looks at you and sounds a warning. He will leave after a year and a day. He will return to the mainland, where his heart yearns to be.
“I tell myself I should remain guarded against you, even as we are fastened together. And yet another side of me believes that you and I could make something of this arrangement. That you and I are complements, that we are made to clash and sharpen each other like iron. That you and I will stay bound together by that which is nameless and runs deeper than vows, until the very end, when the isle takes my bones into the ground and my name is nothing but memory carved into a headstone.”
Jack stood. She had captivated him, and he needed a distraction before the truth spilled out of him. Before he confessed how his feelings for her were becoming entwined with everything—his dreams, aspirations, desires. He wanted to reassure her, to answer her without words, but first he walked to his bureau, where a bottle of birk wine sat.
He poured them each a sparkling glass. Her fingers were cold as they brushed his, accepting his offering. She didn’t remain seated but rose, so their eyes were nearly level, with little space between them. They drank to their wounds, their regrets, and their hopes, to the past, to how the choices each had made unknowingly brought them back together.
“My heart doesn’t yearn for the mainland,” he said at last. “I thought I told you, Adaira, that it’s safe to say I won’t be returning.”
“And yet you’ve told me from the beginning that the mainland is your home,” she countered.
Jack wanted to tell her that he had been withering away there, bit by bit. So infinitesimally that he hadn’t realized how faded he was until he returned to Cadence and found that he could set down roots in a place, roots deep and entwined.
Instead, he whispered, “Yes, but I once thought home was simply a place. Four walls to hold you at night while you slept. But I was wrong. It’s people. It’s being with the ones that you love, and maybe even the ones that you hate.” He couldn’t help but smile, watching how his words raced across her skin, making her flush.
Adaira set aside her glass. Her eyes were keen when she looked at him and said, “Do you know that I once hated you?”
He laughed, and the sound spread through his chest, warm and rich as the wine. “I thought we were telling each other things we did not know.”
“I was glad to see you leave that evening ten years ago,” she confessed. “I stood on the hill at dusk and watched you board the boat. I watched until I could no longer see you, and I counted it a triumph, for my old menace would no longer haunt the isle. I had defeated and banished you, and you would no longer steal my thistles, or feed me pimpleberries, or yank the ribbons from my braids. You can imagine my shock when I saw you weeks ago. After all this time when I had convinced myself that you were my nemesis, that I was destined to hate you even ten years later … I felt a portion of gladness again, but it had nothing to do with your leaving.”
Jack set his glass down and shifted closer to her. The wound in his arm was beginning to itch; it was healing swiftly, and soon this moment would be lost to them. He gently traced the golden light that danced on her cheek.
“Are you telling me that you were glad to see me, Adaira?”
“I was,” she said, and her breath caught beneath his caress. “I was glad to feel something stir within me after years of being cold and empty. I just never imagined I would find it in you.”
It was like she had stolen the very words from his mouth. And he wanted them back.
He brushed her lips with his own, a taunting kiss. She tasted like dark red fruit, like the summer berries that grew wild on the fells, and she took hold of his tunic and drew him closer until they were sharing the same sweetened breath. The air crackled as their raiment caught the static between them. Jack’s mouth was gentle as he drank her sighs and memorized her mouth. But all too soon he felt an obliterating ache in his chest. Dazed, he realized that he was overwhelmed by Adaira, by the feelings she roused within him. He wondered how something as soft as a brushing of lips could resound with such agony in his body.
She must have felt it too. She broke the kiss and released her hold on him, stepping away. Her face was composed, her eyes calm. But her mouth was swollen from his, and she rolled her lips together as if tasting a lingering trace of him.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
Jack merely stared at her, uncertain what sort of hunger she spoke of. Half a beat later, he was thankful for his silence, because Adaira said, “I think our next conversation will go down better with a plate of haggis.”
He had forgotten all about her initial intention to discuss the meeting with Innes. He watched as she strode to the door and sent a request with one of the servants to bring dinner up to Jack’s room. She approached his desk and took hold of it, inching it across the floor toward the hearth. She seemed to burn with endless energy, while he was utterly zapped and frozen, as if drunk from their kiss. But he joined her at last, helping her carry the table to the fire and their two chairs. His musical composition was still carefully piled on the polished oak. Adaira noticed it, and he saw that, while she couldn’t read the notes, she studied them intently.
“Is this your ballad for the wind?” she inquired in a careful tone.
“It is.”
“Nearly complete?”
“Not quite.”
He was relieved that dinner arrived then. He didn’t know if Adaira would forbid him to play the ballad. But his health was fine. He still suffered from bouts of headaches and throbbing fingers, but it would take many years for such symptoms to kill him.