“Aye, lass.”
Then she hurried off to serve the rest of the table and smiled at Coinneach as she passed him on her way to the kitchen.
“Are you feeling well enough to serve on guard duty today?” Aodhan asked Coinneach.
“I am.” If he had been in the barracks asleep, he might not have heard Tamhas’s wolf’s cry of distress. Though with his wolf hearing, he might have.
Once they had finished their meal, the chief and his family left the high table, and as everyone was leaving the great hall, Coinneach told Aodhan that he would join him soon.
Drustan caught up with Coinneach. “Are you feeling well enough to work on the wall today?”
“Aye, I am.”
“If you feel bad, let Aodhan know, and you’ll retire to the barracks. I dinna want Blair to get after me for allowing you to work when you are injured.”
“Thank you, Drustan.”
“You, Aodhan, and Aisling did a good job.”
Coinneach didn’t want them to know he had been wounded just in practice fighting.
“Are you going to join Aodhan?” Drustan raised his brows.
Coinneach glanced at the kitchen.
“Aye, you have another mission first. Dinna make it a habit to sleep with Aisling in the barracks. The other men will want to bring other lasses into there,” Drustan said.
“She was only seeing if I was all right.”
“And stayed for the night.”
Coinneach smiled.
Drustan slapped him on the back. “Join Aodhan soon.”
“I will.” Coinneach hurried to the kitchen to give Aisling a kiss. When he arrived there, Cook and her assistants were eating their meal.
Smiling, Aisling rose from the bench and kissed him. “Remember what I said.”
“I will, lass.” He kissed her back, then looked around for Gormelia and saw her glowering at them. He gave her his fiercest battle look that told her to take care.
Gormelia quickly looked away, and then Coinneach said, “I will see you, sweeting, when I can.”
“At the next meal, if Cook will allow me to bring it to you.”
“Aye, then.” They kissed again, and then he left the kitchen, but gave Gormelia one last look that told her she would pay if she troubled Aisling further.
“You were sobrave when you went to Coinneach’s and Aodhan’s aid,” Nelly said, sitting next to Aisling. “I wouldna have been able to do what you did.”
Nelly and Aisling could have passed for sisters: Aisling taller by a hand, with a sweep of copper that caught every trick of the sunlight, and Nelly the more pocket-sized, her hair a light-red blond that bleached nearly white in summer, always messy, always half pulled back.
They even swapped shawls so often they forgot whose shawl was whose. Even today, Aisling thought Nelly was wearing one of her shawls, but she couldn’t quite remember.
They had known each other since they were barely walking, the kind of friendship that grew out of pack bonds, being the same age, living at the castle, and hungry curiosity, so that by the time they were fully employed in the kitchen, nobody could untangle the knots between their shared memories and their separate identities.
Aisling never said it out loud, but sometimes she watched the two of them reflected in the loch outside the castle walls—Aisling’s long limbs draped over a monolithic stone, Nelly curled into the seat of it like a cat—and felt sure they’d been born from the same mold, only the kiln had set them differently.
Nelly, always the one with a joke half-cocked, had a voice that could cut through a crowd, a laugh that started as a hiccup and grew louder as it rolled. Aisling’s voice was softer, deliberate; shespoke with the kind of carefulness that made people lean in to listen.
