That casual “Oh, love,” caught him unexpectedly in a tender place, and he coughed to hide it.

“Nothing,” he said, shrugging. “Only, when I was young in Paris, a fortune-teller told me I’d die nine times before my death. D’ye think I should count the fever after Laoghaire shot me?”

She shook her head definitely.

“Nay, ye wouldna have died even had Claire not come back wi’ her wee needle. Ye would have got up and gone after her within a day or two.”

He smiled.

“I might’ve.”

His sister made a small noise in her throat that might have been laughter or derision.

They were silent for a moment, both with heads lifted, listening to the wood. The dripping had ceased now, and you could hear a treepie close by, with a call exactly like a rusty hinge opening. Then there was a loud quah-quah as a bird called from somewhere behind him, and he saw Jenny look up over his shoulder wide-eyed.

“Is that a magpie?” she said. In the Highlands, you always listened for magpies, because they were omen birds—and if you heard one, you hoped to hear another. One for sorrow … two for mirth …

“No,” he said, reassuring. “I dinna think there are proper magpies in these mountains. That’s no but a kind of yaffle. Aye—see him there?” He nodded, and she looked over her shoulder to the grayish bird with a scarlet slash at its throat, clinging to a swaying pine branch, a beady eye fixed on the ground.

Jenny relaxed and drew breath, and, taking up the conversation where she’d left it, asked, “D’ye hold it against me, that I made ye marry Laoghaire?”

He gave her a look.

“What makes ye think ye could make me do anything I didna want to, ye wee fussbudget?”

“What the devil is a fussbudget?” she demanded, frowning up at him.

“A bag of nuisance, so far as I can tell,” he admitted. “Jemmy calls Mandy that.”

A sudden dimple appeared near Jenny’s mouth, but she didn’t actually laugh. “Aye,” she said. “Ye ken what I mean.”

“I do,” he said. “And I don’t. Hold it against ye, I mean. She didna actually kill me, after all.”

One of the goats squatted, a few feet away, and let fall a dainty shower of neat black pellets. They steamed briefly, and he caught the oddly pleasant warm scent for an instant before it vanished in the chill.

“I wonder how it is goats are so neat about it,” Jenny said, watching, too. “Compared with coos, I mean.”

“Och, ye’d want to be asking Claire about that,” he told her. “If it’s a matter of innards, she kens nearly as much as God about it.”

Jenny laughed, and he realized belatedly that he’d seen no goat droppings at all in his survey of the meadow. She hadn’t been bringing her nannies up here regularly, then. And therefore … she’d come after him a-purpose. She had a thing to tell him, maybe, in private.