“I will never be a pawn in someone’s scheme again,” Margot murmured. “I should sooner live in poverty, all alone, than live with others in opulence for no better reason than my name and the connections I can bring to them.”

“You are no’ only a name to me,” he said.

Margot didn’t seem to have heard him—she was suddenly looking around her. “I don’t know how to live like this,” she said plaintively. “I am so useless to you that I can’t as much as bake a loaf of bread.”

“It doesna matter—”

“It does matter, Arran! I’ve lived like a privileged blind woman. I despise myself for it—but I will never make that mistake again,” she said. She sighed. “I’m tired. Can we go to bed?”

They found one room with a bed large enough for the two of them. They both fell into it, exhausted beyond measure. Margot rolled into his side, nesting there. “I don’t know how to exist like this,” she said again.

Then there were two of them, because neither did Arran. He could hunt and fish and keep them alive, but he didn’t know how to exist like this. Without a clan. Without his family. Alone, with a wife who, in spite of the events the last several days, he still didn’t know if he could fully trust.

He fell into a deep sleep, the first real sleep he’d had in weeks. So deep, in fact, that he never heard Margot leave him early the next morning. But when he awoke, she was gone. Arran panicked; he pulled on his buckskins and went in search of her, looking in every room until he’d made his way to the kitchen, fearing she’d taken the horse and tried to leave like a madwoman.

But Margot hadn’t left him. She was in the kitchen, her back to him, dressed in the old skirt he’d found. It was far too big for her and dragged the floor. She had tied the lawn shirt in a knot at her waist and had tied her hair into a knot at her nape. She was working at something on the counter that he couldn’t see.

He walked deeper into the kitchen. She looked up with surprise, and her face lit with pleasure. “Look!” she said excitedly. “I found a potato!” She held it up to him. “There were turnips, too. And leeks, I think.”

Arran was, he realized, bowled over on a wave of relief. He’d had that awful thought that she’d left him again. Improbable, impossible, and yet that was the fear that had crept in around his heart when she wasn’t in bed this morning.