Chapter 3: A Shared Quiet
The king’s bedchamber was a cavern of stone and shadow, the silence a heavy, living thing after the roar of the hall. A single tallow candle guttered on a chest near the bed, its weak light struggling against the dark and painting the woven battle scenes on the walls into looming, indistinct shapes. The bed itself was a fortress of timber and hangings, piled with furs that smelled faintly of peat smoke and heather.
Isabel sat within it, swallowed by its scale, her back against the carved headboard. A worn copy of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde was open on her lap, its familiar words a lifeline to a world that felt a thousand miles away. She had changed into a simple linen shift and a woolen robe, the fabric pulled tightly around her. Every sound from the corridor—a distant shout, the tread of a guard—made her muscles lock. She held the book so tightly her knuckles ached.
The door opened.
She didn’t look up, her eyes frozen on the same line she’d read a dozen times. The weight of his presence filled the room before he’d fully entered, displacing the air. She heard the soft thud of the door closing, the rasp of the bar being lowered. Her breath grew shallow.
He moved into the fringe of the candlelight. He’d shed his formal jacket and wore only his léine, the long linen shirt untucked, and his kilt. His feet were bare. He looked younger, and more tired, the fierce mask of the hall gone. He unbuckled the heavy leather belt that held his dirk and laid it carefully on the chest, the metal whispering against wood.
“You read.”
His voice was low, gravelly with the night and the ale. It wasn’t an accusation. It was an observation, tinged with what might have been curiosity.
She forced herself to glance up, her throat tight. “Yes, my lord.”
“Lachlan,” he said, turning to face her. “In here, it’s just Lachlan.” He ran a hand through his auburn hair, making it more unruly. “What is it?”
The question surprised her. “It… it is poetry. Chaucer. Troilus and Criseyde.”
He made a soft, non-committal sound and turned his back to her, beginning to unwind the long, woven length of his plaid. She quickly looked back at her book, her cheeks burning. The fabric whispered as it fell away. In the flickering light, his back was a landscape of old violence—pale, silvery seams across the muscle and shoulder, a deeper, rougher knot of tissue near his spine. The scars of a man who had never turned from a fight. He shrugged the léine off over his head, adding it to the pile, and stood for a moment in just his shirt, which hung to mid-thigh.
The mattress dipped profoundly as he climbed into the far side of the bed, keeping a clear expanse of fur between them. He settled against his own pillows with a heavy exhale, looking up at the canopy. The distance was a palpable relief, and yet it felt stranger than any closeness might have.
“Read some of it,” he said, his eyes still on the shadows above.
“My lord?”
“Lachlan. Read it. Aloud.” He turned his head on the pillow. The candlelight caught the green of his eyes. “I’ve heard of Chaucer. Never heard him. My Latin is for treaties. My Gaelic is for cursing. English poetry is… unfamiliar ground.”
It was a request, not a command. There was no mockery in it. He was simply asking. The sheer normality of it, in this most abnormal of situations, left her unmoored.
“It… it is about the Trojan War,” she began, her voice barely a whisper. She cleared her throat. “About a Trojan prince, Troilus, who falls in love with a woman named Criseyde, whose father has defected to the Greeks. It is a tragedy. Of betrayal. And loss.”
He was silent, listening. She could feel his attention like a physical touch.
“Why would a woman read a tragedy before sleeping?” he asked after a moment.
“I find it… comforting. To see that even great sorrow has been given shape, and words. It makes one’s own feel less formless.” The admission slipped out, unbidden. She tensed, waiting for a derisive comment.
Instead, he said, “Read the part that comforts you, then.”
Her hands trembled slightly as she found the passage. She had folded the corner of the page down long ago. The words were an old friends. She began to read, her voice gaining a little strength as she moved into the rhythm of the verse.
“‘O yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she, In which that love up groweth with youre age, Repaireth hom fro worldly vanitee…’” She translated the meaning instinctively as she went, her voice soft in the dark room. “‘Take heed of this, take heed of my penance, and learn from it…’”
She read for a few minutes, the ancient story of doomed love and political machinations weaving through the cold Scottish air. When she paused, the silence felt different. Softer.
“He loses her,” Lachlan stated. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. She is sent to the Greek camp. She betrays him. He is killed in the war.”
“So it’s a story about a fool.”
Isabel looked up, startled. “No. It is about the fragility of love amidst the schemes of men. About fate.”
He shifted, the furs rustling. “It’s about a man who loved something he couldn’t hold. A woman caught between two worlds, who chose the one that promised safety. Sounds less like fate and more like poor judgment on all sides.” He spoke without malice, with a kind of weary pragmatism. “My life has been full of such stories. They rarely end well for the fool in love.”
She closed the book slowly, her fingertips resting on the worn leather. “Do you believe love is foolish, then?”
For a long moment, he didn’t answer. The candle flame jumped, casting his profile in sharp relief—the strong brow, the line of his nose, the stern set of his mouth. “I believe duty is solid. Love is… mist. It obscures your path. Makes you weak where you must be strong.” He turned his head to look at her directly. “Your father understands that. He trades in solid things. Lands. Titles. Loyalties. He sees people as pieces on a board.”
The mention of her father was a cold splash of reality. She pulled her robe tighter. “And what am I, on this board?”
His gaze was unflinching. “You are a bridge. Bridges can be crossed. Or burned. Or defended.” He paused. “I do not burn what is mine.”
The words should have felt possessive, cold. Instead, they felt like the slice of honeyed boar placed on her plate—a simple, stark claim of protection. However impersonal its origins.
“You defended it tonight,” she whispered. “The bridge.”
A faint, almost imperceptible frown touched his brow. “I defended my hall. My rule. And the woman sitting in the chair of my queen.” He said it as if correcting a minor error in a report. “They are, for now, the same thing.”
For now. The words hung there. The candle was dying, the pool of light shrinking, drawing the darkness closer around the great bed.
“You should sleep,” he said, his voice gruff. He turned onto his side, his back to her once more, a solid, scarred wall in the dimness. “The days ahead will be long. For both of us.”
Isabel carefully set the book on the chest beside the bed and slid down under the furs, blowing out the final candle flame. The room was plunged into absolute black, the kind of dark only ancient stone could hold. She lay rigid, listening to the sound of his breathing, steady and deep. She could feel the residual heat from his body across the space between them.
In the swallowing dark, her father’s voice was loud in her memory. Weak stomach. Weaker will. Fat as a Christmas sow. She squeezed her eyes shut.
Then another voice, low and controlled, cutting through a feast-hall roar. The food from my table is not for your disposal.
And another, quiet in the dark. Read the part that comforts you.
It wasn’t comfort she felt. It was a terrifying, unraveling confusion. The monster of her childhood tales lay an arm’s length away, and he had asked for poetry. He had called her my queen not with flourish, but with fact. He had scars from defending things, and he seemed to include her in that grim catalog.
Sleep, when it finally came, did not find her thinking of Troy, or of her father’s cold eyes. It found her listening to the rhythm of a stranger’s breath, and wondering, against all reason, if a bridge could ever become a home.