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small straw bed, I said, “Congratulations, Arabella! But which man did you choose?”
    “I’m marrying Davy ,” she said, emphatically, as if I was daft to think otherwise. “But I didn’t have to choose,” Arabella added, meeting my eyes with mischief. “Neither Davy or Malcolm will insist upon it. I will marry Davy, but we will simply carry on together, all three.”
    I had never heard of such a thing. Such a scandalous thing. I didn’t see how it could possibly work. Two men and one woman—such things usually ended up in bloodshed. But as I had very little room to judge anyone else’s personal arrangements, I merely bit my lip. “Our father hasn’t given his permission…”
    “Davy says the laird’s permission is the only thing we need.” Arabella sighed a happy sigh. And I sighed with her, because in all the gloom and terror of living in a castle under siege, this was one bright spot.  
    Love, however unorthodox, in whatever shape it took…love was a beautiful thing, was it not? “When will the wedding be?” I asked, wondering how we would possibly celebrate such a thing with every meal rationed and every glass of liquor watered down.
    “Now that part’s a wee bit o’ a mystery,” Arabella said, her eyes widening conspiratorially. “Davy says he must do something for the laird and prove himself, and when he’s done it, then we may marry. He was slippery about the whole thing, and he was gone from the bed before dawn, so I haven’t had a chance to ask anything else.”
    I fought down my urge to scold her for so openly admitting that she shared a bed with a man who was not yet her husband, but I did the same thing, did I not? And unlike my sister, I wasn’t going to get a marriage from it. No, my sister, who had never wished for a respectable hearth and home was going to get one…of a sorts. Whereas I was going to be the laird’s harlot until he cast me off. And yet, it was only the last part that frightened me.
    “I have something for you,” Arabella murmured, a glint in her eye.
    “For me? But you’re the one who is betrothed this day!”
    “ Heather , did you forget your own birthday?”
    “Oh, that,” I said, blushing a bit. “A nineteenth birthday isn’t important.”
    “T’is important to me,” Arabella replied, and pushed up from the straw bed to rummage about in a trunk at the foot of it. She came back to me with a tiny glass vial. “The physicker doesn’t believe in the healing properties of rose oil—but I made some anyway and you might like it to scent at your pulse points.”
    She’d made for me a perfume. A fitting gift for my circumstances, and a thoughtful one too. I pulled the stopper and inhaled the scent, then sputtered with delight. “Oh, but it’s a beautiful scent! Do you want to try some?”
    “Get away with you,” Arabella said, pulling her wrist away with a laugh. “I’m no laird’s lady, swanning about, smelling sweetly, with flowers in my hair. I am more like to roam about smelling of pungent herbs with dried bark powder under my nails.”
    She took pride in it, I thought. In being useful. In having a place at the castle where she was valued as an assistant to the physicker. I envied her that more than anything.  
    I did my work at night, in the laird’s bed. But by day, I was lost.
    When the sun rose, everyone in the castle seemed to have useful work to do but me. The warriors repelled attacks, shot at any approaching boats, and kept watch over the enclosure against tests of our defenses. The castle staff went about their work. And even the villagers found ways of assisting by hauling water or seeing to it that ammunition was easily available to the men on the walls. And the guards kept watch over my laird and his larder.
    I was worried for my little siblings, far from my reach now. For most of my life, I’d been the mistress of my father’s cottage, tending to farm chores and to the little ones. Keeping them fed and clothed, since our