Cruel Snow

III. Geillis

Geillis MacDonald had not always loved her husband.

She had been barely out of girlhood when they had met, only weeks before they would be wed,  a marriage designed to strengthen the alliance between her father's clan and Clan MacDonald. Alasdair, of course, had purported to love her at first sight, for Alasdair had been rash and reckless back then, and she had been beautiful. But, she was dutiful, too. And it was out of duty, not love, that she had agreed to be his wife. In those days, they had called Alasdair MacDonald 'The Fox', and it was like a fox that Geillis' love for him had snuck up on her, so gradually and silently that she had not known it was there until she found found herself limp and powerless between its jaws.

Not much time passed before she found herself not only her husband, but their two boys as well. But, boys never remained boys for long. They all too soon grew stronger and taller than the mothers who bore them, if those mothers were lucky. Geillis knew many unlucky mothers who had lost their children to the cruelties of winter, of disease, and of war. She herself had been unlucky too many times to mourn for the little boys who had grown to become the young men she knew today.

Iain was the elder of the pair, named for his father's father, who had been chieftain of Clan MacDonald before Alasdair, just as Iain was expected to become chieftain after him. Such expectations always wore heavily on those who were burdened by them, and one would be forgiven for thinking that it was the weight of that burden that had made Iain the way he was: tight-laced, pensive, and analytical to the point of anxiousness. Geillis, as his mother, knew better than to think this. Her own husband had carried the load of impending responsibility that now fell to Iain, but until the moment that responsibility had truly been his, he had remained stubbornly carefree, drinking with the other young men of the glen and lifting cattle from the surrounding farmsteads with the gaiety of a boy from whom no one might ever expect anything at all.

To that effect, Iain may have been Alasdair's successor, but Sandy was Alasdair anew. Her younger son was tow-headed, but in all other respects, he had all the traits of The Fox when he was young, to the point that Geillis had called him The Cub when he was a bairn. Sometimes, she wondered whether God had refrained from passing on any of the fire in Alasdair's heart to Iain so that Sandy might have more than his own share of it. Either that, or when He had let her keep her firstborn, He had decided to give him more of her own cool, rational sense. No man cared to know that they had more of their mother's qualities than their father's, especially not one in Iain's position, so Geillis never told him this, but he was more her son than he was Alasdair's.

Unfortunately, though, Iain had not yet mastered his mother's greatest skill, that of convincing Alasdair to concede to her logic. Geillis' husband and son had been engaged in quiet quarrels for weeks, ever since Alasdair had announced his decision to wait for King James to release him from oath before swearing allegiance to the new King and Queen.

Silently, Geillis was inclined to agree with Iain, in spite of her wifely loyalties. Surely, the King to whom Alasdair had once pledged his allegiance was of less importance than the men who were still pledged to Alasdair himself, the ones who wore MacDonald heather in their brooches. These men constituted Clan MacDonald, the very clan that was Alasdair's to protect. His duty to them was far greater than that to the crown, a crown that barely understood the highlanders, and cared for them even less. But, it was futile, her saying this to Alasdair. The clan was his indeed, and so he would have no one tell him how he should lead it, certainly not his son, nor his wife. No, he needed to come to this conclusion on his own — or, perhaps, be pushed to reach this conclusion without ever realising that a hand had been steering him towards it all along.

Alasdair was the one they called The Fox, but Geillis was the sly one.

As the days slipped by, and Yuletide crept ever closer, she had laid her traps: the comments made so innocuously that her husband would not realise that they were strongly-held opinions, and ideas put forward so subtly that Alasdair believed them to be his own. But, it seemed that Alasdair's stubbornness had increased with age. December was coming to its end, and so too was the time remaining before it would be too late for any oaths to be made or broken, and still he had not changed his mind. Geillis was beginning to think that her efforts had all been in vain, that she and the men she loved so fiercely were all doomed. In desperation, she took to her last resort: prayer.