"Aye," she told him, her voice muffled in his fur. "I ken. Me too. I'm happy I'm here."
She set him down.
Fox turned.
He crossed the chamber to Anthony with the purposeful directness he usually reserved for unguarded plates of meat, and walked straight into Anthony's shin, pressing the full weight of his narrow head against it for a moment. Then turned and trotted out of the open door and disappeared down the corridor without looking back.
Anthony looked at the empty doorway. Then at Catriona.
"Did yer fox just thank me?"
"He has his own way of doing things," she said.
She was at the worktable, her hands moving over her herb jars in the automatic, settling way she had when she needed something familiar under her fingers. Her cloak was still on, still dripping.
He came into the room and closed the door.
She turned at the sound of the latch and looked at it, and then at him, and there it was again. That expression he couldn't fully read, the one with too many things in it.
He watched her clock the closed door and make her calculation and arrive at the other side of it.
"Ye could have left that open," she said.
"Aye," he agreed.
A beat.
"Anthony."
"I'm stayin'," he said. Plain and simple, the same way he'd learned to say the things that mattered. "If ye'll have me."
She looked at him for a long moment. Outside, the rain kept coming, and the fire in the chamber had burned low, and the room held the particular stillness of a place that was waiting to see what happened next.
"Ye're drippin' on me floor," she said.
"I am."
"And ye rode yer horse into the ground gettin' here."
"His legs are fine. I checked."
Her mouth moved. Not quite a smile yet. Something that was thinking about becoming one. She turned back to the worktable, reached up to the hook behind it, brought down a dry cloth, and turned back and held it out across the space between them.
He crossed the room and took it, and her hand didn't move back when his closed over it.
They stood like that for a moment, him holding the cloth and her still holding the other end of it, and he looked at her face, and she looked at his.
"So tell me, little fox," he said. His voice came out low and rough-edged, the way it came out when he'd stopped managing it. He watched something in her face go very still. "Will ye marry a dragon?"
The question sat in the chamber between them, exposed, stripped of the armor that the teasing words had tried to give it and somehow no less naked for them.
She looked at him.
He held her gaze and did not look away and did not backfill the silence with anything, just let the question stand there in the firelight with all its vulnerability showing, because she deserved that. She deserved a man who could say the thing plainly and then stand in front of it without flinching.
Her breath caught.
Her eyes went bright again, and this time the brightness came with the corner of her mouth pulling despite itself.
