He stepped back, turned and pulled the door closed behind him.
The lock turned.
Catriona stood in the center of the chamber and listened to his footsteps move away down the corridor and then to nothing at all.
Her wrists ached where the rope had been. Her hip ached where she'd hit the cobblestones. Her ribs had something to say about the landing as well.
She breathed through all of it systematically, the way she'd learned to breathe through things. Start with what's physical, what can be measured and catalogued, and set aside. Physical, she could manage.
She had come here for a child.
A sick boy, six years old, breathing poorly his whole short life, while his uncle ran out of options one by one. That was the fact of it, stripped of the drama and the rope and the courtyard spectacle.
She was a healer. There was a child who needed her. That part was uncomplicated.
Everything else was a problem to be solved.
She crossed to the window and looked out.
Courtyard below, guards settling back into their routes. She counted without meaning to, six visible, two more near the gatehouse.
The portcullis lowered now, iron teeth set into stone. Beyond the outer wall, the hills rolled away dark under evening cloud, the tree line a black edge against grey sky.
The wind pushed through the narrow gap in the glass. Cold. Sharp. It smelled of heather and rain and open ground. The ache it produced in her chest was sharper than her hip, sharper than her wrists.
She pressed her palm flat against the stone beside the window. Cold seeped into her hand, and she let it, focused on it, used it.
He thought walls held things. He didn't understand that everything she was had been built in the open, you couldn't cage what had never been tamed.
She looked at the gate below. At the path beyond it. At the ridge she'd almost reached.
"Ye'll nae keep me," she said quietly. Steady. Certain.
The wind answered through the glass.
She stood there a moment longer. Then asked herself honestly whether the certainty in that statement was about the gate, or about the fact that she could still feel, with unreasonable precision, the exact place on her arm where his grip had been.
She turned away from the window before she had to answer that.
She set her satchel on the table and began to take stock of what she had.
The boy first.Everythin' else after.
It would have been easier to believe if the warmth of his hand wasn't still branded into her skin.
CHAPTER FOUR
“It's time.”
The command came a second before the knock. At dawn.
Not a servant's knock, tentative, apologetic, the kind that hoped you might not answer. This one landed twice, flat and certain, and then the door opened before she'd fully sat up.
She was on her feet while reaching for the small knife she kept in her boot in one motion. It was pure reflex, but then she stopped.
Anthony stood in the doorway.
In full daylight, he'd been imposing.
