He didn't look at her. "Folk talk."
She hummed. Let a beat pass.
"Fiery," she said thoughtfully, as if considering the word from several angles.
The corridor went dangerous-quiet.
He stopped.
She stopped a half-step after him. He didn't turn, stood facing ahead, and when he spoke his voice came out level and carrying, somehow managing to feel like every sharp gaze in the keep had been redirected her way at once.
"Another word," he said calmly, "and ye'll be healin' from the dungeons."
She drew breath in sharply.
And then, because the look on his face from the side was doing something around the jaw that she couldn't quite categorize, and because some part of her had made a decision before the restof her caught up, she closed her mouth. Said nothing. Faced forward.
For the briefest moment, the very corner of his mouth moved. The barest suggestion of something.
Did he just smile?
There and gone before she could be certain she'd seen it.
He walked on. She followed.
They stopped outside a door at the end of the upper corridor. Carved oak, older than the rest of the fittings, the iron handle worn smooth from years of use.
Anthony put his hand on it and didn't open it.
It lasted less than two seconds. Anyone else would have missed it.
But she was watching. The hand on the handle, still. A half-beat too long. The slight change in how he was breathing.
He's afraid.
Not of her. Not of the corridor. Of what was on the other side of this door.
She understood, suddenly and completely, that whatever she found in that room was the thing that had sent him riding into the western glens himself rather than dispatching a fourth set of men.
She said nothing. She didn't look away from his face.
He pushed it open.
The room was warm, close, the curtains drawn against the draft so that the light came only from the hearth. Amber and low, throwing soft shadows across the ceiling.
It smelled of lavender ash and something medicinal underneath, the remnants of remedies tried and failed. She catalogued it without thinking.
Yarrow. Elderflower. Something camphor-based, used too heavily.
The bed was near the hearth. Small.
A child's bed, built low, heaped with blankets despite the warmth of the room. And in it, barely visible beneath the layers, a boy.
She crossed the room before she'd decided to.
Healer first.Always healer first.
Everything else fell away the same way it always did. The locked room, the rope burns at her wrists, the man in the doorway behind her. Gone.
