She moved toward the door.
Behind her Anthony hadn't moved from the wall.
She paused with her hand on the frame and looked back at him. Standing there in the amber light with his arms still folded tight across his chest and his expression still controlled. Watching his nephew breathe, jaw set, eyes fixed on the boy's chest as it rose and fell.
She didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that wasn't already in the room.
She stepped out into the corridor and pulled the door almost closed behind her.
Outside, the servants had gathered in a loose cluster a respectful distance away, waiting, watching. She could already hear it starting to move through them in murmurs, low and swift.
The healer had come. The Dragon had brought her. The boy's breathing had eased.
She walked back toward her chamber and said nothing to any of them.
But something had shifted in the weight of the keep around her, small, fragile, like a door opened onto a room that had been sealed a very long time.
She'd felt it before. It was what happened in a house when hope came back in.
CHAPTER FIVE
"Who told ye to open those?"
The maid stood in the doorway of James's chamber with a pile of fresh linen pressed to her chest and an expression caught squarely between alarm and apology.
She was young, fair-haired, round-faced, the same one who'd gone soft-eyed over Fox in the courtyard on the first day.
"Nay one," Catriona said, without looking up from the boy's breathing. "I told meself."
"But the cold, Miss, the Laird always says the room must be kept closed."
"The Laird says many things." She adjusted the shutter she'd eased open. Two fingers of gap, no more, enough for the air to move without sending a draft across the bed.
"Right now his lungs need air that isnae thick with peat smoke and four people's breathin'. So they'll have it."
The maid set the linen on the chest at the foot of the bed and hovered in the particular way of someone who wanted to object further but hadn't yet decided it was worth the cost.
Catriona looked at her properly. "What's yer name?"
"Mairi, Miss."
"Mairi." Bright eyes, thoughts moving visibly across her face before she could organize them.
The kind of girl who knew everything that happened in a household and couldn't help sharing it. Catriona had met a dozen like her over the years and found them, on balance, genuinely useful. "Are ye any good in a sick room?"
Mairi straightened immediately, the way people did when they were offered a thing they'd wanted to be asked.
"Aye. I helped the old healer sometimes. Before the fever took her last winter."
"Then stay." Catriona turned back to her satchel. "I need to ken what's in the stores and where they're kept, and I'd rather have it told to me than spend half the mornin' findin' out by wanderin' the keep and annoyin' everyone I meet."
Mairi's face opened into something approaching delight.
"The stores are in the lower corridor, off the kitchens. There's dried lavender, nettle bundles, some sage I think, and there was a jar of something brown and earthy that Cook keeps for the stew, but I suspect isnae for the stew."
"Lungwort?" Catriona asked.
A pause. "I daenae think so, Miss. I wouldnae ken what that looked like."
