He was smart enough to say nothing.
"Herb room," Anthony said, already turning toward the gate. "Her worktable. Leave them there and come away." He pulled off his muddy gloves as he walked. "Say nothin' about where they came from."
"And if she asks?"
"She willnae ask."
He knew this with certainty.
She would find the herbs, identify them correctly, within about ten seconds. Know exactly where they'd come from and under what circumstances, and she would say absolutely nothing about it.
Because she was the kind of woman who absorbed information quietly and drew her own conclusions without needing anyone to hand them to her.
Thatwas the part that irritated him.
Not that she was sharp. Sharp, he could work with, sharp was useful.
It was that she never gave him the satisfaction of reacting. Never pushed back when he expected it, never let him see what she'd filed away or what she'd decided.
She simply knew things about him now that he hadn't chosen to give her, and she carried them without comment, and he had no way of knowing what she intended to do with any of it.
He'd understood that about her before the end of the first day. He had not yet decided whether it was a problem.
He crossed the courtyard as the keep came to life around him.
Men moving at the far end, the clang of the smithy starting up, smoke rising from the kitchen, the smell of bread cutting clean through the cold morning air.
Ordinary sounds. His sounds, the sounds of a household running as it should.
He listened through all of it for the one sound he always checked first.
From the upper east wing, thin, but there. James. Breathing.
He stopped in the middle of the courtyard and counted the rhythm without appearing to count anything.
Steadier.
Marginally, measurably steadier. The kind of improvement that meant nothing on its own and everything in the right direction. He'd stopped letting himself think the wordhealeda long time ago. It invited too much.
But better than yesterday, that he would take. That he allowed himself.
He stood there with mud on his boots and his empty hands at his sides and the cold of the morning moving around him.
Something in his chest loosened by a fraction.
Daenae.
He told himself immediately.
She was working. The boy was steadier. That was the whole of it. Nothing more than that and he was not going to make it into anything more than that.
"Fergus," he said. "The herbs."
"Already goin', me Laird." Footsteps, moving away toward the keep entrance.
Anthony turned toward the hall.
He had a full morning of actual work waiting. Correspondence from MacLennan, the matter of the northern pasture boundary, two men in the yard who needed their assignments reviewed.
