Anthony took a small step back. "Yer joints?"
"Bad."
"Have ye spoken to the healer?"
A pause in the digging.
Seumas sat back on his heels, looked up at him. "She gave me a salve last week," he said, grudgingly. "For the hands."
"Did it help?"
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Aye," Seumas said, in the tone of someone making a significant confession. "Quicker than expected."
Anthony nodded. Said nothing further. Seumas went back to his soil.
Good.
He kept moving.
She was working her way through the keep one reluctant person at a time, and she hadn't asked for his help to do it. He found he couldn't decide whether that relieved him or unsettled him, and arrived at the conclusion that it was probably both.
He moved on, completing the circuit of the yard, nodding to men who caught his eye, stopping twice to address small matters that required a decision. A dispute over patrol rotation, a question about the grain store.
He handled both quickly and kept moving.
On his second pass, he stopped near the training ground, where Callum and two of the younger lads were running drills.
Callum was a capable soldier.
Anthony had no complaint about the man's sword arm. His mouth was a different matter, and lately it had developed a particular quality he was watching.
As if sensing the attention, Callum looked up. Straight at Anthony. Then, deliberately, toward the gate.
"She'll be back before dusk, then," Callum said. To the man beside him, not to Anthony. Not quite loud enough to be a direct address. Exactly loud enough to be heard.
The yard went a degree quieter around them.
There it is.
Anthony looked at Callum with the particular quality of attention that had, over ten years, replaced the need for most spoken warnings.
He let it sit for a full five seconds. Long enough for Callum to understand that the comment had landed, had been heard, had been assessed, and had been found wanting.
Callum's sword arm continued its drill. But the man's jaw had tightened.
"When ye've finished those drills," Anthony said, even and unhurried, "ye can run the south ridge patrol. Both ways."
Callum looked at him. Understood. "Aye, me Laird."
Anthony walked on.
The irritation settled under his ribs and stayed there, low and steady, the kind that wasn't about one man's loose mouth but about what it signaled. The shape of something larger forming, slowly, in the keep's undercurrent.
He'd need to stay ahead of it.
He went up to James in the late afternoon.
