The boy was awake, sitting propped against his pillows. He looked up when Anthony came in. His color was better than yesterday. Not much, but enough to notice, and enough to loosen something in Anthony's chest that had been knotted since morning.
"Ye're nae coughin'," Anthony said.
"I coughed this mornin'." James tracked Fox around the room. "She did the steam thing again. It helped."
Anthony pulled the chair from the corner, set it beside the bed, and sat. He did this without ceremony.
He'd sat in this chair more times than he could count over six years. Through fevers, through the bad nights, through the mornings when James's breathing had sounded like something tearing slowly apart.
He sat in it the same way each time. As if stillness were something he could offer when he had nothing else.
"Does it hurt? The steam."
"Nay. It's warm." James finally looked at him. "She talks to me while she does it. Even when I'm half asleep."
"What does she say?"
James thought about it.
"She tells me what the herbs are for. What they do." He paused. "She says me body already kens how to breathe, it just needs to be reminded."
Anthony looked at the window.
The shutters cracked two fingers, as they always were now. The air in the room lighter than it had been in years. Cooler, cleaner, the particular quality of air that didn't cost anything to breathe.
Six years.
Six years of that chair and that sound and that window sealed tight, and it took her four days.
He kept his face still. Set the thought somewhere he could examine it later, when he was alone and there was no one watching his expression.
"Do ye like her?" James asked.
Anthony looked back at him.
James was watching him with the unsettling directness he'd had since he was old enough to form questions.
There was no guile in it. There never was with James. Just the simple, devastating honesty of a child who hadn't yet learned that some questions were better left unasked.
He'll be a problem when he's older.
Anthony felt a brief warm flicker of something he didn't name.
"She heals ye well," Anthony said.
"That's nae what I asked."
"Aye. It is."
James considered this with the expression of a six-year-old who had decided not to argue the point out loud and was reserving the right to return to it.
Anthony recognized the expression. He'd been on the receiving end of it before. He'd also been the one making it, thirty years ago, at a man who was no longer here to see where it had ended up.
The boy has his grandfather's patience.
God help us all.
"Fox doesnae like Callum," James offered.
