Smoke rose from three cooking fires, the smell of it carrying salt and fat and something sweet underneath, bannocks on a griddle somewhere close.
Life.This is what life sounds like when it's not holding its breath.
The keep had a life of its own, she knew that. But it was a held life, a careful one, a household moving around a grief that had never fully been named.
This was different. This was ordinary and loud and entirely unconcerned with her.
For about a minute.
Then a woman near the first stall noticed Fox.
She stepped back. Not dramatically, a single step, the kind that happens before the mind has finished the thought.
She pulled the child beside her slightly closer with one hand. Her eyes moved from Fox to Catriona and something moved across her face. Not fear exactly, not yet, but the particular wariness of someone who'd already heard a story and was now deciding how much of it to believe.
Catriona met her eyes. Nodded once, easily, the way she moved through every village where she wasn't yet known.
I see ye. I'm nae asking anything of ye.
The woman's child twisted around to look at Fox. "Ma, is that a fox?"
"Aye," the woman said. "Come on."
Twenty years.And it's always the same shape.
She knew the rhythm of it.
The caution first, then the watching, then if she stayed long enough and helped enough people, the grudging acceptance.
Some places moved faster than others. Some never moved at all. She'd learned to read which was which within the first hour of arriving, and she'd learned to stop expecting it to hurt and simply work with what was there.
It still carried weight, though. She'd stopped expecting it not to.
Further in, the market thickened around them. More stalls, more bodies, the noise becoming something you moved through rather than heard.
A wool merchant caught her eye and held it, assessing.
A girl of perhaps twelve stared openly at Fox with her mouth slightly open and an expression of pure delighted disbelief until her mother noticed and redirected her attention with a firm hand on the shoulder.
Two older men near the grain stall looked up as she passed. She felt their gaze on her back for several paces after.
A woman with a basket of turnips stepped out of a doorway ahead, saw Fox, and stepped back in.
Then, from the other side of the square, a voice. "Miss Campbell."
She turned.
A young woman was crossing toward her, walking quickly. Plain dress, fair hair, a child on her hip.
She looked familiar in the way people looked familiar when you'd seen them once in poor light and worried circumstances.
"Agnes," Catriona said, placing her.
The fever case. Three weeks ago, her son.
"Aye." Agnes stopped in front of her, slightly breathless.
The child on her hip regarded Fox with enormous eyes. "I just, I wanted to say. Robbie's been right as rain since ye came. Nay fever since. He's eatin'." She shifted the child slightly. "I wanted to say thank ye. Properly."
