Fergus's expression, when she glanced at him, had closed completely. Not hostile, sealed. The face of a man who had identified the line and planted himself on it.
"Best ye ask the Laird that yerself."
He stepped ahead then, a deliberate half-stride that ended the conversation as firmly as any locked door.
She let it go. She had enough to carry up the hill.
The keep grew larger as they climbed.
She looked at it differently now than she had on arrival. Not as walls and gates and obstacles but as a place that held something, the way a wound holds what made it.
The east wing where James slept. The study where Anthony worked in the evenings. The courtyard where ordinary life went on around a grief that nobody addressed directly.
Because he survived fire when others didnae.
She thought about the scar she saw along his jaw. About the half-second pause before he opened James's door every single time, the one he didn't know she'd noticed.
About the quality of his stillness during the bad night. Hands at his sides, doing absolutely nothing, which for a man like him was the hardest possible instruction.
She walked through the gate and went upstairs and told herself she was thinking about the treatment.
She was, partly.
The rumors arrived the next morning through Mairi, who came with the breakfast tray and the expression of someone who had been collecting information since before sunrise.
"They're sayin' ye burn herbs at night," she said. "That the smoke from yer window smells like nothin' natural."
"It's camphor and dried thyme."
"And that the child breathes easier because of somethin' ye put in the air."
"That's actually correct."
"And," Mairi set the tray down carefully, "That Fox watches the doors at night like a spirit."
Catriona looked at Fox, who was watching the door, then looked back at Mairi. "He can hear things in the walls. Mice, probably."
"I'm just sayin' what they're sayin'."
"I ken." She reached for her cup. "Let them say it. James is breathin'. That's what matters."
Mairi gave her the look she used when she disagreed but had decided the argument wasn't worth the effort.
Then she left, and the rumors stayed in the room like smoke that couldn't find the window.
Seumas appeared in the herb room doorway after the morning treatment with his hands shoved into his sleeves and the expression of a man who had arrived somewhere against every instinct he possessed.
She waited. He looked at the shelves. At Fox. At the ceiling. Back at her.
"Joints," he said. Like a formal complaint filed with the wrong office.
"Sit down," she said.
He sat on the low stool with the elaborate care of someone whose joints were the exact problem under discussion.
She came around to him and crouched to his level and took his hands. The knuckles were thick with old inflammation, the skin tight, the kind that built over years of cold mornings in cold soil and never fully went down.
"How long?" she asked.
