"Five winters, give or take."
She pressed along each joint, feeling the heat in them, the resistance. "Cold makes it worse."
"Everything makes it worse," he said. "Cold makes it insufferable."
She stood and found the salve and came back and began working it in. Slow deliberate circles, thumbs moving over each knuckle with the pressure that helped rather than aggravated.
Seumas held his hands still and watched her with the narrowed assessment of a man who hadn't committed to a verdict yet.
"The boy breathes better," he offered, after a minute. As if making conversation required significant effort.
"Aye."
"I've heard him less at night."
"Good. That's the treatment workin'."
He looked at the shelves again. Then back at his hands.
"Folk in the village are talkin'. About the herbs and the fox and what have ye."
"I ken."
"Doesnae bother ye?"
She kept her thumbs moving. "I've been doin' this twelve years. Folk talk the whole time. What bothers me is when children cannae breathe. The talkin' is background noise."
He absorbed this.
She felt the tension in his hands ease gradually as the salve worked, not quickly, but steadily. She waited.
He flexed his fingers. Once. Twice. Looked at them with the expression of a man who has found something where he expected nothing.
"Aye, well." The words came out grudging, admirably resistant to the evidence they were describing. "That's either fine healin' or dangerous magic."
"Rendered tallow, yarrow oil, and willow bark extract," she said.
He looked at her for a long moment. Stood with the careful dignity of a man who had not just been impressed against his will.
"Aye," he said, to nothing in particular, and shuffled out grumbling.
She watched him go and kept a straight face with moderate success.
He was back the next morning.
Before the first cup of water, before James's treatment, standing in the doorway with his hands in his sleeves and the same expression of a man arriving somewhere against his better judgement.
He had mud on his boots and a small piece of leaf caught in his beard that he appeared entirely unaware of.
"Joints," he said.
She looked at the leaf. Decided not to mention it. "Sit down, Seumas."
He sat.
She reached for the salve. And outside the window the morning was grey and cold and ordinary, and somewhere in the keep James was breathing steadily.
And this, she was beginning to understand, was what settled looked like, when it arrived quietly enough that you didn't notice it until it was already there.
