He looked at her for one more heartbeat. One heartbeat too many, he already knew it. Then he stepped past her, reached back, and pulled the door to James's room gently closed between them.
He held the handle a moment on his side of it. His forehead pressed against the cool wood, his eyes closed tight.
Then he let go, and walked the length of the corridor to his room, and did not look back, and lay down on top of the covers fully dressed and stared at the ceiling of his own room and thought about the way she had not stepped back. The silence of his room felt louder than ever.
He was still thinking about it when the grey of dawn came through the window. His heart was still beating a rhythm that had nothing to do with sleep, and the tension under his skin burned in places that had been silent so long he'd forgotten they could.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The laughter from the courtyard reached her before she reached the window. She paused in the corridor, her head tilting toward the sound as a flicker of surprise crossed her face.
She had been heading to the storeroom for more dried chamomile. James's evening preparation was the same as every morning. There was nothing remarkable about the errand.
And yet her feet had stopped.
The sound came through the stone before she'd consciously decided to stop. She felt a strange, light pull in her chest, the rhythm of the laughter unfamiliar in these walls.
She didn't recognize it at first.
It had the shape of laughter but the wrong source.
Not Mairi's bright chatter, not the men in the yard at their drills. Lower. More reluctant. She moved toward the light of the window, her brow furrowed.
Below in the courtyard, Anthony stood with mud on his boot and an empty watering pail in Seumas's outstretched hand. His shoulders were drawn up, his usual posture of command slightly skewed by the absurdity of the moment.
He stared at the turnip for a moment longer than was comfortable, then drew himself up.
Eidith had both hands pressed to her mouth, shoulders shaking. Seumas was on his knees in the dirt, making what appeared to be a formal apology to a waterlogged plant.
Catriona watched them, a small, involuntary smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
Anthony said something. She couldn't hear the words through the glass.
Seumas replied. Eidith's shoulders shook harder.
Daenae.
She felt it coming before it happened and told herself to look away, to go to the storeroom, to think about chamomile and James's evening preparation and anything else at all.
And then Anthony, the man who had ridden into the western glens and taken her from a cliff ledge. The man who stood at the head of his table, the man who had pulled that door closed between them three hours ago with a quietness that had sat in her chest like cold water.
That man's face did something she had never once seen it do.
It softened. The hard, guarded lines around his eyes crinkled, and the tension she'd come to expect in his jaw finally dissolved.
Not a smile, not quite.
Something underneath a smile. Something that belonged to a younger version of him, some version that had existed before whatever had taken it away.
Oh.
The word formed in her chest before it reached her mind.
She felt it the way she felt a change in the weather, before she could name it, before she could prepare for it. Her fingers spread flat against the cold stone of the window frame without her telling them to.
She was seeing it now, and she had not been prepared for it, and she could not look away. The sight of it sent a sudden, aching warmth through her.
The Dragon laughs.
