And the castle, which had been pressing cold stone on all sides since the first morning she'd walked its corridors, felt for one moment fractionally less like a cage. Her heart gave a strange, rhythmic thump of recognition.
"Ye've never seen him so before."
She startled. Her hand flew to her sternum, her pulse jumping beneath her palm.
Mairi stood two steps behind her, arms folded, her gaze on the courtyard below. Something in her stillness changed. Not much, just a settling, the way a person settles when they see something they had stopped expecting. There was a quiet knowing in Mairi's expression that made Catriona feel exposed.
"I didnae hear ye," Catriona said. She turned back to the window quickly, her face heating.
"Aye." Mairi's mouth curved slightly. "Ye were occupied."
Catriona looked back at the courtyard.
Anthony had handed the pail back to Seumas with what appeared to be a firm statement of policy about root vegetables, and was turning toward the hall.
But the set of his face was different. Not the locked expression he wore like armor, not the weight of the Laird. Something looser.
Something that was still almost there. She watched the way he walked, the usual rigidness of his spine replaced by a more natural, fluid stride.
"He seems different," Catriona said, before she could stop herself. The words felt heavy, a confession she hadn't meant to make.
Mairi hummed softly. "He was once."
Catriona glanced at her. Her eyes were searching, hungry for the story behind the change.
Mairi was still watching the courtyard, her expression quiet in a way it usually wasn't. Mairi, whose thoughts moved visibly across her face before she could stop them, Mairi who talked the way some people breathed, reflexively, without effort. This stillness was different. Deliberate. Catriona saw a shadow of old grief cross Mairi's features.
"What changed?" Catriona asked.
Mairi was quiet for a moment.
Down below, Seumas had returned to his soil. Eidith had uncrossed her arms and was moving back toward the keepentrance, still carrying the faint, contained warmth of a woman who had enjoyed herself more than she intended.
"Fire," Mairi said simply. "And loss."
She said it the way people said things they had grown up knowing. Not as revelation, just as fact, the kind of fact that had been part of the air for so long it required no explanation. The word seemed to chill the air between them.
Catriona waited. She kept her gaze fixed on Mairi, her hands curling into the wool of her shawl.
"His father," Mairi said. "His brother. His sister-in-law. His mother, later, the smoke took her lungs slow. He brought her back to the keep after and stayed with her until the end, which took longer than it should have and was harder for it." She paused. "He was twenty-five when he buried the last of them." Mairi's voice was a low, somber thread.
Catriona looked at the courtyard. Empty now except for Seumas, still on his knees, talking to the plants.
Twenty-five.
Running a keep and a clan and a grief that hadn't been named properly in six years, with a six-month-old child in the east wing breathing wrong. The numbers hit her like a physical weight, making her shoulders slump.
The chair beside the bed.
Every night for six years. The image of him sitting in the dark, guarding a child's breath, made her throat tighten.
"He guards more than walls now," Mairi said.
It wasn't a dramatic statement.
It had the quality of something observed and accepted. The same tone Iona had used on the road back from the market. The tone of people who had watched this man for years and had filed him under complicated and ours and left it there. Catriona nodded slowly, the pieces of the man finally beginning to fit together.
Catriona turned back to the window.
