"I ken." James folded his hands on the blanket over his lap. "I'm nae reaching." His knuckles were white from the effort of staying still.
"Ye are reachin' with yer face."
James looked at her. Then, with visible effort, arranged his expression into something he apparently considered neutral. His brow smoothed, and he tried to settle his features into a mask of indifference.
Fox, from the hearth, turned his head.
Catriona went back to the mortar.
She had learned, in the weeks since she'd come to this room, that Fox operated on his own schedule and his own assessments and interference in either was not appreciated.
He would do what he was going to do. You simply had to be in the right position when he did it. She watched from the corner of her eye, her breath held.
The grinding continued. James sat very still. Fox looked at the fire. Then at James. Then at the fire again. The only sound was the rhythmic scrape of stone on stone.
Then he stood, stretched with the elaborate thoroughness of an animal that intended the stretch to be noticed, and crossed the room.
He stopped at the foot of the bed.
James did not move. His eyes were wide, the pupils dilated with excitement.
Fox's nose came up. He sniffed the edge of the blanket. Sniffed James's folded hands. Sniffed the pillow.
Then, coming to a good conclusion, he stepped his front paws onto the mattress, turned around once, and lay down directly across James's legs.
James's face, the face that had been working very hard at neutrality, broke completely. A wide, toothy grin spread across his features, his whole body shaking with suppressed glee.
He grabbed a fistful of Fox's fur.
Fox's head came up sharply. His amber eyes fixed on James's hand, his nose sniffing. The room held its breath. Catriona's hands froze on the mortar, her heart hammer-fast.
Fox put his head back down.
James laughed.
It came out of him the way things came out of him. Suddenly, completely, without warning or apology. Bright and high and entirely six years old. Nothing guarded in it, nothing careful,just the pure, uncomplicated sound of a child who had been delighted past the point of managing it. The sound was like a burst of sunlight in the cold room.
It filled the room.
It went into the walls and the ceiling and the fire-warmed air.
It sat there, that sound, and Catriona's hands went still on the mortar. Her throat did something she was not going to examine, and she looked at the boy laughing in the bed with a fox draped across his legs. A lump formed in her throat, a physical manifestation of a pride she hadn't expected to feel.
There he is. There's the child that was in there all along.
She pressed her lips together hard. She felt a prickle of tears behind her eyes and blinked them away.
Fox went still for the second grab. His ears flattened once, then settled. He did not pull away.
James's laugh settled into something smaller and warmer, still there, still present. The kind of happiness that didn't need to announce itself anymore because it had already arrived. He stroked the fox's fur with a gentleness that made Catriona's chest ache.
"He's nae movin'," James said, with profound satisfaction.
"Nay," she said. Her voice came out steady. She was pleased about that. She cleared the huskiness from her throat.
"He likes me."
"He's made his position clear."
