"Agreed."
She glanced back at him, briefly, as if she hadn't expected that. "Ye agreed quickly."
"I want the boy well. Nae an audience."
She faced forward again. The fox moved below them, still steady, still unbothered, navigating the rocky ground as though it had made this journey a hundred times before.
Anthony kept his eyes on the keep in the distance and said nothing more.
She would argue again before they reached the gates.
He already knew it. She was the kind of woman who stored things up and came back to them, and she hadn't finished withthe wordtrialyet. He could feel it in the set of her shoulders, in the particular quality of the silence she was keeping.
He told himself that was why he was still paying attention to her. Because she was unpredictable. Because unpredictable things needed watching.
Not because the silence itself had a quality he couldn't quite name.
Not because he'd noticed, somewhere in the last two hours, that she smelled of pine resin and something green and faintly sharp - herbs, probably, always herbs - and that it was not unpleasant.
He fixed his eyes on the keep.
Two hours. Then walls. Then James.
One thing at a time.
CHAPTER THREE
“Nae bad.”
She smelled it before she saw it.
Peat smoke and cold stone and something older beneath both. The particular scent of a place that had housed generations of the same blood and absorbed them into its walls.
Catriona had been in enough keeps to know the smell of power. This was not the soft kind.
McArthur rose from the hillside the way mountains rose, like it had always been there and the land had simply grown up around it.
Walls the color of dark granite, towers squared and unadorned, gates of iron-banded oak that could stop a battering ram and looked like they had. No banners. No decoration. Nothing thatwasn't structural. Even from a distance it said the same thing in every direction.
Nothin' gets in that we daenae allow. Nothin' gets out either.
She understood it in a single sweep.
One look at the height of the outer wall, the spacing of the guards along the parapet, the weight of the gate mechanism even as it stood open, and she understood.
Once inside, she would not leave easily.
The men slowed around her as they approached the entrance.
The fox moved ahead, unbothered, already nosing toward the open gate as if he'd been invited. The horses filed through the arch one by one and the stone closed around them.
Walls on both sides, the arch overhead, cobbled ground underneath, and then they were inside the courtyard and the gate was behind her.
She moved.
She twisted hard in the saddle, drove her shoulder back into Anthony's chest with everything she had, and threw her weight sideways.
They went down together.
