"Aye," Anthony said.
Nothing more followed.
He did not offer the contents, and no one dared ask for them. Around the table, conversation resumed.
Donal muttered something about the north pasture grain stores. Someone answered with a forced, hollow nod. The meeting continued, a ghost of its former self.
Anthony looked at the folded letter and thought about nothing at all. It was a discipline he had spent six years building, a hollow space in his chest where he stowed things that could not be killed.
It served him now as it always served him, completely, and at a considerable cost.
The whispers reached the kitchens by midday, moving faster than the draft through the stones.
Anthony knew they had arrived because Mairi's face, when she passed him in the corridor with a heavy tray of bread, had the particular strained quality of someone physically struggling not to vomit up a secret.
She pressed her lips into a thin, white line and kept her eyes on her boots. It told him everything. It told him Eidith knew. It told him the whole keep had already swallowed the news like a bitter tonic.
Lady MacLeod rides the northern road.
He heard the name twice more before the sun touched the horizon. Once from two clansmen near the training yard who choked on their words the moment they registered his heavy footsteps. And once from a kitchen lad who turned beet-red and found an urgent need to be in the cellar.
He let it run. Rumor was like a gorse fire, if you tried to stamp on it, you only carried the sparks on your own soles.
But there was another sound and gossip, quieter and more jagged, moving through a different channel.
Tam, the kitchen lad, had woken three nights running from the same dream. A red fox at the foot of his bed, watching him. Still as a grave marker, amber eyes unblinking in the dark. Just watching.
He heard it from Fergus, who had heard it from Donal, who had heard it from the trembling boy himself.
"Daenae repeat such nonsense," Anthony said, his jaw tightening so hard it ached.
"I'm nae repeatin' it for the sake of a tale, me Laird. I'm reportin' it because the lad is terrified," Fergus countered.
"Same thing. It feeds the rot."
Fergus stayed silent for a moment, his gaze drifting to the window.
"There's more. MacNab's cow. The one that was fresh last week." He paused, his voice dropping an octave. "Found her this mornin' in the tall grass. Cold. Nay mark of a wolf, nay sickness in the gut. The men are saying it's witchcraft."
"I ken what the men are sayin'." Anthony's voice was level, but it had the edge of a claymore. "I also ken that cows die in autumn and dreams are the product of too much ale and a twelve-year-old's fright. Are we clear, Fergus?"
Fergus met his eyes, searching for the man beneath the Laird. "Aye, me Laird. Clear as glass."
"Good. That's all."
It was all.
Anthony told himself that firmly as he watched Fergus leave. He told himself until it almost felt like certainty.
But as he turned back to the cold stone wall of his study, the silence of the keep felt heavier, as if the building itself were holding its breath, waiting for a blow to fall.
By evening, the keep had settled, but the quality of the quiet was different. It was the silence of a household listening for a footstep on the stair without admitting they were afraid of who was walking.
Anthony found himself in the kitchen garden after supper without entirely having decided to go there.
The night was still, the wind soft enough to be a ghost's breath, carrying the scent of turned earth, damp peat, and the sharpening edge of winter. A half-moon sat low over the eastern wall, casting a pale, sickly light across the stone paths.
He had brought his short blade. It needed work, the edge had nicked during the last patrol.
