She had been twelve years old when they closed the world to her.
He pressed the thought down, though it fought him.
"The armor," he said, his voice unusually thick. "Does it hold?"
She looked at him then. Her green eyes were dark in the moonlight, searching his face with a terrifying intensity. "Some days better than others," she said.
Anthony nodded once, a sharp, jerky movement. He looked back at his blade, the steel reflecting the pale moon.
"Aye," he said. "I ken that."
They stayed in the garden for another hour.
Theshhh-shhhof his stone and the rustle of her basket were the only conversation they needed.
When she rose, she passed within two feet of him. He could smell the lavender and the cold on her shawl. He watched the east door close behind her and sat in the quiet, clutching the finished blade.
He had stayed.
Every instinct he possessed had told him to leave, to find a wall to hide behind, but he had remained in the conversation. He had chosen the weight of her truth over the safety of his silence. Hedidn't ask himself why. He simply noted it, the way he noted a change in the wind, and went inside.
Supper was loud enough that she almost missed it.
The messenger had been given a place at the lower end of the table, cleaned up now. A cup in his hand, talking to the man beside him.
She had not been paying him particular attention.
Then he said the name.
Moira.
He said it the way you said a place you'd passed through.
Aye, I came by way of Moira MacLeod's party on the northern road, near a dozen riders, fine horses.
He kept talking, and the man beside him nodded, and the conversation moved on without a seam.
She was reaching for the bread.
Her hand completed the reach. She tore a piece. She did not look at the head of the table.
She did not need to.
The quality of the silence from that direction was different.
Not loud. Not visible. The kind of change that happened in a room when one person in it went very still while everyone else kept moving. She had felt it before in sickrooms, the moment a body stopped fighting and the air shifted before anyone had looked up to check.
She looked up.
Anthony was cutting his meat. His face was exactly as it always was. Jaw set, eyes forward, expression giving away nothing.
Toonothing.
She had spent enough weeks reading him to know the difference between his ordinary closed expression and the one he wore when he was holding something down with both hands.
This was the second kind. The knife moved with the precise, controlled care of a man who had decided exactly how much force to use and was not going to deviate from it.
Fergus, to his left, had found something to study in his cup.
