Donal, three seats down, was talking about drainage. Loudly. With more investment in the subject than drainage had ever warranted.
She looked back at her plate.
She ate. She kept her face even and her breathing steady and she did not look at the head of the table again for the rest of the meal.
Mairi caught her on the stairs.
Not accidentally.
"Moira MacLeod," she said, without preamble.
Catriona kept walking. "What of her?"
"She was meant to wed him."
Mairi fell into step, her voice dropping to the register she used when the information was good enough to require discretion.
"Years ago, before the fire. Her father arranged it when the Laird was still his father's second son. Young, unmarked, the family intact behind him." A pause weighted with significance. "Then the fire came. His family died. The scars came with it." She letthat sit for one precise beat. "Her father sent word ofdifficulties.She was wed to MacLeod before the summer was out."
Catriona said nothing.
The stairs were cold under her boots. She counted them without meaning to.
Three. Four.
"He never spoke of it," Mairi continued, her voice quieter now, the gossip shading into something more careful.
"Nae once, to anyone. Fergus kens, I think. Eidith kens. The rest of us just ken the shape of it from what isnae said." She glanced sideways. "And now she's riding the northern road with a dozen horses and he's sitting at supper cutting his meat like he means it harm."
Five. Six.
Catriona reached the top of the stairs and stopped.
She had the full picture now, assembled cleanly.
The broken betrothal. The letter. The notation on the map Fergus had made in careful small letters. The way Anthony's thumb had pressed over something on the vellum when he thought no one was looking.
She left because of the scars.
The picture was complete, and she understood it entirely. She set it in its proper place with the efficient, systematic movement she used for all information that needed filing.
And then she noticed the other thing.
It was sitting beneath her ribs without having announced itself, low and uninvited, wearing no name she wanted to give it.
Not anger. Not pity. Something that had arrived during the telling and had not left with the end of it, something that had specifically to do with the name said at the supper table and the stillness it had made and the dozen riders on the northern road.
She recognized it in the same moment she decided she had no use for it.
That's enough of that.
"Thank ye," she said to Mairi. Even. Practical. The tone she used when a patient had given her the last piece of information she needed, and she was ready to work. "Go to bed."
Mairi looked at her for a moment.
"Aye," she said. "Goodnight."
She went.
