She reached across the small table, her fingers wrapping around his hand to reposition it on the pestle. She guided his grip lower, her skin warm against his calloused palm.
"Here. Flat. Let the weight of the stone do the work, not yer shoulder."
His hand went rigid under hers.
For a heartbeat, neither of them breathed. The heat from the brazier seemed to flare, or perhaps it was just the sudden proximity. She pulled her hand back quickly, her fingers tingling.
He tried again.
This time, the root gave way with a satisfying crunch, breaking down into a coarse, grey powder. She watched him find the rhythm. Not with ease, but with the stubborn, singular focus he brought to everything.
"What does this one do?" he asked after a while.
He held up a fragment of the half-ground root between two fingers, examining it as if it were a component of a siege engine.
"Valerian. For sleep. For the kind of pain that doesnae have a clean source." She glanced at it, then back to her own work. "Keep going, ye're only half done."
He resumed the circular motion. "And the one in the blue jar."
"Elecampane. Ye already ken that one. Ye pulled it from the east wall three weeks ago and left it on me table without a note."
The grinding stopped. Anthony looked at the jar, then at the wall. "I daenae ken what ye mean."
"Aye, ye do."
The grinding resumed, faster now.
Catriona did not look at him, but from the corner of her eye, she saw the corner of his mouth twitch, a ghost of a pull that was gone before she could be certain it was a smile.
They worked in silence for several minutes. The rain moved across the roof in a heavy sheet.
"It seems," Anthony said, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly register that vibrated in the small room, "the fact ye'll be leaving soon amuses ye."
He didn't look at her. He kept his eyes on the mortar, his hands moving in slow, deliberate circles.
"Nae amusement," she said, setting her own tools down. The word felt like a lie as soon as it left her throat. "Only relief."
He looked up then, his amber eyes searching hers. "Relief."
"Staying anywhere too long means becoming part of the masonry," she said, her voice steady even as her heart began a frantic rhythm against her ribs.
"And when things break, and they always do, eventually, the healer is the first one the mob looks to blame. I've seen the smoke from me own roof, Anthony. I've stopped being surprised by it." She reached for a jar, her movements stiff. "So aye. When the work is done and James is whole, I go. It's cleaner that way."
He was quiet for a moment. The mortar had gone still in his hands.
"Has it always broken?" he asked. "Every place."
She looked at him.
He was asking it the way he asked things he'd been turning over for a while, not casually, not to fill silence. She considered deflecting and decided against it.
"Every place," she said. "Some faster than others."
"And ye always saw it comin'."
"Usually." She picked up a dried stem and turned it between her fingers. "By the time folk start dreaming about the fox, I ken it's time to go."
His jaw shifted once. She watched him absorb that, the dreams Mairi had mentioned, the talk she knew had been moving through the keep like smoke through a gap. He had known she would hear it eventually.
