"Aye," Anthony said. "It has."
Eidith stepped forward, and the party moved toward the guest wing. The hall began its slow return to ordinary noise, but Catriona became aware of Mairi at her shoulder, practically vibrating with the weight of her observations.
"She looked at ye," Mairi whispered, her voice a thin thread. "When he said yer name."
"I noticed."
"And he looked at ye first. Before he said it. Did ye notice that?"
Catriona picked up the candle she'd set on the side table. "Goodnight, Mairi."
"Catriona."
"Goodnight."
She walked back toward the corridor, and Fox fell in at her heel.
She kept her pace even and her face forward, refusing to think about the warmth along her jaw that had still not entirely left. She refused to think about a woman with pale hair and dark eyes looking at her with a smile that was a construction of war.
She thought about James's morning treatment. She thought about the elecampane steeping in the blue jar. She thought about the rain, which was still coming down, making the courtyard cold.
She thought about all of those things.
She tried not to think about the way Anthony's voice had sounded when he welcomed her. She did not think about the horses in the yard. She did not think about the particular quality of Moira MacLeod's look, not hostile, but assessing. The look of a woman who had walked into a room and identified, without effort, the single thing in it that required her attention.
Fox paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at her, a low whine in his throat.
"I ken," she said. “It's nae going to be easy this time.”
She picked up her candle and went to bed.
The rain came down on McArthur all through the night. In the morning, Moira MacLeod would still be there, and Catriona was going to be entirely fine about that.
I'm certain about it.
She was almost certain of it.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The storm arrived without warning.
One hour the sky was the flat, colorless grey that had sat over McArthur for three days.
The next, the wind came off the northern ridge like something with intention, driving rain horizontal against the keep walls, rattling the shutters in their iron brackets, finding every gap in the stonework that six generations of MacArthurs had failed to seal.
By nightfall, the courtyard was a river.
Catriona stood at the narrow window of her chamber and watched it and thought about the roads. About the passes. About the particular quality of Highland mud after sustained rain, the way it swallowed cart wheels and held horses' hooves and turned a two-hour journey into something that couldn't be done at all.
Moira MacLeod is not leaving.
She had known it before the storm.
Had felt it in the careful way the woman moved through the keep, the way her eyes tracked doorways and faces and the small geography of a household still learning what it was. Polite. Impeccably so. And thorough in the way that politeness, when it was a tool rather than a habit, always was.
She is counting things.She has been counting since she arrived.
She turned from the window.
