She hit the cobblestones and rolled, pain cracking through her hip and elbow, and was already pushing to her feet before anyone had processed what had happened.
The outer ridge path. Twenty feet. If she reached it, she could escape.
"After her!"
She ran. Flat out, arms pumping despite the raw ache at her wrists, heading for the narrow gap between the gatehouse wall and the outer stone where the path curved away toward the ridge.
The wind hit her face and for one single moment it felt like enough, like the hills beyond the walls were still reachable, still hers.
His hand closed around her arm. Absolute and immediate.
He pulled her back against him and she felt the full solid fact of him at her back, immovable as the wall three feet to her left.
She fought. She kicked back, struck his forearm with her elbow, twisted against his grip with everything her body had. None of it moved him.
"I will nae be caged!" she spat.
"Ye are already in me lands." His voice came from just above her, even and unhurried. "And in me care."
Care.
She stopped fighting.
Not because the word softened her, because it made her so furious she needed a moment to decide what to do with it. She stood rigid in his grip and breathed through her nose and said nothing.
Every part of her still wanted to run. The gap between the gatehouse and the outer stone was still there, still measurable, still possibly enough. She calculated it once more, fast and honest, and arrived at the same answer she didn't want.
Not today. Not like this.
He released her.
She stepped forward and turned to face him, putting distance between them because she needed it, not because she was composed enough to deserve it.
This was the first time she'd looked at him straight, in full light, without fury or motion blurring the picture.
He was broader than she'd registered on the ledge.
Not merely tall but built like something the Highlands had made deliberately, shoulders that had carried weight for years and showed it.
A jaw that hadn't softened with authority the way some men's did. The scars ran down the left side of his face and throat, old and settled, the kind that had long since stopped being wounds and become simply the shape of him.
Brown eyes, darker than she'd expected. Steady in a way that was not calm exactly, but absolute.
She had treated men who looked like they'd been forged. He looked like he had been.
His expression was closed. Not angry, not satisfied. Just watching her the way he'd watched the path: ahead, steady, accounting for terrain.
She looked away first.
Around them, the courtyard had come alive.
Servants gathered along the edges with the particular posture of people who want to watch something but don't want to be caught watching it.
Younger faces burned with open curiosity. Older ones watched with the guarded caution of those who'd seen enough arrivals to know that new things inside these walls always meant something. A kitchen lad had stopped mid-step with a bucket in each hand and simply stood there, mouth slightly open.
The fox walked past all of them with his nose lifted, tail high, entirely composed.
“A fox, inside the keep?”
