Catriona ate what she could manage, which was not much, and excused herself before the table cleared. She walked the corridor to her chamber with her shoulders straight and Fox at her heel, and did not let her jaw unclench until the door was closed behind her.
She lay in the dark and listened to the storm and thought about the way Moira had paused. The precision of it. Nothing about that woman was accidental.
Unnatural.
She had heard the word before. Had heard it in a dozen different voices in a dozen different places over a dozen years. From people who had watched her heal a child's fever in a single night and decided the speed of it was suspicious. From people who had been grateful first and frightened after, which was always the worst order.
She knew what the word meant when it was spoken in that particular tone. She knew what it was the beginning of.
She pressed her palm flat to her sternum and breathed through her nose and told herself it was nothing. Told herself Anthony had dismissed it. Told herself the clan knew her now.
Aye,keep telling yerself that.
Fox pressed his chin to her ankle.
She reached down without looking and found the warm, solid weight of his head and held it until her breathing settled. The fire burned low and the storm kept doing what it was doing outside, which was everything it could.
Morning came grey and wet.
Anthony had risen before first light to oversee repairs to the cattle shelters on the south side of the estate.
She had heard his boots in the corridor, knew them still, without having decided to, and had listened to them fade down the stairs and out of the keep, and had lain in the dark afterward staring at the ceiling.
The lungwort on her worktable was gone. She needed more, and the market at the village edge would have it, and the walk was short, and the walls of the keep that morning felt like what they were.
She wrapped her cloak, took her basket, and went.
The market was thin in the rain.
Stalls with their awnings lashed down against the wind, vendors who had decided the weather was worth enduring and set their jaws accordingly.
Catriona moved through it with her hood up and her head down, the kind of purposeful efficiency that discouraged conversation. She found the lungwort at the second stall, traded a prepared salve for more than she needed, and was wrapping it into cloth when the man appeared at her elbow.
She heard him before she saw him.
A hesitation in the foot traffic, the specific pause of someone who had been waiting for a moment rather than arriving at one.
She turned.
He was unremarkable in the way that some people were unremarkable deliberately. Medium height, weathered, the kind of face that looked like every face and none in particular. His left arm was extended toward her, sleeve rolled to the elbow, displaying a wound along the forearm.
She looked at it.
Shallow.
The edges were too clean for an accident. Too deliberate in their length. The kind of cut that knew exactly what it was doing and had been careful not to go deep enough to matter.
"Healer," he said. Flat. Rehearsed-sounding. "Would ye take a look?"
Everything in her that had been trained across years of practice, that had learned to read the difference between a man in pain and a man performing pain, said,
Something is wrong here.
She could not name the specific detail. Just the low, persistent certainty of it, the same instinct that had once told her to leave a village three days before the fever arrived.
She treated it anyway. Because he was in front of her and the wound was there, and she was a healer. And refusing treatment to a man who asked for it was not something she knew how to do, regardless of what her instincts were saying at the back of her mind.
She cleaned it. Applied lavender oil. Bound it with a strip of clean linen from her basket, neat and tight and proper.
