"She recognizes them," someone said.
"She admits it," said another.
Don't show them fear.
Old knowledge, learned young, learned at cost.
Fear is what they're looking for. Daenae give them the shape of it.
She lifted her chin and looked at the crowd and found every face she recognized in it.
Donal, not meeting her eyes. Two of the kitchen lads at the edge, pressed back against the wall. Seumas, somewhere in the middle, with an expression she couldn't read from here. And on the steps of the keep, raised above it all, Moira MacLeod stood with her hands folded and her face arranged in something that looked so much like sorrow that Catriona, who had been watching her since supper, almost believed it.
Almost.
There it is.
There's the shape of it. There's the thing ye've been building since ye arrived.
The elder's voice rose again, measured and solemn. "An investigation must be held. For the safety of this glen, and all who live within it."
"Witchcraft."
She didn't know whose voice said it first. It didn't matter. The word was in the air, and the air had been waiting for it, and what happened next happened the way these things always happened. Fast and loud.
Hands closed on her arms.
She didn't fight. She had learned, early and at cost, that fighting confirmed what they believed and gave them permission for what came after.
Then Fox hit the first guard's shin like a thrown stone.
He went for the hands holding her first, and when those hands pulled back.
He turned on the second guard with a sound she had never heard him make in five years of knowing him. Not the fox she had pulled from a trap in the western glens, patient and clever and content to steal bread and dignity in equal measure. Something older than that. Something that had decided.
He twisted out of the first grasp, was seized by the second, and held, still snarling.
Catriona heard him and could not do anything about it, and that, more than the hands at her wrists and the iron that followed them and the word still ringing off the courtyard stones, was the thing that closed her throat.
She looked at the road through the gate. The empty track that ran north toward the ridge where Anthony had ridden before first light.
He doesnae ken.
He's out there, and he doesnae know, and by the time he returns, it will already be decided.
The iron bit at her wrists. She lifted her chin.
She had been here before. Not these walls or these faces, but this place, this specific geography of a crowd that had found a direction for its fear and aimed it at the nearest woman who didn't quite fit.
She had been twelve years old the first time. She had survived it then by running.
She was not running now.
The crowd pressed in.
Moira MacLeod watched from the steps, and Catriona stood in the middle of it all, wrists bound. Fox's voice was somewhere behind her, and she kept her chin up, and gave them nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY
