She had looked once.
Once was enough.
She was not going to be found looking a second time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
He came in at a gallop and pulled the horse up hard at the courtyard entrance. The sound of it, iron shoes on wet stone, the animal's sudden violent halt, cut through the crowd noise the way a blade cut through rope.
Clean. Immediate. Final.
Nobody had told them to go quiet. They just did.
Anthony dismounted without hurrying. That was the thing Catriona registered first. The deliberateness of it, one hand on the pommel, one boot finding the ground, then the other. The full unhurried weight of him arriving in the courtyard as though he had all the time in the world and intended to use it exactly as he chose.
Mud darkened his boots to the knee. His jaw was set. His eyes moved across the assembled crowd in a single sweep, touchingeach cluster of faces in turn, and the clusters that had been loudest a moment ago found somewhere else to look.
Fergus came in behind him, and behind Fergus came two men Catriona didn't recognize. Behind them, on a lead rope, a shepherd in a wet wool coat who was trying very hard not to show that his legs were shaking.
Anthony's gaze found her.
One second. No more.
It moved across her face and down to the iron at her wrists and back up, and whatever he felt about what he saw, he kept behind his back teeth. Then he turned to face the courtyard and the crowd and the council elder who was already stepping forward with his hands raised in the manner of a man preparing to explain himself.
Anthony looked at him.
The elder's hands came down.
"When I returned to me keep," Anthony began.
His voice carried to every corner of the courtyard without him raising it, which was somehow worse than shouting, the way a very still dog was worse than a barking one.
"I learned the healer had been taken in me absence." He let that sit for a moment. "Taken. In chains. In me own courtyard. On evidence presented to me council while I rode me own land."
His gaze moved across the crowd again, slower this time, and the people it landed on shifted their weight. "So before I returned here, I investigated the accusation meself."
"Me Laird." The elder stepped forward again, finding some reserve of official courage. "The evidence was presented in proper form. The council acted within its power."
"I didnae ask what the council did," Anthony said. "I'm telling ye what I did. Ye'll have yer turn."
The elder closed his mouth.
Anthony turned his head slightly. "Seumas."
Old Seumas detached himself from the edge of the crowd. His movement was slow and deliberate, showing his joints hurt, but deciding the pain was worth it today.
He came forward and stopped beside Anthony and squared his shoulders and looked at the assembled crowd the way he looked at the soil when he was displeased with it, which was to say with profound and personal affront.
"Tell them what ye told me," Anthony said.
Seumas pulled in a breath through his nose.
"Three days past," he said, his voice carrying the rough authority of someone who had been in this clan since before half the people present were born, "I was in the upper herb garden. Early. Before the household was up."
He paused, his eyes finding Moira's maid at the edge of the crowd. A young woman with a pale, pinched face who had gone very still. "I saw her. Carryin' bundles from the store near the healer's worktable. I asked her what she was about." Another pause. "She said they were prayer tokens for the chapel. I had nay reason to doubt her." His jaw tightened. "I have reason now."
The murmuring that moved through the crowd had a different quality to the earlier noise. Less certain. More uneasy, the sound of people beginning to recalculate.
