The guards moved.
Moira went with them.
She did not look back, which was the last composed thing she did, and it cost her. Catriona could see it in the set of her shoulders as she crossed the courtyard, the rigid and deliberate straightness of a woman using everything she had left to leave with dignity because everything else was gone.
The crowd stepped back to let her through. Not with hostility now. With the quiet discomfort of people who had been part of something and were beginning to understand the shape of what they'd been part of.
The gate closed.
Anthony turned.
He crossed the courtyard to Catriona and stopped in front of her. He looked at the iron at her wrists, and something moved in his jaw, a single tight contraction, there and gone.
He held out his hand to the nearest guard without looking at him, and the guard, who had been paying close attention to the previous ten minutes of his laird's activities, produced the key immediately.
Anthony took it and crouched in front of her and put the key in the lock and turned it. The iron opened, and he caught it before it could fall and set it on the ground.
He straightened.
Her wrists were marked red where the iron had sat. He looked at them. Then he took her right hand in both of his, turned it over, and ran his thumb along the inside of her wrist. Not a caress, not quite, but something more careful than clinical, following the line of irritated skin with a deliberateness that had nothing to do with assessment, and both of them knew it.
She did not pull away.
"The healer," he said, to the courtyard, to the crowd, to the council elder, to whoever needed to hear it and file it somewhere permanent, "stands under me protection." He did not let go of her hand. "And under me trust."
He looked at her then, directly, and his expression had none of its usual management in it. Just his face, present and unguarded in the grey afternoon light. "Are ye hurt?"
She looked at him.
Her throat had been doing something complicated for the last several minutes. She had been managing it by not thinking about it, and she could not quite speak yet, so she shook her head once,and watched something in his shoulders come down a fraction, and gripped his hand back, and did not care who saw it.
"Good," he said quietly. And did not let go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
He got her out of the courtyard before the crowd finished deciding what it felt about everything that had just happened.
That is the priority.
Not the council, not Moira's riders still assembling at the gate, not Fergus, who was already moving to manage both.
Her.
Out of the courtyard and away from the faces that had been shoutingburn hertwenty minutes ago. And were now wearing expressions of collective, uncomfortable regret, because collective, uncomfortable regret still had eyes, and she had been standing in iron long enough.
He put his hand at her back, and she moved with it without argument. Which told him more about how she was doing thananything she would have said, because Catriona Campbell did not move with anyone's hand at her back without argument.
They crossed the courtyard through the gap the crowd made for them. It made the gap quickly and quietly, which was the correct response, and came out through the inner gate to where his horse still stood, reins trailing, sides heaving from the hard ride down from the ridge.
He had pushed the animal harder than he should have.
I would do it again.
He turned to her and put his hands at her waist and lifted her up onto the horse before she had time to form a position on whether she wanted to be lifted.
She made a soft, startled sound, and her hands closed around his arm for balance as the horse shifted its weight beneath her. He felt the grip of her fingers through his sleeve, and swung up behind her, and took the reins, and turned them toward the keep.
The ride was short.
