Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
“Nae bad.”
She smelled it before she saw it.
Peat smoke and cold stone and something older beneath both. The particular scent of a place that had housed generations of the same blood and absorbed them into its walls.
Catriona had been in enough keeps to know the smell of power. This was not the soft kind.
McArthur rose from the hillside the way mountains rose, like it had always been there and the land had simply grown up around it.
Walls the color of dark granite, towers squared and unadorned, gates of iron-banded oak that could stop a battering ram and looked like they had. No banners. No decoration. Nothing that wasn't structural. Even from a distance it said the same thing in every direction.
Nothin' gets in that we daenae allow. Nothin' gets out either.
She understood it in a single sweep.
One look at the height of the outer wall, the spacing of the guards along the parapet, the weight of the gate mechanism even as it stood open, and she understood.
Once inside, she would not leave easily.
The men slowed around her as they approached the entrance.
The fox moved ahead, unbothered, already nosing toward the open gate as if he'd been invited. The horses filed through the arch one by one and the stone closed around them.
Walls on both sides, the arch overhead, cobbled ground underneath, and then they were inside the courtyard and the gate was behind her.
She moved.
She twisted hard in the saddle, drove her shoulder back into Anthony's chest with everything she had, and threw her weight sideways.
They went down together.
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?”
She heard someone say.
He paused beside a young maid who'd frozen with a basket of linens pressed to her chest, sniffed once at the hem of her apron, decided she wasn't interesting, and moved on.
The maid let out a small noise somewhere between delight and alarm.
Catriona pressed her lips together.
Anthony noticed. His gaze cut sideways to her face and back so quickly she almost missed it, but she caught the moment. Saw him clock her almost-smile and file it away and return his expression to neutral with practiced efficiency.
She looked away first.
A woman came forward from the keep entrance.
Catriona had not seen her standing there, which meant she'd been still long enough to look like part of the architecture, which meant she was someone who knew how to watch.
Dark wool. Silver-threaded hair pinned tight. Posture like a blade set on its edge. Straight, sharp, not decorative.
"Me Laird." Her eyes went to Anthony first, then, immediately, completely, to Catriona. "Ye've returned."
Not a greeting. A report confirmed. "And this would be the healer."
Not a question either.
"Catriona Campbell," Anthony said before Catriona had drawn breath to speak. She noted that. Filed it.
"Eidith Murray." The woman inclined her head by precisely the amount the situation required and no more. "I keep order here."
It was the kind of statement that contained an entire conversation.
I see ye. I have nae decided about ye. Conduct yerself accordingly.
Catriona met her eyes directly.
"Catriona Campbell," she said again, her own voice this time. "I heal. And before ye ask, the fox stays."
Fox chose that moment to sit down beside her feet, curl his tail neatly around his paws, and look up at Eidith with the patient dignity of someone awaiting a verdict he already knew would go his way.
Eidith looked at him. At Catriona. At Anthony.
Anthony nodded once.
A pause.
"Then he stays."
Behind Eidith, a young maid - round-faced, bright-eyed, the kind of girl whose thoughts moved visibly across her face before she could stop them - was staring at Fox with something approaching reverence.
"He's beautiful," she breathed.
"He steals eggs," a man's voice replied from somewhere to Catriona's left.
The maid gasped. Fox's ear twitched.
"Inside."
Anthony said it to the courtyard generally but meant it for her specifically. He was already moving toward the keep doors.
Catriona looked at the gate behind her. Still open. Guards returning to their posts, relaxed now, the brief excitement settling. She looked at the ridge path through the gap in the gatehouse where the portcullis teeth hung overhead.
Twenty feet.
Almost…
She followed him inside.
The corridors were worse than the courtyard.
Stone floor, stone walls, low ceiling pressing down, torches in iron brackets throwing orange light that did nothing to reduce the sense of the walls moving closer.
Doors on both sides, most of them closed, and she had no idea what lay behind any of them. The keep's interior was a series of choices made by someone else: which way to go, when to stop, when to turn. All of them already decided.
No sky.
That was the part that sat wrong in her chest. A low, persistent pressure.
She'd slept under trees more nights than she could count. Had woken to wind and open air so consistently it had stopped being remarkable and simply become the fact of her life.
This was the opposite of that in every way.
She catalogued exits without appearing to. Two doors at the end of the main corridor, one smaller, possibly service passage. A stairwell on the right that went up. Windows at intervals along the left wall, too narrow to climb through and too far from the ground to make it worth the attempt.
Nae impossible. Just nae today.
Anthony stopped outside a door in the upper corridor and pushed it open. She stepped through ahead of him. She wasn't going to stand waiting to be ushered like someone's timid guest, and took in the room in a single look.
Simple. Stone. One window, narrow, set deep in the wall. A bed, a small table, a basin. No second door.
The window looked onto the inner courtyard, which meant the outer wall was behind her, which meant the view from here was guards and cobblestones and another forty feet of keep between her and anything resembling outside.
He stepped past her and untied her wrists. Slowly. She kept her eyes on the window while her hands came free, felt the cold air on skin rubbed raw by rope.
She rotated her wrists once and said nothing.
"If ye attempt to flee again," he said, voice low and steady at her back, "I will lock this door and keep the key."
She turned. "Threats suit ye."
He stepped closer, close enough she could feel his heat without touch.
"It is nae a threat." He held her gaze without effort, just held it the way he held everything, like it had already been decided. "It is a promise."
She wanted to tell him she'd been in worse places. She wanted to tell him a locked door was not the most frightening thing she'd survived, and he should know better than to think it would be.
She wanted to say something that would crack that composure just slightly and give her somewhere to put the anger that had been building since a waterfall and a cloud of blinding powder several hours ago.
She said none of it.
Because he was close enough that the warmth of him reached her without contact. And her breath, infuriatingly, traitorously, stumbled. Not from fear, not from anger, but from something she had no intention of examining.
A single missed beat, no more.
But he was looking directly at her, and the composure didn't change, and she knew with absolute certainty that he'd seen it.
That was the thing she couldn't stand.
Not the proximity. Not even the locked door ahead of her.
The fact that he'd seen it and done nothing with it.
Hadn't pressed, hadn't smirked, hadn't used it the way men like him usually used whatever small advantage they found.
Just filed it behind those dark, steady eyes the same way he filed everything.
She held his gaze anyway. She was not going to look away.
He stepped back, turned and pulled the door closed behind him.
The lock turned.
Catriona stood in the center of the chamber and listened to his footsteps move away down the corridor and then to nothing at all.
Her wrists ached where the rope had been. Her hip ached where she'd hit the cobblestones. Her ribs had something to say about the landing as well.
She breathed through all of it systematically, the way she'd learned to breathe through things. Start with what's physical, what can be measured and catalogued, and set aside. Physical, she could manage.
She had come here for a child.
A sick boy, six years old, breathing poorly his whole short life, while his uncle ran out of options one by one. That was the fact of it, stripped of the drama and the rope and the courtyard spectacle.
She was a healer. There was a child who needed her. That part was uncomplicated.
Everything else was a problem to be solved.
She crossed to the window and looked out.
Courtyard below, guards settling back into their routes. She counted without meaning to, six visible, two more near the gatehouse.
The portcullis lowered now, iron teeth set into stone. Beyond the outer wall, the hills rolled away dark under evening cloud, the tree line a black edge against grey sky.
The wind pushed through the narrow gap in the glass. Cold. Sharp. It smelled of heather and rain and open ground. The ache it produced in her chest was sharper than her hip, sharper than her wrists.
She pressed her palm flat against the stone beside the window. Cold seeped into her hand, and she let it, focused on it, used it.
He thought walls held things. He didn't understand that everything she was had been built in the open, you couldn't cage what had never been tamed.
She looked at the gate below. At the path beyond it. At the ridge she'd almost reached.
"Ye'll nae keep me," she said quietly. Steady. Certain.
The wind answered through the glass.
She stood there a moment longer. Then asked herself honestly whether the certainty in that statement was about the gate, or about the fact that she could still feel, with unreasonable precision, the exact place on her arm where his grip had been.
She turned away from the window before she had to answer that.
She set her satchel on the table and began to take stock of what she had.
The boy first. Everythin' else after.
It would have been easier to believe if the warmth of his hand wasn't still branded into her skin.