Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Ye ken I'm meant to look subtle."
Fergus said it through his teeth after the third villager in as many minutes had slowed to stare at them. Or more precisely, at him, six feet of armed man-at-arms attempting to pass himself off as casual company on a market road.
"Then perhaps stop glarin' at everyone as though ye're expectin' battle," Catriona replied without slowing.
"Habit."
"Work on it."
He huffed. Fell back another half step. Within thirty seconds, he'd drifted forward again to exactly the same distance as before, apparently without noticing.
She decided not to mention it.
The road down from the keep followed the ridge before dropping into the valley where the village spread along both sides of the river.
She'd seen it from the east window for weeks. The smoke of it in the mornings, the sound of the bells on market days carrying up the hill. She hadn't been this close to it since they'd ridden through on the way to McArthur.
That felt like a different year. It had been less than a week.
Fox moved beside her on the road, nose working, tail up.
He had the particular alert quality he got when there was something new to assess, ears swiveling forward, each step placed with consideration.
She watched him and felt her own shoulders doing something similar, the loosening that happened when there was open sky above her and no walls close on both sides.
She hadn't realized how much the keep had been pressing until she was outside of it.
The village opened around them as they came off the ridge path, noise first, before the sight of it.
Wool merchants argued across a stall gap about weight and price, neither willing to give ground.
Children ran the gaps between adults with the liquid ease of small people accustomed to being ignored.
A fisherman shouted prices at the square with the volume and conviction of someone who believed repetition was persuasion.
Smoke rose from three cooking fires, the smell of it carrying salt and fat and something sweet underneath, bannocks on a griddle somewhere close.
Life. This is what life sounds like when it's not holding its breath.
The keep had a life of its own, she knew that. But it was a held life, a careful one, a household moving around a grief that had never fully been named.
This was different. This was ordinary and loud and entirely unconcerned with her.
For about a minute.
Then a woman near the first stall noticed Fox.
She stepped back. Not dramatically, a single step, the kind that happens before the mind has finished the thought.
She pulled the child beside her slightly closer with one hand. Her eyes moved from Fox to Catriona and something moved across her face. Not fear exactly, not yet, but the particular wariness of someone who'd already heard a story and was now deciding how much of it to believe.
Catriona met her eyes. Nodded once, easily, the way she moved through every village where she wasn't yet known.
I see ye. I'm nae asking anything of ye.
The woman's child twisted around to look at Fox. "Ma, is that a fox?"
"Aye," the woman said. "Come on."
Twenty years. And it's always the same shape.
She knew the rhythm of it.
The caution first, then the watching, then if she stayed long enough and helped enough people, the grudging acceptance.
Some places moved faster than others. Some never moved at all. She'd learned to read which was which within the first hour of arriving, and she'd learned to stop expecting it to hurt and simply work with what was there.
It still carried weight, though. She'd stopped expecting it not to.
Further in, the market thickened around them. More stalls, more bodies, the noise becoming something you moved through rather than heard.
A wool merchant caught her eye and held it, assessing.
A girl of perhaps twelve stared openly at Fox with her mouth slightly open and an expression of pure delighted disbelief until her mother noticed and redirected her attention with a firm hand on the shoulder.
Two older men near the grain stall looked up as she passed. She felt their gaze on her back for several paces after.
A woman with a basket of turnips stepped out of a doorway ahead, saw Fox, and stepped back in.
Then, from the other side of the square, a voice. "Miss Campbell."
She turned.
A young woman was crossing toward her, walking quickly. Plain dress, fair hair, a child on her hip.
She looked familiar in the way people looked familiar when you'd seen them once in poor light and worried circumstances.
"Agnes," Catriona said, placing her.
The fever case. Three weeks ago, her son.
"Aye." Agnes stopped in front of her, slightly breathless.
The child on her hip regarded Fox with enormous eyes. "I just, I wanted to say. Robbie's been right as rain since ye came. Nay fever since. He's eatin'." She shifted the child slightly. "I wanted to say thank ye. Properly."
"I'm glad he's well." Catriona looked at the boy.
Healthy color, bright eyes, chewing on the edge of his mother's sleeve with great concentration. "Keep him warm through the cold months. If the fever returns, willow bark tea, cool cloth, and send for me."
Agnes nodded. Hesitated.
Her eyes moved briefly to Fergus, standing his careful distance behind Catriona, then back.
"There's talk," she said, quieter. "About ye bein' up at the keep. Folks are sayin' the Dragon brought ye himself." A beat. "The Dragon's keep, is it where ye are now? Are ye, are ye well there?"
It was asked with a particular delicacy, the question underneath the question perfectly clear.
Is he keepin' ye there against yer will and if so what are we to do about it?
"I'm well," Catriona said. Simply. "The boy needs me and I go where I'm needed."
Agnes held her eyes for a moment. Then nodded, something settling in her face.
"Aye," she said. "Good." She shifted the child on her hip, touched Catriona's arm briefly, and moved away.
Fergus appeared at her shoulder. "Friend of yers?"
"Patient." She walked on. "There's a difference."
He huffed quietly. "Is there?"
She didn't answer.
But the exchange had shifted something in the weight of the square around her, she felt it, the slight rebalancing of attention.
Agnes had spoken to her in plain sight of half the market. That carried its own message, whether Agnes had intended it or not.
"Ignore them," Fergus said quietly. He'd moved up beside her without appearing to decide to do it.
"I am."
"Aye." A pause. "Ye're very good at it."
"I've had practice."
He was quiet for a moment. Then, with the measured tone of someone offering something they'd decided to offer, "They fear what they daenae understand. That's all it is."
"I ken." She kept her eyes forward. "I'm accustomed to it."
"Aye." Another pause, longer.
She heard him glance toward the hill, the keep visible from here, sitting dark against the grey sky. "But the Laird doesnae."
She said nothing. Her steps slowed, just fractionally, before she corrected it and continued toward the far side of the square.
She did not examine what that meant. She was here for lungwort.
Iona's stall occupied the sheltered corner where the square met the church wall. A practical position out of the direct wind, with the kind of established permanence that said this woman had been here for years and intended to remain.
Bundles of lavender hung from the frame above. Dried nettle, sorted by grade. Roots wrapped and labelled in a hand that knew what it was doing.
The arrangement had the order of someone who respected their materials.
Catriona looked at the stall before she looked at the woman.
Then she looked at the woman.
Iona was perhaps fifty, broad-built, with the unhurried stillness of someone who had nothing to prove and knew it.
She was watching Catriona approach with the particular expression of a practitioner watching another practitioner enter their space. Measuring, calibrating, not yet decided.
Fergus peeled away to a discreet distance without being asked. Catriona gave him credit for the instinct.
"Iona." She set her basket on the edge of the stall.
"Catriona," Iona said it like she'd already known the name. "I'd wondered when ye'd come by."
"I had a patient."
"Aye. Ye did." Iona's eyes moved to the basket, the salves and dried bundles Catriona had brought to trade.
She picked up the nearest salve jar, removed the cloth seal, and smelled it. Said nothing. Replaced the seal and set it down.
"Yarrow and comfrey," Catriona said. "For joint inflammation. The base is rendered tallow, nae lard, it holds better in cold."
"I use lard."
"I ken. It works well enough. The tallow holds the active compounds longer in low temperatures." She said it without apology or emphasis, the plain exchange of information between people who both knew the subject. "It's a small difference."
Iona looked at her. Then at the jar.
"Aye," she said, in a tone that neither agreed nor disagreed, and set it to one side in the way of someone putting something away for later consideration.
They moved through it, herbs traded, questions exchanged with the testing quality of a professional interview neither of them acknowledged as such.
Iona asked about her compounding method for chest complaints. Catriona answered directly.
Iona asked about the steam treatment. Catriona explained the rationale, the humidity loosening the congestion, the compound in the water working on the inflamed tissue directly.
Iona listened without commenting, which was, Catriona was learning, Iona's version of paying close attention.
"The lungwort," Catriona said finally. "I have none and I need it. Do ye have any, or do ye ken where I might find it growin' near here?"
Iona reached under the stall without comment and produced a wrapped bundle. "I have some." She set it on the surface between them. "For the boy's lungs?"
"Aye. It's the third stage of the treatment. The steam clears, the elecampane strengthens, the lungwort maintains."