Chapter 8 #2
Iona was quiet for a moment, looking at the bundle. "The old healer used a two-stage method."
"I ken. It's a sound method." Catriona met her eyes. "I think he needs three."
Iona regarded her for a long, flat moment.
Then she named a price for the lungwort that was fair, and Catriona paid it, and the transaction was concluded without further negotiation, which was its own kind of agreement.
Iona began sorting through the remaining stock on her stall, unhurried, her hands moving with the automatic efficiency of long habit.
A silence settled between them. Not uncomfortable, the silence of two women who had said what needed saying professionally and were deciding whether there was anything else.
"The boy's mother," Iona said finally, to the herbs rather than to Catriona.
The tone of someone thinking aloud rather than making a statement.
"Margaret. She had weak lungs, ye ken. Since she was a girl.
Cold winters were hard on her." A small pause.
"The old healer always said the boy likely inherited the tendency. "
Catriona looked at her. "Is that common knowledge? In the village?"
"Those who were here then ken it." Iona turned a bundle over in her hands. "Those who werenae only ken the fire."
The way she said it, the fire, had a weight to it that the words alone didn't carry.
"What was the fire?" Catriona asked.
Iona's hands slowed. She set the bundle down with the deliberateness of someone choosing their next words carefully.
"Ye live in the Dragon's keep and ye havenae heard?" A glance sideways, half measuring, half something she was deciding how to handle. "Nay one's told ye?"
"I've been tendin' the livin'," Catriona said. "History hasnae been me concern."
"Aye." Iona hummed. Low, noncommittal.
She turned back to her stall.
Catriona waited. She'd learned already that Iona's silences had different qualities. This one had the quality of someone who had decided something and was working out how little of it to say.
"It was years ago now," Iona said at last. Her voice was measured. Careful. "A bad night. The lower wing of the keep caught. The family. most of them, didnae make it out." She paused. "The ones that did didnae make it long after."
Catriona held very still. "The Laird's family."
"Aye."
"How many?"
Iona looked at her directly for the first time since the subject had shifted. The measuring expression was back, sharper now, running a calculation Catriona couldn't quite read.
"That's all I'll say on it," she said. Quiet. Final. The door closing.
Catriona held her gaze for a moment. Then nodded once, accepting it.
"Thank ye," she said. "For the lungwort and for the rest."
"Aye." Iona turned back to her stall without ceremony.
Catriona gathered her basket and moved away.
The fire. The family.
Most of them didnae make it out. The ones that did didnae make it long after.
She turned it over as she walked. Not the bare facts, which were few enough, but the way Iona had delivered them.
The deliberate slowing before each sentence. The sharp look when Catriona pressed too close. The way Iona had already returned to her lavender before Catriona had taken a single step away or said anything more.
There was a story in this valley that people still handled carefully. And she slept under his roof every night without knowing it.
She filed it away. She'd come back to it.
"Lass." Iona spoke without looking up. Quieter now, the market noise making a small private space around them. "Folk forgive healin' easy enough around here. They've seen the boy improve and they're grateful for it, most of them."
She set down the bundle she was holding. "But they daenae trust what they cannae understand. And there are those who've already decided what ye are, and James breathin' better only confuses them." She looked at Catriona directly. "Be careful."
Fox, who had been sitting patiently at the edge of the stall, chose this moment to step forward and sit down squarely on top of Iona's neatly bundled lavender.
Iona looked at him.
Fox looked at Iona.
Iona exhaled. "Aye," she said, with the weariness of a woman adding one more thing to a list that was already long. "That includes him."
Catriona reached over and lifted Fox by the scruff.
He made his position on this clear, loudly, and she set him down to the side of the stall with a firm look that he returned with complete indifference.
Behind her, she heard Fergus shift. He'd drifted closer again, drawn by the two women a few stalls over who had been whispering behind their hands for the past several minutes and were making increasingly little effort to be subtle about it.
She heard him take the half-step forward that put him at her shoulder.
She stepped sideways and nudged him back with her elbow. "Ye hover worse than a storm cloud."
"Orders," he muttered.
"The orders were to stay within sight. Ye're within earshot."
"Same thing."
"It isnae."
Iona's mouth had developed a twitch at the corner that it was fighting to contain.
She watched the two of them for a moment with the expression of a woman who had been observing people long enough to know what she was looking at, even when the people in question had not yet arrived at the same conclusion.
"Aye," she said, dryly, to no one in particular. "The Dragon guards what he values."
Catriona picked up her basket and turned from the stall with the smooth, unhurried movement of someone who had not heard a word of that.
She walked at the same pace she'd arrived, Fox falling in at her heel, Fergus taking up his customary position two paces behind.
The warmth that had crept up her neck was not fear. She knew what fear felt like, it sat low and cold and made the hands careful.
This was something else entirely, something that moved upward rather than downward, that had no useful function she could identify and no business being there at all.
She attributed it to the cooking fires. There were several nearby. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation, and she intended to keep it.
She kept walking and did not look back.