Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
The laughter from the courtyard reached her before she reached the window. She paused in the corridor, her head tilting toward the sound as a flicker of surprise crossed her face.
She had been heading to the storeroom for more dried chamomile. James's evening preparation was the same as every morning. There was nothing remarkable about the errand.
And yet her feet had stopped.
The sound came through the stone before she'd consciously decided to stop. She felt a strange, light pull in her chest, the rhythm of the laughter unfamiliar in these walls.
She didn't recognize it at first.
It had the shape of laughter but the wrong source.
Not Mairi's bright chatter, not the men in the yard at their drills. Lower. More reluctant. She moved toward the light of the window, her brow furrowed.
Below in the courtyard, Anthony stood with mud on his boot and an empty watering pail in Seumas's outstretched hand. His shoulders were drawn up, his usual posture of command slightly skewed by the absurdity of the moment.
He stared at the turnip for a moment longer than was comfortable, then drew himself up.
Eidith had both hands pressed to her mouth, shoulders shaking. Seumas was on his knees in the dirt, making what appeared to be a formal apology to a waterlogged plant.
Catriona watched them, a small, involuntary smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
Anthony said something. She couldn't hear the words through the glass.
Seumas replied. Eidith's shoulders shook harder.
Daenae.
She felt it coming before it happened and told herself to look away, to go to the storeroom, to think about chamomile and James's evening preparation and anything else at all.
And then Anthony, the man who had ridden into the western glens and taken her from a cliff ledge. The man who stood at the head of his table, the man who had pulled that door closed between them three hours ago with a quietness that had sat in her chest like cold water.
That man's face did something she had never once seen it do.
It softened. The hard, guarded lines around his eyes crinkled, and the tension she'd come to expect in his jaw finally dissolved.
Not a smile, not quite.
Something underneath a smile. Something that belonged to a younger version of him, some version that had existed before whatever had taken it away.
Oh.
The word formed in her chest before it reached her mind.
She felt it the way she felt a change in the weather, before she could name it, before she could prepare for it. Her fingers spread flat against the cold stone of the window frame without her telling them to.
She was seeing it now, and she had not been prepared for it, and she could not look away. The sight of it sent a sudden, aching warmth through her.
The Dragon laughs.
And the castle, which had been pressing cold stone on all sides since the first morning she'd walked its corridors, felt for one moment fractionally less like a cage. Her heart gave a strange, rhythmic thump of recognition.
"Ye've never seen him so before."
She startled. Her hand flew to her sternum, her pulse jumping beneath her palm.
Mairi stood two steps behind her, arms folded, her gaze on the courtyard below.
Something in her stillness changed. Not much, just a settling, the way a person settles when they see something they had stopped expecting.
There was a quiet knowing in Mairi's expression that made Catriona feel exposed.
"I didnae hear ye," Catriona said. She turned back to the window quickly, her face heating.
"Aye." Mairi's mouth curved slightly. "Ye were occupied."
Catriona looked back at the courtyard.
Anthony had handed the pail back to Seumas with what appeared to be a firm statement of policy about root vegetables, and was turning toward the hall.
But the set of his face was different. Not the locked expression he wore like armor, not the weight of the Laird. Something looser.
Something that was still almost there. She watched the way he walked, the usual rigidness of his spine replaced by a more natural, fluid stride.
"He seems different," Catriona said, before she could stop herself. The words felt heavy, a confession she hadn't meant to make.
Mairi hummed softly. "He was once."
Catriona glanced at her. Her eyes were searching, hungry for the story behind the change.
Mairi was still watching the courtyard, her expression quiet in a way it usually wasn't. Mairi, whose thoughts moved visibly across her face before she could stop them, Mairi who talked the way some people breathed, reflexively, without effort.
This stillness was different. Deliberate.
Catriona saw a shadow of old grief cross Mairi's features.
"What changed?" Catriona asked.
Mairi was quiet for a moment.
Down below, Seumas had returned to his soil. Eidith had uncrossed her arms and was moving back toward the keep entrance, still carrying the faint, contained warmth of a woman who had enjoyed herself more than she intended.
"Fire," Mairi said simply. "And loss."
She said it the way people said things they had grown up knowing. Not as revelation, just as fact, the kind of fact that had been part of the air for so long it required no explanation. The word seemed to chill the air between them.
Catriona waited. She kept her gaze fixed on Mairi, her hands curling into the wool of her shawl.
"His father," Mairi said. "His brother. His sister-in-law.
His mother, later, the smoke took her lungs slow.
He brought her back to the keep after and stayed with her until the end, which took longer than it should have and was harder for it.
" She paused. "He was twenty-five when he buried the last of them.
" Mairi's voice was a low, somber thread.
Catriona looked at the courtyard. Empty now except for Seumas, still on his knees, talking to the plants.
Twenty-five.
Running a keep and a clan and a grief that hadn't been named properly in six years, with a six-month-old child in the east wing breathing wrong. The numbers hit her like a physical weight, making her shoulders slump.
The chair beside the bed.
Every night for six years. The image of him sitting in the dark, guarding a child's breath, made her throat tighten.
"He guards more than walls now," Mairi said.
It wasn't a dramatic statement.
It had the quality of something observed and accepted.
The same tone Iona had used on the road back from the market.
The tone of people who had watched this man for years and had filed him under complicated and ours and left it there.
Catriona nodded slowly, the pieces of the man finally beginning to fit together.
Catriona turned back to the window.
He looked up. One heartbeat, maybe two. Long enough that if he had been looking for her, he would have found her. She felt a spark shoot down her spine, and she stepped back into the shadows of the corridor, her heart hammering. She waited for a moment.
When she looked back down, Anthony had crossed the courtyard and disappeared through the gate, but she was still looking at the place where he'd stood.
The particular cobblestone where the mud had splashed, where Eidith had laughed, where his face had done that thing it had no business doing in broad daylight where people could see it. She could still see the phantom of that softer expression in her mind's eye.
She heard him then, without looking.
The way she always heard him now. Footsteps she'd catalogued without meaning to. Stride length, weight, and pace. The difference between him crossing the hall on clan business and him walking the east wing corridor at three in the morning.
She had not decided to learn the difference. She simply had. Her ears strained for the sound, a reflex she no longer tried to fight.
"Dragons breathe fire when wounded, lass," Mairi said, her voice gentle. "It doesnae mean they daenae feel the burn." Mairi reached out, her hand resting briefly on Catriona's arm in a gesture of rare solemnity.
Catriona said nothing. She just watched the empty courtyard, the silence between them heavy and deep.
She stood at the window a moment longer than she needed to.
The morning light reached the courtyard for the first time in what felt like weeks.
Thin, pale, winter-weak, but present. James had been angling toward the window since breakfast, tracking it, looking like a child who had a plan.
His eyes were bright, his small hands clutching the edge of the blanket.
"Nay," Catriona said, without looking up from the mortar. She kept her voice firm, despite the way her chest warmed at his eagerness.
"I didnae say anythin'," James said. He looked at her with wide, innocent eyes, his mouth twitching.
"Ye were about to ask if ye could go outside."
A pause. "I was goin' to ask if the window could be opened." He gave a small, hopeful shrug.
"That's the same thing with fewer steps."
James subsided against his pillows. His eyes went to the ceiling. His mouth pressed flat. He let out a long, dramatic sigh that filled the quiet room. He was not done, she could tell. He was just regrouping.
Across the room, Fox completed his circuit of the perimeter and sat down beside the hearth.
"He's done that four times," James said. His gaze was fixed on the animal, fascination replacing his boredom.
"He's countin' exits."
"There's only one door."
"He's being thorough."
James watched Fox with the focused attention he brought to everything he considered worth understanding.
His color was better today. The warmth of genuine blood under the skin rather than the feverish flush she'd been fighting since the first week.
His breathing, from across the room, was audible in the way breathing was supposed to be. Background, unremarkable, not a thing that required monitoring. Catriona listened to the steady rhythm, a sense of relief washing over her.
She noted it without letting herself feel it yet.