Chapter 12 #2
Not yet. Another week. Then feel it. She kept her hands busy, the grinding of the herbs a familiar comfort.
"Can I try?" James said.
She looked up. The question was a soft, urgent thing in the air.
He was looking at Fox and said nothing for a moment. His small body was tense with concentration.
"He'll come to ye when he's ready," she said. "Daenae reach for him."
"I ken." James folded his hands on the blanket over his lap. "I'm nae reaching." His knuckles were white from the effort of staying still.
"Ye are reachin' with yer face."
James looked at her. Then, with visible effort, arranged his expression into something he apparently considered neutral. His brow smoothed, and he tried to settle his features into a mask of indifference.
Fox, from the hearth, turned his head.
Catriona went back to the mortar.
She had learned, in the weeks since she'd come to this room, that Fox operated on his own schedule and his own assessments and interference in either was not appreciated.
He would do what he was going to do. You simply had to be in the right position when he did it. She watched from the corner of her eye, her breath held.
The grinding continued. James sat very still. Fox looked at the fire. Then at James. Then at the fire again. The only sound was the rhythmic scrape of stone on stone.
Then he stood, stretched with the elaborate thoroughness of an animal that intended the stretch to be noticed, and crossed the room.
He stopped at the foot of the bed.
James did not move. His eyes were wide, the pupils dilated with excitement.
Fox's nose came up. He sniffed the edge of the blanket. Sniffed James's folded hands. Sniffed the pillow.
Then, coming to a good conclusion, he stepped his front paws onto the mattress, turned around once, and lay down directly across James's legs.
James's face, the face that had been working very hard at neutrality, broke completely. A wide, toothy grin spread across his features, his whole body shaking with suppressed glee.
He grabbed a fistful of Fox's fur.
Fox's head came up sharply. His amber eyes fixed on James's hand, his nose sniffing. The room held its breath. Catriona's hands froze on the mortar, her heart hammer-fast.
Fox put his head back down.
James laughed.
It came out of him the way things came out of him.
Suddenly, completely, without warning or apology.
Bright and high and entirely six years old.
Nothing guarded in it, nothing careful, just the pure, uncomplicated sound of a child who had been delighted past the point of managing it.
The sound was like a burst of sunlight in the cold room.
It filled the room.
It went into the walls and the ceiling and the fire-warmed air.
It sat there, that sound, and Catriona's hands went still on the mortar.
Her throat did something she was not going to examine, and she looked at the boy laughing in the bed with a fox draped across his legs.
A lump formed in her throat, a physical manifestation of a pride she hadn't expected to feel.
There he is. There's the child that was in there all along.
She pressed her lips together hard. She felt a prickle of tears behind her eyes and blinked them away.
Fox went still for the second grab. His ears flattened once, then settled. He did not pull away.
James's laugh settled into something smaller and warmer, still there, still present. The kind of happiness that didn't need to announce itself anymore because it had already arrived. He stroked the fox's fur with a gentleness that made Catriona's chest ache.
"He's nae movin'," James said, with profound satisfaction.
"Nay," she said. Her voice came out steady. She was pleased about that. She cleared the huskiness from her throat.
"He likes me."
"He's made his position clear."
"Can I name him somethin'?"
"He has a name."
"I ken. Can I give him a second name?" He looked at her with intense gravity, his little jaw set.
She looked up at him.
He watched her without blinking, chin level, mouth set. Across his legs, Fox had not moved. One of Fox's ears twitched. Neither of them looked particularly concerned.
"What did ye have in mind?" she said. Her own smile finally broke through.
James considered this with great gravity. "Robert," he said.
She blinked. "Robert." Her eyebrows shot up in surprise.
"It's a dignified name."
She looked at Fox. Fox looked at her. The animal's expression seemed almost to mock the human name.
"He willnae answer to it," she said.
"He doesnae answer to Fox either," James pointed out, showing her the logic of a six-year-old who paid attention.
She opened her mouth. She was about to respond when she heard it.
A floorboard in the corridor.
She knew it before the doorway darkened.
The weight of it, the pace. The particular way those footsteps stopped just short of the threshold rather than crossing it, because he always checked before he entered, always made sure before he brought himself fully into a room that contained the boy.
She felt the air in the room shift, a sudden electric tension.
Anthony stood in the doorway.
He had his hand on the door frame and his eyes on James.
On his face was an expression that had arrived before his defenses had, the kind of expression that happened when something caught you between one breath and the next, and you had no time to put the walls up first. His mouth was slightly parted, his eyes wide with a raw, naked wonder.
James, with Fox across his legs and his blanket rumpled and his color better than it had been in six years, looked up.
"Uncle Anthony. Fox sat on me."
Anthony did not speak. He seemed to be struggling with a knot in his throat, his hand tightening on the wood of the door frame until his knuckles turned white.
"He grabbed him," Catriona said, setting down the pestle. "Fox allowed it."
She watched him look at the boy. At Fox. At the boy again. At the brightness still in James's face. The loose, unguarded quality of a child who had just been properly happy and hadn't put it away yet. She saw a muscle jump in Anthony's cheek as he fought for control.
His hand tightened once on the door frame.
"The beast has poor judgment," he said.
His voice came out level. Nearly. There was a slight, gravelly tremor beneath the words.
James giggled. The sound of it, smaller this time, private, almost conspiratorial, landed in the room and sat there. Catriona watched Anthony's jaw move. He was gritting his teeth, his expression a battlefield between his usual mask and the joy before him.
"He likes ye too," she said to Fox.
Lightly. Giving Anthony somewhere to look that wasn't directly at her. She could feel the heat of his gaze even as she avoided it.
"Fox doesnae like everyone," Anthony said.
He crossed the room to the chair, pulled it out, and sat.
His gaze moved over James slowly. Forehead. Eyes. The set of his mouth.
He was reading something, and he was being thorough about it.
James, with the instincts of a child who had been studied this way his whole life and had developed opinions about it, reached across the blanket and put his hand on Anthony's knee.
Anthony looked down at it.
Small hand. Six years old. The same hand that had been the size of a walnut when Anthony had carried him out of the smoke wrapped against his chest. The last living person left of a family that had taken most of a year to finish dying.
He covered the boy's hand with his own. Once. Brief. The way a man touched something he was not going to let himself hold for too long. His fingers were steady, but the pressure was deliberate, a grounding touch.
Then James said, "Will ye pick me up?"
Anthony looked at him. His eyes searched the boy's face, a flicker of uncertainty crossing his brow.
"Catriona said I could sit by the window if someone held me," James said, with the serene confidence of a six-year-old. "The light's good today."
Catriona had said no such thing.
She held her expression and said nothing.
Ye wee menace.
She felt the smile she was hiding reach her eyes anyway.
Anthony looked at her over the top of James's head. His eyes narrowed a fraction.
He was reading her now, looking for the lie and finding only a shared purpose. The weight of his gaze landed on her the way it always did, more thorough than it had any right to be, more aware.
She returned it with complete composure.
Daenae look at his face when he finds it.
He looked back at James. He stood slowly, bent, and picked James up from the bed.
Not with the ease of long habit, not the way Catriona lifted him when she needed to reposition him for treatment, quick and matter-of-fact.
He lifted him the way you lifted something you were afraid of dropping. With both arms. He took his time, both hands steady. Like it was the only thing in the room worth getting right.
He pulled the boy close to his chest, his head bowing for a second over James's dark curls.
Daenae.
James settled against his chest and did not tense, did not check, did not hold any part of himself back. He simply settled. The boy's trust was absolute, and Catriona felt it hit her somewhere she hadn't thought to guard.
Anthony's eyes closed for a moment.
Just a moment. Just a brief, involuntary closing, and he said nothing. The lashes against his skin looked dark and tired, and he let out a long, shuddering breath.
Stop watchin' him.
Then they opened, and he looked at the window and crossed toward it. James was solid in his arms, Fox descending from the bed to follow at his heel as though the arrangement had been agreed upon in advance.
Catriona looked down at the mortar.
The herbs she'd been grinding were long since ready. She began grinding them again anyway, and the small rhythmic sound of it filled the room.
Outside, the pale winter light lay across the courtyard stones, and Anthony stood at the window with James in his arms and said nothing, and nothing needed to be said.
She did not look up again.
She did not trust what her face would do if she did. She kept her head down, her focus on the herbs, her heart beating a frantic, hopeful rhythm she had no good name for and no intention of examining.
Nae yet. Nae this.
The boy. Think about the boy.
The grinding continued. The light held. And she thought about neither.