Chapter 13 #2
The thought settled in her chest like a coal, small and quiet and far too warm.
"The beast," he said to no one in particular, "has been stealin' from me for weeks." His voice was dry, but there was a flicker of something in his eyes—not quite a smile, but a softening.
"He's consistent," Seumas said. The old man's eyes were twinkling with mischief.
"He has a system," Catriona said. Her voice came out even. She was pleased about that. She looked down at her plate, her heart still hammering against her ribs.
"Aye." Anthony looked at his plate. "So did the MacLennans. I dealt with that too."
Fergus made a sound. A short, sharp bark of a laugh that he quickly muffled with his napkin.
Mairi leaned close to Catriona's ear. "He compared the fox to a rival clan," she breathed, reverent. "That's practically an acknowledgement." She gave Catriona a meaningful nudge.
"Eat yer supper, Mairi," Eidith said, from three feet away, without looking up. There was a hint of a smile on her lips.
Mairi ate her supper.
Catriona looked at the table in front of her and waited for the warmth in her face to settle, and did not look at the head of the table again. She told herself it had been a long day and she was tired, and almost believed it. But the feeling of his gaze remained, a ghost of a touch on her skin.
Three days later, James got out of bed.
Catriona had been watching for it.
The strengthening had been building in his chest for two weeks, the breathing easier, the color better, the particular quality of a body beginning to remember what it was supposed to be capable of.
She watched the way he moved in the bed, his small limbs testing their own weight with a new, quiet strength.
She had noted it each morning without saying so, the way she noted everything she wasn't ready to feel yet. Her own heart would give a small, hopeful leap every time he sat up without a struggle.
She was compounding the evening preparation at the worktable when Fox's tail flickered.
That was all. A flicker, a quick side-to-side at the tip, the signal he gave when something had caught his attention and he was deciding whether it warranted full engagement. Catriona froze, her hand hovering over the mortar.
James, in the bed, was watching the tail. His eyes were wide, his mouth slightly parted in anticipation.
Daenae.
He pushed the blanket back and put his feet on the floor. The soft thud of his feet hitting the stone sounded like a drumbeat in the quiet room.
She set down the pestle. "James." Her voice was a sharp, instinctive warning.
"I'm just standin'," he said. He looked at her, his chin set with a stubbornness that was terrifyingly familiar.
He was standing.
Both feet flat on the cold stone, both hands still touching the mattress.
Upright in the thin winter light from the window with his dark hair damp at his temples and the particular expression he wore when he was doing something he'd decided on before asking.
His jaw was tight, his focus entirely on the space between him and the hearth.
Fox's tail flickered again.
James took a step.
She was halfway across the room before she'd decided to move.
Not to stop him, she realized, but because she couldn't stay at the worktable.
But because her feet had made the decision before the rest of her caught up, the same way she'd moved toward every patient she'd ever had in the moment when something shifted.
Her breath was trapped in her chest, a painful, heavy thing.
James took another step.
Then another step, arms out, eyes down, the tip of his tongue just visible at the corner of his mouth.
Fox moved ahead of him, tail up, at exactly the pace of a small boy taking unsteady steps across a stone floor.
Catriona watched the way his knees trembled, her hands reaching out in the air, not touching but ready.
"Ye will fall," she said, and stopped, because her throat was doing something she hadn't given it permission to do. A thick, aching lump had formed there, making it hard to swallow.
James laughed.
High and bright and startled out of him by his own success, his arms windmilling slightly as his balance found itself and held.
The sound of it went into the room and the corridor beyond. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated triumph, and it made the air in the room vibrate.
The two servants passing outside stopped and looked through the open door.
And then one of them made a sound that brought the other one running.
Then there were four people in the doorway, and Fox was doing a second circuit of the room like a creature leading a small parade.
Catriona felt the collective indrawn breath of the people in the doorway.
James was still walking, still laughing. He hit the far wall with both hands and spun around, laughing, as though he had just come a very long way and wanted everyone to know it. His face was flushed with exertion, his eyes shining with a light she hadn't seen since she arrived.
The servants were clapping. Catriona did not register when that started. One of them, the young lad who always froze when Fox looked at him, Tam, had his hand pressed over his mouth and his eyes were bright. The joy in the room was a living, breathing thing.
She crouched in front of James and put both hands on his arms, steadying him. His skin was warm, his muscles pulsing with the thrill of the movement.
His face was flushed and delighted and six years old and entirely, completely, alive.
"I did it," he said. He was breathless, but his grin was wide.
"Ye did," she said.
Her voice came out wrong. She cleared her throat. She had to fight to keep it steady.
"Ye still need the treatment twice daily," she said, "and ye're nae runnin' anywhere until I say so, and if ye try to go down the stairs alone I will ken about it before ye reach the second step." She tried to sound stern, but her eyes were wet.
"How?" James said, fascinated.
"Fox tells me everythin'."
James looked at Fox. Fox sat down and looked at the ceiling with sublime indifference.
"He wouldnae," James said. A small, conspiratorial giggle escaped him.
"Try me," she said.
The servants were still making noise behind her.
She could hear Mairi's voice among them now, which meant the keep would know within twenty minutes, which meant Eidith would know within ten, which meant it was already done. She felt a sense of profound accomplishment, a weight lifting from her shoulders.
She stood. Turned.
Anthony stood in the doorway.
She didn't know how long he'd been there. He was still. The particular stillness he had when he was holding something still. His hands were clenched into fists at his sides, his knuckles stark white.
His eyes were on James, who had turned to show him the evidence of the achievement and was demonstrating his balance by standing without touching anything.
She watched Anthony look at the boy. There was a look on his face she couldn't describe—a mixture of terror, relief, and a love so deep it seemed to wound him.
His jaw shifted once. His hand, at his side, closed briefly and opened. A muscle jumping in his cheek was the only sign of the storm within.
Daenae look at his face.
Look at James. Look at Fox. Look at the window. Anywhere else.
She looked at his face.
And what she saw there, raw, unguarded, present in the way it was never present.
The six years of that chair in the dark and the footsteps in the corridor.
The hand beside the blanket that never claimed the comfort of touching.
The sheer intensity of his emotion was overwhelming, and she felt her own breath hitch in response.
All of it arriving at once in two seconds on the face of a man who had no idea she was watching.
She looked away.
She looked at the window. At the pale winter light on the courtyard stones. At the frost still on the north-facing wall. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, a frantic, hollow sound.
He's better.
The thought was clean. Simple. The thing she had been working toward since the first morning she'd pressed two fingers to the inside of James's wrist and counted.
He's better.
And then, arriving immediately after, quiet and cold and precise as a blade finding the gap in armor.
He's better.
She would leave.
I will leave soon.
The realization hit her like a bucket of ice water, draining the warmth from her limbs.
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and looked at the courtyard and heard the room behind her.
James demonstrating the walk again for Anthony, Fox's claws on the stone. The servants' voices dropping to something warmer and more private, Mairi's bright chatter starting up.
Catriona stood very still and let the cold fact of it sit in her chest where it had been sitting, she realized, for days. She'd known it was coming. She'd simply not looked directly at it until now. She felt a sudden, sharp ache of loneliness, even in the crowded room.
She turned.
Anthony was looking at her.
Not at James. Not at Fox. Not at the servants filing out with their careful joy.
At her. Across the room. His gaze was dark and focused, as if he were trying to read the very thoughts she was hiding.
Through the noise and the movement, directly at her face, and she understood from the stillness of him that he had just arrived at the same place by a different road and at the same moment.
He's better.
She watched that thought cross Anthony's face in real time. His expression flickered, a momentary loosening before the mask slammed back into place.
Neither of them spoke.
James, between them, demonstrated the walk a third time for Fox, who had resumed his circuit with the air of a creature that took professional pride in his work.
She looked at Anthony.
He looked at her.
The room moved around them, and they stood in the middle of it and did not say a word.
He's better.
The thought was not new.
She had known it clinically for days. Had measured it in his breathing, in his color, in the way he now chased Fox across the floor without stopping to catch his breath. She had known it the way she knew all her patients' progress. Precisely. Professionally. At a careful distance.
This was not that.
This was the thought landing in her body rather than her mind, and what came with it, arriving in the same breath, quiet and unavoidable:
I will leave soon.
She had not let herself think it until now. Had kept busy enough, kept her hands in the herbs and her mind in the work, and had not looked directly at the shape of what came after. She looked at it now. Felt the cold edge of it.
The winter light came through the window pale and thin, and James laughed again somewhere behind her.
She could not breathe as easily as the child now could.
The thought moved through her slowly, and she did not look away from Anthony's face as it did.
His expression had done the same thing hers had, she could see it, the flicker of the same realization crossing him before the mask came back down and covered it.
The room moved. James demonstrated the walk again. Fox resumed his circuit.
Neither of them spoke.
Neither of them moved.
The distance between them, which had never once felt like enough, felt suddenly, acutely, like something she was about to lose the right to complain about.
This is what it feels like before the door closes.
She knew this feeling. She had stood in enough doorways.
She had just never minded it this much before.