Chapter 14 #2
She picked up the dispatch, checked the seal, and it was intact. Turned it over, checked the other side, and held it out toward Anthony. Her fingers were steady, the pale skin of her hand catching the light from the brazier.
"He prefers important rooms," she said. She tilted her head, her gaze searching his. "And important documents, apparently."
Anthony crossed the room and took it. He looked at Fox. Fox looked at the worktable. His ears were forward. His expression was open, interested, entirely without guilt. Anthony felt the heat of embarrassment rising in his neck.
"He's a menace," Anthony said. “Daenae make me see him again.” He clutched the dispatch, his knuckles white.
"He's thorough." She turned back to the worktable. "Close the door on yer way out." She dismissed him with a casual flick of her hand, her focus already returning to her herbs.
"I wasnae leavin'." He stopped. He felt his feet root to the floor, the sudden quiet of the room wrapping around him.
Fergus appeared in the doorway behind him, red-faced, entertained, doing a poor job of concealing the second. Fergus's eyes were dancing, his mouth twitching behind his hand.
Catriona did not look up from whatever she was grinding. "Ye're lettin' the cold in," she said. The rhythmic scrape of the pestle filled the space. "Both of ye."
Fergus stepped inside. Anthony didn't move. The smell of the room—earthy, sharp, and strangely sweet—made Anthony's senses swirl.
He looked at the room. The worktable with its rows of jars and its worn pestle and the precise arrangement of everything that had been someone else's chaos before she'd reorganized it the first week. He saw the order she had brought to the mess, a quiet reflection of her own mind.
The small brazier with Fox now positioned directly in front of it. The narrow window with its two-finger gap letting in the thread of outside air she kept insisting on. The thread of cold air brushed against his heated skin, a sharp contrast to the warmth of the brazier.
The dispatch in his hand was a routine supply report from the southern farmstead. Three days' ride to steal and return it. He felt the absurdity of it all pressing down on him.
"This keep," Anthony said, his voice gaining its usual depth, "is nae a route for that animal to run dispatches through."
"Tell him that." She tilted her head toward Fox without looking up. "He's a good listener." She gave a small, dry chuckle that made Anthony's pulse quicken.
"He listens to nothin'." He stepped further into the room, his shadow stretching across her table.
"He listens to me." She looked up then, her green eyes bright and challenging.
"Because ye feed him."
"Because he trusts me." She set the pestle down.
The sound of the stone hitting the table was final.
She looked at him then. Directly, the way she always looked at him, the way that had been unsettling him since a cliff ledge in the western glens.
"There's a difference." Her gaze was unwavering, cutting through his defenses.
Fergus had found something to examine on the far shelf. He stood at the shelf with his hands behind his back, reading each label in turn. The man was trying very hard to appear invisible, his shoulders hunched.
"Ye treat this place like a battlefield," Catriona said. She leaned against the table, her arms folding over her chest.
"It is one," Anthony said. He felt his jaw tighten again. "Some of the time."
"Nae in here." She looked at the room. The low ceiling, the brazier warmth, the smell of the preparations she'd been working on since dawn. "In here it's a sickroom. Sickrooms run on different rules." The softness in her voice made the air feel thicker.
"Everythin' in these walls runs on my rules." He stepped closer, his heart thudding in his ears.
"Includin' the boy?" She said it evenly. No heat. Worse than heat. The question landed like a blow to his stomach.
His jaw tightened. He felt the familiar pressure behind his eyes. "The boy is why the rules exist."
"The boy is why I'm here," she said. "And I'm still here. Which should tell ye somethin' about my rules." She stepped toward him, the height difference between them feeling suddenly insignificant.
Fergus had gone very still beside the shelf. He didn't even seem to be breathing.
"Ye treat danger like inconvenience," Anthony stated, his voice matter of fact. He looked down at her, his pulse racing.
"I treat illness like somethin' that can be fixed." She held his gaze. Her eyes were a deep, dark emerald in the dim light. "Which it can. When people step aside and let it be."
"I warn ye when there is somethin' to be warned about." His voice dropped, becoming a low, private rumble.
"And I decide what the warnin's worth." She picked up the pestle. Her fingers brushed against the stone, a slow, deliberate movement. "I've been decidin' that since before I came here."
"And before ye came here," he declared, his voice growing louder, "ye were alone in the western glens with a fox and a satchel and no walls between ye and whatever found ye in the night."
“I trust healin'.” She looked at the mortar, her jaw set.
“I trust survival.” He met her gaze, the intensity between them almost physical.
The pestle stopped. The silence that followed was absolute.
The room went quiet. The only sound was the soft hiss of the peat in the brazier.
She looked at him. He looked at her. Fox opened one eye from the brazier corner. The fox watched them with a knowing, ancient stillness.
The quiet stretched long enough that Fergus shifted his weight on the flagstone, the small sound of a man regretting his position in a room and seeing no clean exit from it. The scrape of leather on stone was jarring.
"Better healin' than fleein'." Fergus said. The words were out before the man could stop them.
And stopped. Fergus froze, his face draining of color.
The words landed the way a stone landed in still water. The impact first, then the rings spreading outward, then the stillness that came after that was not the same stillness as before. Anthony felt the blood rush to his face, a heat that had nothing to do with the run.
Fergus's mouth closed. His chin came down slightly.
His shoulders dropped by a fraction. The whole posture of a man who had heard his own words arrive in a room and understood, too late, the exact thing they'd hit and the exact person they'd hit it in front of. The man's hands trembled at his sides.
Anthony turned his head. The movement was slow, predatory.
He looked at Fergus. Fergus looked back at him with both hands loose at his sides and his jaw set. The particular expression he wore when he had done something he couldn't undo and had decided that holding still was the only remaining option. Fergus's eyes were wide with a sudden, sharp fear.
"I meant-" Fergus started. His voice cracked, the word trailing off into nothing.
"Leave us," Anthony commanded. The word was a low, dangerous snarl.
Fergus left. The door pulled closed behind him with a click that sat in the air after it. The sound of the latch was like the snap of a trap.
The herb room was small at the best of times. Worktable, shelves, brazier, window. Two people and whatever Fergus's words had just put in the room with them made it considerably smaller. The air felt thin, the scent of lavender and rot suddenly overwhelming.
Catriona set the pestle down. She looked at the table. Then at him. Her eyes were searching his face, looking for the wound.
"Who fled?" she said. Her voice was quiet, a soft probe into a tender place. "I thought the previous healer passed away."
"She did." His voice was flat, a wall of stone.
"Then who fled?" She stepped closer, her presence a warm, persistent pressure.
"That is none of yer concern." He turned away, his heart hammering against his ribs.
She was quiet. He could hear the rhythmic rise and fall of her breath.
He watched her file it. The deflection, the tone, the door he'd shut before she'd finished the question. He watched her jaw set slightly, and her hands flatten on the edge of the table. The tension in her fingers was visible, her knuckles white.
"What happened to James's parents?" She kept her voice level. "Iona said the fire. Donal said the smoke took them. The woman in the market couldnae believe I didnae ken the tale, livin' here as I do." She took a step toward him, her gaze never wavering.
She folded her arms. Not a challenge, a steadying, the way she steadied herself before delivering difficult information to a patient. He saw her shoulders rise with a deep, bracing breath.
"Everyone in this valley handles that story like it's made of somethin' that breaks. And nobody will say it plain." Her voice was a low, steady demand.
He looked at the window. The small grey square of sky above the inner courtyard. Frost on the sill. The thread of cold air coming through the two-finger gap. He watched the frost patterns, his mind a chaotic whirl of smoke and memory.
A muscle moved in his jaw. Once. He felt the old, familiar pain flare in his chest.
"Anthony," she said. It was a whisper, a plea.
"Enough." Quiet. Level. The word carrying under it not anger, something below anger, something with more weight and more room in it than anger had. He felt the weight of the years pressing down on him, a heavy, cold tide.
She looked at him. He looked at the window. Fox in the corner had both eyes open now, ears up, watching them both. The fox's amber gaze was a silent witness to the cracking of the walls.
"James deserves to understand the full story of how he came to be here," she said. She reached out, her fingers hovering just inches from his arm. "And I cannae treat what I daenae understand. That's the first rule of healin', ye cannae fix what ye willnae look at."
"Ye are treatin' it," he said. "Ye have been treatin' it. Ye daenae need the history." He turned back to her, his eyes blazing with a desperate, defensive fire.
"I always need the history." She held her ground, two feet of cold flagstone between them, her eyes on his face, steady. "Ye cannae understand the illness without understandin' everything that came before it. The whole body. The whole life." She didn't flinch from the heat in his gaze.
"The history…" He stopped. The word died in his throat, a dry, choked thing.
She waited. The silence was a physical pressure, pushing the air from his lungs.
The brazier shifted. A small collapse of peat, a brief brightening of the flame, then lower than before. The light flickered across his face, revealing the depth of the exhaustion etched there.
“Anthony.” She said his name like a prayer.
"ENOUGH." The roar tore from his throat before he could stop it.
It came out harder than he would have wanted. The word filled the room and bounced off the stone and settled. The echo of it was immediate and visible in her. He watched her flinch, her shoulders tensing, but she didn't move back.
Chin up, shoulders back, hands flat on the table edge, and her eyes on his face without flinching, without stepping back, without giving him the retreat he had not asked for and did not deserve. He saw the flicker of pain in her eyes, and it gutted him.
He looked at the window. His breath was coming in short, shallow gasps.
His hands at his sides were still. His jaw was tight. The frost on the windowsill had not moved. He felt the cold from the stone floor seeping into his boots.
The room held it. The stillness was absolute.
She had not stepped back.
He was aware of that with a precision that had nothing to do with strategy. Not the way he was aware of a man holding ground in a yard, not the clean tactical fact of it. Something rawer.
She had stood in the wreckage of that roar with her chin level and her hands flat on the table edge, and looked at him without flinching, and he could feel his own heartbeat in places he had no business feeling it.
He looked at the window. At the frost. At anything that was not her face.
Fox put his chin on his paws and closed his eyes, as if the matter were already settled.