Chapter 17 #2
He pressed the thought down, though it fought him.
"The armor," he said, his voice unusually thick. "Does it hold?"
She looked at him then. Her green eyes were dark in the moonlight, searching his face with a terrifying intensity. "Some days better than others," she said.
Anthony nodded once, a sharp, jerky movement. He looked back at his blade, the steel reflecting the pale moon.
"Aye," he said. "I ken that."
They stayed in the garden for another hour.
The shhh-shhh of his stone and the rustle of her basket were the only conversation they needed.
When she rose, she passed within two feet of him. He could smell the lavender and the cold on her shawl. He watched the east door close behind her and sat in the quiet, clutching the finished blade.
He had stayed.
Every instinct he possessed had told him to leave, to find a wall to hide behind, but he had remained in the conversation. He had chosen the weight of her truth over the safety of his silence. He didn't ask himself why. He simply noted it, the way he noted a change in the wind, and went inside.
Supper was loud enough that she almost missed it.
The messenger had been given a place at the lower end of the table, cleaned up now. A cup in his hand, talking to the man beside him.
She had not been paying him particular attention.
Then he said the name.
Moira.
He said it the way you said a place you'd passed through.
Aye, I came by way of Moira MacLeod's party on the northern road, near a dozen riders, fine horses.
He kept talking, and the man beside him nodded, and the conversation moved on without a seam.
She was reaching for the bread.
Her hand completed the reach. She tore a piece. She did not look at the head of the table.
She did not need to.
The quality of the silence from that direction was different.
Not loud. Not visible. The kind of change that happened in a room when one person in it went very still while everyone else kept moving. She had felt it before in sickrooms, the moment a body stopped fighting and the air shifted before anyone had looked up to check.
She looked up.
Anthony was cutting his meat. His face was exactly as it always was. Jaw set, eyes forward, expression giving away nothing.
Too nothing.
She had spent enough weeks reading him to know the difference between his ordinary closed expression and the one he wore when he was holding something down with both hands.
This was the second kind. The knife moved with the precise, controlled care of a man who had decided exactly how much force to use and was not going to deviate from it.
Fergus, to his left, had found something to study in his cup.
Donal, three seats down, was talking about drainage. Loudly. With more investment in the subject than drainage had ever warranted.
She looked back at her plate.
She ate. She kept her face even and her breathing steady and she did not look at the head of the table again for the rest of the meal.
Mairi caught her on the stairs.
Not accidentally.
"Moira MacLeod," she said, without preamble.
Catriona kept walking. "What of her?"
"She was meant to wed him."
Mairi fell into step, her voice dropping to the register she used when the information was good enough to require discretion.
"Years ago, before the fire. Her father arranged it when the Laird was still his father's second son.
Young, unmarked, the family intact behind him.
" A pause weighted with significance. "Then the fire came.
His family died. The scars came with it.
" She let that sit for one precise beat.
"Her father sent word of difficulties. She was wed to MacLeod before the summer was out. "
Catriona said nothing.
The stairs were cold under her boots. She counted them without meaning to.
Three. Four.
"He never spoke of it," Mairi continued, her voice quieter now, the gossip shading into something more careful.
"Nae once, to anyone. Fergus kens, I think. Eidith kens. The rest of us just ken the shape of it from what isnae said." She glanced sideways. "And now she's riding the northern road with a dozen horses and he's sitting at supper cutting his meat like he means it harm."
Five. Six.
Catriona reached the top of the stairs and stopped.
She had the full picture now, assembled cleanly.
The broken betrothal. The letter. The notation on the map Fergus had made in careful small letters. The way Anthony's thumb had pressed over something on the vellum when he thought no one was looking.
She left because of the scars.
The picture was complete, and she understood it entirely. She set it in its proper place with the efficient, systematic movement she used for all information that needed filing.
And then she noticed the other thing.
It was sitting beneath her ribs without having announced itself, low and uninvited, wearing no name she wanted to give it.
Not anger. Not pity. Something that had arrived during the telling and had not left with the end of it, something that had specifically to do with the name said at the supper table and the stillness it had made and the dozen riders on the northern road.
She recognized it in the same moment she decided she had no use for it.
That's enough of that.
"Thank ye," she said to Mairi. Even. Practical. The tone she used when a patient had given her the last piece of information she needed, and she was ready to work. "Go to bed."
Mairi looked at her for a moment.
"Aye," she said. "Goodnight."
She went.
Catriona stood at the top of the stairs in the cold corridor and looked at nothing in particular and waited for the feeling beneath her ribs to behave itself.
It did not, especially, behave itself.
Fox sat down beside her feet and looked up at her with his amber eyes and did nothing.
"Daenae," she told him.
He looked away. Diplomatically.
She picked up her candle and went to bed.