Chapter 18 #2
Catriona looked up, her pulse jumping. "How many?"
"Ten. Maybe twelve." Mairi looked over her shoulder toward the hall. "Fine horses. Green cloaks. A woman is leading them."
Catriona rose, her stomach dropping.
She followed Mairi into the Great Hall. The room felt charged, like the air before a lightning strike. Servants moved in frantic, quiet patterns. Eidith stood by the entrance, her arms folded, her face a mask of iron that was neither a welcome nor a threat.
Anthony stood at the center of it.
He was exactly as he had been, the same dark tunic, the same settled authority. But Catriona saw the way his hands were locked behind his back, his shoulders so rigid they looked carved from the stone itself.
The heavy doors groaned open, letting in a gust of wet, freezing air. Moira MacLeod walked in out of the night.
She was older than Catriona, perhaps near thirty, and she moved with the easy, practiced grace of a woman who expected the world to rearrange itself for her arrival.
Her hair was a pale, polished blonde, tucked under a hood, and her face was arranged in a pleasant, composed expression that didn't reach her dark, calculating eyes. Her traveling clothes were dusted with the road but cut from the finest wool.
She looked at Anthony first. Not the hall, not the servants, but him. She fixed her gaze on him with an intensity that made Catriona feel like an intruder in her own home.
"Laird McArthur." Moira's voice was warm, a honeyed sound that filled the room. "Forgive the hour. The weather turned faster than we anticipated."
"Lady MacLeod." Anthony's voice was a flat, dead thing. It wasn't cold. Cold would have meant he felt something. It was simply empty. "Ye're welcome at McArthur."
"Ye're very gracious." Moira let her gaze sweep the room, her eyes moving over the tapestries, the fire, and finally, the household.
They stopped on Catriona for the length of a single breath.
It was a sharp, assessing look that felt like a blade sliding between ribs. Then it was gone, and Moira was speaking again, her voice light as she described her journey.
"The road from the north is worse than I remember. We pushed through hoping to reach the inn at Glendair, but the river crossin' was higher than me man thought wise." A small, practiced rueful smile touched her lips. "I hope we daenae impose."
"Ye daenae impose," Anthony said. "Eidith will show yer party to yer chambers."
"Ye're kind."
She turned to survey her guards, issuing a quiet instruction, and in the brief space of her turned back, Catriona watched Anthony's face. It did nothing. Not relief, not displeasure. He simply stood in the center of his hall and waited for the next thing that required him.
Moira turned back.
"I heard the boy is improved," she said.
The warmth in her voice shifted register slightly, still managed, but angled toward something that wanted to read as genuine concern.
"The whole glen speaks of it. A healer from the western glens, they say?"
Anthony's eyes moved across the hall to Catriona, a single brief pass that felt like a tether between them. "Aye. Catriona Campbell. She has done considerable work for the boy."
Moira followed the look.
She turned to Catriona with a smile that reached the exact distance smiles reached when they had been constructed rather than arrived at.
"Catriona Campbell." She inclined her head. "Then the glen owes ye a debt. The boy is well-loved."
"He's a good patient," Catriona said.
Her voice was even, practical, the tone she used when she had nothing to prove.
Something shifted in Moira's eyes, too brief to be called an expression. A recalibration.
"Indeed." She held Catriona's gaze one moment longer than courtesy required, then looked back at Anthony with a warmth that had been specifically increased. "I look forward to the chance to speak more, Laird. It has been too long."
"Aye," Anthony said. "It has."
Eidith stepped forward, and the party moved toward the guest wing. The hall began its slow return to ordinary noise, but Catriona became aware of Mairi at her shoulder, practically vibrating with the weight of her observations.
"She looked at ye," Mairi whispered, her voice a thin thread. "When he said yer name."
"I noticed."
"And he looked at ye first. Before he said it. Did ye notice that?"
Catriona picked up the candle she'd set on the side table. "Goodnight, Mairi."
"Catriona."
"Goodnight."
She walked back toward the corridor, and Fox fell in at her heel.
She kept her pace even and her face forward, refusing to think about the warmth along her jaw that had still not entirely left. She refused to think about a woman with pale hair and dark eyes looking at her with a smile that was a construction of war.
She thought about James's morning treatment. She thought about the elecampane steeping in the blue jar. She thought about the rain, which was still coming down, making the courtyard cold.
She thought about all of those things.
She tried not to think about the way Anthony's voice had sounded when he welcomed her.
She did not think about the horses in the yard.
She did not think about the particular quality of Moira MacLeod's look, not hostile, but assessing.
The look of a woman who had walked into a room and identified, without effort, the single thing in it that required her attention.
Fox paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at her, a low whine in his throat.
"I ken," she said. “It's nae going to be easy this time.”
She picked up her candle and went to bed.
The rain came down on McArthur all through the night. In the morning, Moira MacLeod would still be there, and Catriona was going to be entirely fine about that.
I'm certain about it.
She was almost certain of it.