Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The storm arrived without warning.
One hour the sky was the flat, colorless grey that had sat over McArthur for three days.
The next, the wind came off the northern ridge like something with intention, driving rain horizontal against the keep walls, rattling the shutters in their iron brackets, finding every gap in the stonework that six generations of MacArthurs had failed to seal.
By nightfall, the courtyard was a river.
Catriona stood at the narrow window of her chamber and watched it and thought about the roads.
About the passes. About the particular quality of Highland mud after sustained rain, the way it swallowed cart wheels and held horses' hooves and turned a two-hour journey into something that couldn't be done at all.
Moira MacLeod is not leaving.
She had known it before the storm.
Had felt it in the careful way the woman moved through the keep, the way her eyes tracked doorways and faces and the small geography of a household still learning what it was. Polite. Impeccably so. And thorough in the way that politeness, when it was a tool rather than a habit, always was.
She is counting things. She has been counting since she arrived.
She turned from the window.
Fox was on the bed, watching her with amber eyes.
"Aye," she told him. "I ken."
She pulled her shawl tighter and went to check on James before supper, taking the long corridor that passed the upper hall, because she had learned by now which routes were quiet and which ones weren't, and tonight she wanted quiet.
The keep felt different with Moira in it.
Fuller somehow, and not in the way of warmth. The way a room felt when someone had moved the furniture slightly, and you couldn't name what was wrong, but kept catching the edge of it.
She checked James's pulse, his breathing, and the color in his face. All steady.
He had fallen asleep with Fox's vacant spot still warm at the foot of the bed, one hand curled beneath his chin, his chest rising at the new, easier pace that still made something catch in her throat every time she heard it.
He's better.
She tucked the blanket at his shoulder and went down to supper.
The hall was fuller than usual, storm-kept, men who would ordinarily have taken their meal in the yard now pressed into the long room with its low beams and peat-smoke warmth.
Moira sat two places from Anthony's right, composed and bright-eyed, her pale hair pinned with a precision that suggested either a very skilled maid or a very deliberate presentation of self.
She spoke well.
That was the first thing and the most important thing to understand about her.
She spoke with the unhurried ease of a woman who had spent years in rooms where speech was currency and had never once been short of funds.
She asked questions that flattered the men who answered them. She listened with her whole face.
Catriona sat in her usual place beside Mairi and watched without appearing to watch.
Then, during a lull in the conversation, while a servant was refilling the cups and the attention of the table was briefly nowhere in particular, Moira set down her cup with a small, gracious gesture and said it.
"The child does seem remarkably improved." Her voice was warm with what looked exactly like relief. "One hears such terrible accounts of his condition. To see him so..." She paused, tilting her head slightly. "Vigorous."
A beat.
"Remarkable, truly, how quickly he improves." Her eyes moved across the table with an expression of pure, mild wonder. "Some might call it..." Another pause. Shorter this time. Barely a hesitation at all. "Unnatural."
The word landed in the hall the way a coal lands on dry cloth.
Catriona felt it move outward from where it had been placed.
Watched it reach Donal, who set down his cup with a fraction more care than the action required.
Watched it reach the two men three seats down who had spent a week on the north wall inventory in the rain.
Watched it reach Callum, who said nothing but stopped eating.
The fire crackled. Someone coughed.
"The child improves," Anthony said, "because the healer is skilled." His voice carried the flat authority of a statement that was not an invitation to discussion. He did not look up from his plate.
Moira smiled at him with great warmth. "Of course," she said. "Of course, that is it."
Of course, Ye've already done it.
Ye daenae need to say it twice.
She looked at her plate. The food had stopped tasting of anything.
Anthony had not looked at her. He had defended her the way he would defend a decision. Efficiently, from a distance, without a single word directed at her, without anything that might have told her she was something other than the subject of the conversation.
Valued while useful.
That's all this is. That's all it has ever been, and ye were a fool to let yerself forget it.
Mairi's hand found her knee under the table. A brief, warm pressure, and it was gone.
Catriona ate what she could manage, which was not much, and excused herself before the table cleared. She walked the corridor to her chamber with her shoulders straight and Fox at her heel, and did not let her jaw unclench until the door was closed behind her.
She lay in the dark and listened to the storm and thought about the way Moira had paused. The precision of it. Nothing about that woman was accidental.
Unnatural.
She had heard the word before. Had heard it in a dozen different voices in a dozen different places over a dozen years.
From people who had watched her heal a child's fever in a single night and decided the speed of it was suspicious.
From people who had been grateful first and frightened after, which was always the worst order.
She knew what the word meant when it was spoken in that particular tone. She knew what it was the beginning of.
She pressed her palm flat to her sternum and breathed through her nose and told herself it was nothing. Told herself Anthony had dismissed it. Told herself the clan knew her now.
Aye, keep telling yerself that.
Fox pressed his chin to her ankle.
She reached down without looking and found the warm, solid weight of his head and held it until her breathing settled. The fire burned low and the storm kept doing what it was doing outside, which was everything it could.
Morning came grey and wet.
Anthony had risen before first light to oversee repairs to the cattle shelters on the south side of the estate.
She had heard his boots in the corridor, knew them still, without having decided to, and had listened to them fade down the stairs and out of the keep, and had lain in the dark afterward staring at the ceiling.
The lungwort on her worktable was gone. She needed more, and the market at the village edge would have it, and the walk was short, and the walls of the keep that morning felt like what they were.
She wrapped her cloak, took her basket, and went.
The market was thin in the rain.
Stalls with their awnings lashed down against the wind, vendors who had decided the weather was worth enduring and set their jaws accordingly.
Catriona moved through it with her hood up and her head down, the kind of purposeful efficiency that discouraged conversation. She found the lungwort at the second stall, traded a prepared salve for more than she needed, and was wrapping it into cloth when the man appeared at her elbow.
She heard him before she saw him.
A hesitation in the foot traffic, the specific pause of someone who had been waiting for a moment rather than arriving at one.
She turned.
He was unremarkable in the way that some people were unremarkable deliberately. Medium height, weathered, the kind of face that looked like every face and none in particular. His left arm was extended toward her, sleeve rolled to the elbow, displaying a wound along the forearm.
She looked at it.
Shallow.
The edges were too clean for an accident. Too deliberate in their length. The kind of cut that knew exactly what it was doing and had been careful not to go deep enough to matter.
"Healer," he said. Flat. Rehearsed-sounding. "Would ye take a look?"
Everything in her that had been trained across years of practice, that had learned to read the difference between a man in pain and a man performing pain, said,
Something is wrong here.
She could not name the specific detail. Just the low, persistent certainty of it, the same instinct that had once told her to leave a village three days before the fever arrived.
She treated it anyway. Because he was in front of her and the wound was there, and she was a healer. And refusing treatment to a man who asked for it was not something she knew how to do, regardless of what her instincts were saying at the back of her mind.
She cleaned it. Applied lavender oil. Bound it with a strip of clean linen from her basket, neat and tight and proper.
"Keep it dry," she said. "Change the binding in two days."
He looked at her. Something moved in his face that she didn't like, a flicker behind the eyes, there and gone.
"Me thanks," he said. And left.
She watched the direction he took, the pace of him, the way he moved through the crowd without once glancing at the stalls on either side.
A man who knows where he's going, and isnae shopping.
She stood with the lungwort in her hands and the unease sitting cold in her chest and could not name what she was looking at, only that she was looking at something. Then the crowd closed around him, and he was gone, and she gathered her basket and turned for the road back to McArthur.
She smelled the crowd before she saw it.
The particular quality of gathered people. Bodies and breath and wet wool and the specific charge in the air that happened when a crowd had a purpose, and the purpose was not a good one.
It reached her before the courtyard opened up, before she could see what was assembled under the arch. She came through the gate and stopped.