Chapter 19 #2
The council stood in a line beneath the archway. Six men, their expressions arranged.
Villagers pressed in from both sides, murmuring, their faces carrying the bright, uncomfortable energy of people who had been told something alarming and had not yet decided what to do with it.
And there, at the center, held up by two guards on either side with his arm bandaged in her clean linen, was the man from the market.
He was standing differently now. The slump was gone. He was upright and deliberate, with an audience behind him and guards beside him, and the wound that had been quietly extended toward her on a rain-damp street was now displayed for the consideration of the assembled company.
In his other hand he held a bundle.
She looked at the bundle.
Cloth. Bone. A strip of something dark wound between them. Herbs, recognizable, specific. The kind of combination she used in James's second-stage preparation and left as discarded matter in the bowl by the worktable.
Her stomach dropped.
Those are mine.
Those came from me table.
The council elder stepped forward. A careful man, she had noted that about him, careful in the way of men who understood that what they were about to do would be remembered and had decided to do it with gravity.
"A matter has been brought before this council," he said, his voice carrying to every corner of the courtyard, "requiring investigation for the safety of everyone."
"He wasnae there before me."
Her voice came out steady. That surprised her.
She walked forward through the crowd, which parted. She stopped ten feet from the man. From the bundle.
"That man came to me at the market," she said, to the council and to the crowd and to anyone listening. "I treated a wound on his arm. I gave him lavender oil and clean linen. That is all I gave him."
"She lies," the man said. His voice was louder than it needed to be.
"She lies," someone echoed from the back. Then another voice. Then two more.
Already seeded.
They came here already knowin' what they were going to say.
She looked at the bundle. At the herbs she recognized. At the bones, the crude knot of the cloth, the symbols pressed into it that had never come from her hands.
"I have never made that," she said, quieter now, which sometimes carried further than volume. "I have never made anything like it. Those herbs were mine, but they were to be discarded later."
"She recognizes them," someone said.
"She admits it," said another.
Don't show them fear.
Old knowledge, learned young, learned at cost.
Fear is what they're looking for. Daenae give them the shape of it.
She lifted her chin and looked at the crowd and found every face she recognized in it.
Donal, not meeting her eyes. Two of the kitchen lads at the edge, pressed back against the wall.
Seumas, somewhere in the middle, with an expression she couldn't read from here.
And on the steps of the keep, raised above it all, Moira MacLeod stood with her hands folded and her face arranged in something that looked so much like sorrow that Catriona, who had been watching her since supper, almost believed it.
Almost.
There it is.
There's the shape of it. There's the thing ye've been building since ye arrived.
The elder's voice rose again, measured and solemn. "An investigation must be held. For the safety of this glen, and all who live within it."
"Witchcraft."
She didn't know whose voice said it first. It didn't matter. The word was in the air, and the air had been waiting for it, and what happened next happened the way these things always happened. Fast and loud.
Hands closed on her arms.
She didn't fight. She had learned, early and at cost, that fighting confirmed what they believed and gave them permission for what came after.
Then Fox hit the first guard's shin like a thrown stone.
He went for the hands holding her first, and when those hands pulled back.
He turned on the second guard with a sound she had never heard him make in five years of knowing him. Not the fox she had pulled from a trap in the western glens, patient and clever and content to steal bread and dignity in equal measure. Something older than that. Something that had decided.
He twisted out of the first grasp, was seized by the second, and held, still snarling.
Catriona heard him and could not do anything about it, and that, more than the hands at her wrists and the iron that followed them and the word still ringing off the courtyard stones, was the thing that closed her throat.
She looked at the road through the gate. The empty track that ran north toward the ridge where Anthony had ridden before first light.
He doesnae ken.
He's out there, and he doesnae know, and by the time he returns, it will already be decided.
The iron bit at her wrists. She lifted her chin.
She had been here before. Not these walls or these faces, but this place, this specific geography of a crowd that had found a direction for its fear and aimed it at the nearest woman who didn't quite fit.
She had been twelve years old the first time. She had survived it then by running.
She was not running now.
The crowd pressed in.
Moira MacLeod watched from the steps, and Catriona stood in the middle of it all, wrists bound. Fox's voice was somewhere behind her, and she kept her chin up, and gave them nothing.