Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
The torches should not have been lit yet.
That was the thought that arrived first, strange and specific, cutting through everything else.
The bruising pressure of fingers digging into her biceps, the low, jagged thrum of the crowd, the cold bite of the hemp rope cinched tight enough to make her pulse throb against the fibers.
The afternoon was a flat Highland grey, the kind of light that hung heavy over the heather but still let a person see the grain in the stone.
Yet someone had carried out the pitch-soaked brands and set them into the iron brackets, sparking them into a frantic, guttering dance in the middle of the afternoon.
Catriona understood, with the marrow-deep clarity that comes when the heart begins to hammer against the ribs, that the torches were not there for visibility.
They were for atmosphere.
This had been arranged. All of it.
The man from the market with his clean-edged, bloodless wound and his rehearsed, flat voice. The council assembled and waited in a grim semi-circle before she had even cleared the gate. The bundle of her own herbs, knotted with bleached bones she had never touched.
The evidence was too neat, the outrage too polished. This was not a spontaneous eruption of fear. This was a thing that had been built, piece by careful piece, by someone who understood exactly how much kindling a rumor needed to catch fire.
She looked toward the keep steps again. Moira still stood there, her hands folded over her fine woolen skirts, her face composed into a mask of perfect, tragic sorrow.
Aye. There it is.
The rope jerked at her wrists as someone pulled on the tether, and she let it. She didn't strain against the men holding her arms, even as their knuckles whitened with the force of their grip. She kept her chin parallel to the stones.
She had been twelve years old the first time a circle of faces had closed around her, and she had learned then what fighting gave them.
A show to justify their fear, and what stillness cost her.
She had chosen stillness every time since, and she was choosing it now, her spine a rigid line of defiance.
Fox was still snarling somewhere behind the wall of bodies.
She could hear him. Not the quick, sharp bark he used when Anthony teased him with a scrap of meat, but a sound that was lower, older, and continuous. It was the vibration of a predator that had weighed the odds and decided to fight them anyway.
Then came the sudden, sharp clack of stones hitting the cobbles, a frantic scuffle, and a high, broken sound that cut Catriona cleaner than any blade. She tried to twist her head, but the hands on her arms wrenched her back, steering her forward into the press of the crowd.
"Fox," she said.
Her voice was a dry rasp, barely a whisper. It wasn't a command, she had no breath left for authority. It was just his name, spoken in the soft tone she used when she needed him to trust her.
They brought her to the center of the courtyard and forced her to a halt. She stood her ground, her boots planted firmly on the damp stone.
The man from the market stepped forward, raising the charm high above his head. He held it out for the crowd like a trophy fish at the end of a line, turning it so the firelight caught the bone and the dark thread.
Catriona recognized the grey-green leaves of her own elecampane.
She did not recognize the bird-skull or the crude knot of cloth marked with dark, jagged symbols.
Marks that had never come from her hands or the long, quiet lineage of her grandmother's craft that she had carried since she was small enough to grab rosemary from the kitchen garden.
"She gave it me herself," the man shouted.
He projected his voice toward the back of the crowd, his chest puffed out. "Pressed it into me hand at the market this very morning. Said it would protect me animals from the murrain."
He paused, his eyes darting to the council elders, letting the silence fill with the sudden, sharp intake of breath from the villagers. "By evenin', three of me best cattle were dead in the dirt."
The crowd exhaled as one body, a low moan of fear that rippled through the ranks.
Catriona looked him directly in the eye, her gaze level and unblinking.
"Ye came to me with a wound," she said. She kept her voice steady and unhurried, the tone she used when a patient's fever-dream turned to panic, and they needed a solid point to hold onto.
"I cleaned it. I bound it with clean linen and lavender oil.
I gave ye nothing else. I have never seen that bundle before this moment. "
"She still lies!" the man barked before her last word had even faded.
The words sat ready in his mouth, leaping out with a practiced speed. Behind him, the crowd answered like an instrument being tuned to a discordant pitch.
"Witch," a woman's voice called from the left. It was half-swallowed, almost tentative, as if testing the weight of the air.
It did not stay tentative for long.
"Curse!" came a shout from the right, louder and more certain.
"Burn her!" The cry came from the back, where the faces were blurred by torch-smoke.
Catriona locked her fingers together behind her back.
She could feel the fine, uncontrollable trembling in her hands and fought to keep the vibration from reaching her shoulders or her face.
The acrid smoke from the torches stung her eyes, making them water. She blinked deliberately, once, twice, swallowing back the lump in her throat. She was not going to weep in front of a crowd that was looking for evidence of guilt in every tremor. Weeping would be evidence, and she knew it.
The council elder stepped forward, his heavy robes rustling against the stones.
"The evidence presented before this council is serious in its nature," he said.
He spoke slowly, weighing his words one at a time. "A charm of dark construction. Livestock dead in the field. A healer whose very methods have been questioned by more than one voice since her arrival." He clasped his hands behind his back. "The council will hear testimony."
"There is nothing to hear," Catriona said.
She didn't shout, but her voice cut through the murmurs like a whetted blade.
"I am a healer. I have spent six weeks tendin' that child's lungs.
I have nae harmed a single livin' thing inside these walls or out, and I can account for every dried leaf on me table and every drop of tincture I have compounded since the day I arrived. "
"She accounts for herself," someone muttered from the crowd, followed by a derisive snort.
"Of course she does."
"Who else would account for a stranger?" another voice added.
The elder raised a hand for silence, and the courtyard settled into a restless, shifting quiet.
"The healer will have her opportunity to speak before the council," he said. He didn't sound unkind, which felt like a fresh insult. "For now, she will be held in the keep until-"
"Someone call for the Laird!"
The voice was Donal's.
Catriona spotted him in the press. Grey-bearded and broad, his arms crossed over a chest.
Donal's mouth thinned into a hard, bitter line, his brow furrowed. He looked at the council through narrowed eyes, his jaw set with the rigid disgust showing he had lived long enough to know what a rushed judgment looked like and did not enjoy the sight of it.
"Anthony MacArthur is Laird of this land. Nae a decision of this weight gets made without his boots on these stones."
A ripple of hesitation moved through the crowd. They didn't agree, but they knew the law of the keep.
"The Laird rides the eastern ridge," the elder replied, his mouth thinning into a hard line. "He cannae be reached before nightfall."
"Then we wait," Donal said, his voice dropping into a stubborn register that echoed off the masonry.
"The livestock are…"
"Already dead," Donal snapped, the bluntness of his words ending the protest. "Waitin' another hour willnae bring them back to life."
Catriona looked at him. He didn't return the gaze. His eyes remained fixed on the elder. She felt a sudden, complicated warmth prickle behind her ribs. A small thing she didn't have the strength to hold right now, but could not push away.
"Riders have been sent," the elder said.
So, Anthony would know soon.
The question formed in her mind before she could catch it, sharp as a needle.
Would it matter?
Perhaps he doesnae care.
The thought lodged below her sternum, sharper than the iron of the shackles or the damp cold of the stones seeping through her boots.
She had told herself, through all those quiet evenings in the herb room, that she knew the terms of her stay. She was useful. Useful was the arrangement. She had told herself she wasn't foolish enough to build a hope on a foundation that had never been offered.
She stole a glance toward the gate.
The track ran north and empty, a ribbon of wet mud and silent heather under the grey sky. No rider appeared.
She looked back at the cobbles before anyone could catch her looking.
"In the meantime," the elder resumed, "the healer will be secured. For her own safety as much as the people around."
"Her own safety," Catriona repeated. She didn't file the sharp, jagged edge off her voice this time. "Aye. Of course."
From the steps of the keep, Moira MacLeod descended two stairs. She moved slowly, with a careful grace, and when she spoke, her voice was a flute-note of enormous gentleness.
It was, Catriona realized, her most lethal weapon.
"I take nay pleasure in this," Moira said.
She addressed the council, her hands opening at her sides in a gesture of practiced helplessness.
"I have prayed since last night that there was another explanation. That what I witnessed, the speed of the child's recovery, the animal that fears nothin', the remedies that work where learned physicians failed, that all of it was simply skill."
She paused, her dark eyes drifting to Catriona with a look of pained reluctance that made Catriona's stomach turn.
"I pray it still. But I could nae in conscience remain silent when a good man's cattle lie dead and a charm sits in me hand that I cannot explain."
"Then let me explain it," Catriona said. Her voice had dropped low, the fury compressed into a cold, hard precision.
"I didnae make that charm. I daenae make charms. Me grandmother taught me herb lore and the patience to learn what a body needs and give it exactly that.
She taught me nothin' else, because there is nothin' else, there is only work and knowledge.
I have used both for six weeks for a child who could nae walk ten paces without gaspin', and he is breathin'. That is the whole of it."
She stared at Moira, letting the silence stretch thin. "If that frightens ye, me lady, I cannae help ye. Fear finds its reasons."
For a fraction of a second, something broke across Moira's face. It was so fast Catriona almost missed it. A flicker of something raw and exposed behind the mask. Not guilt, but something sharper.
Then the performance snapped back into place. Moira dropped her gaze, obviously not happy she had been somewhat challenged. Catriona could see that she felt insulted.
The crowd wasn't quiet anymore.
The words, witch, curse, burn, had begun to grow, feeding on the tension. The elder raised his hand, but the noise only dampened slightly. The guards' grip on Catriona's arms tightened until her shoulders ached.
"Take her inside," the elder commanded.
"Ye'll wait," Donal barked.
He took two heavy steps forward, planting himself between Catriona and the heavy oak doors of the keep. "Anthony MacArthur is the Laird of this clan, and this woman stands under his protection. Nae one of ye moves her one inch until he's standing in this courtyard. Am I plain?"
The movement stopped. The courtyard held its breath.
Somewhere behind her, barely audible over the wind and the snapping torches, Catriona heard a sound.
A quick, bright note, a fox's bark, alive and stubborn. Her throat closed up.
She did not let a muscle in her face move.
She stood in the middle of the courtyard with the rope at her wrists and Donal's broad back three feet in front of her. She straightened her spine, took a breath of the smoke-thick air, and did not look at the road again.
She had looked once.
Once was enough.
She was not going to be found looking a second time.