Page 44 of A Highland Healer Captured
She didn’t know.
Best to move.
In her chamber she splashed water on her face until her skin prickled, changed for a cleaner gown, braided her hair tighter as if restraint could be worn like clothing. She swallowed a mouthful of oatcake, another of watered ale, and forced her mind to make more lists: blanket, cup, draught, a packet of marshmallow and moss in case the air stung him. Every time her thoughts tried to slide toward the sight of Zander’s mouth curving when Grayson laughed, she shoved them back into jars.
When she slipped out again, the keep had gone to that strange gray hour that isn’t quite morning but isn’t night, either—the hour when men who haven’t slept look like ghosts of themselves and women who’ve worked through dark stand steadier than saints. She crossed the yard with her bundle and told herself the skip in her pulse was from the cold.
But that was a lie.
The yard was empty enough to feel private. Zander wrapped Grayson in two blankets, lifted him carefully, and carried him down the stairs and out beneath the old elm as if he were offering his son to the air itself.
He had forgotten how a sleeping keep sounded—a handful of distant voices, the soft clink of a watchman’s buckle, a raven scolding no one in particular from the roofline. The grass held last night’s dew for ransom.
He set the boy down on the woven mat he had tucked under his arm at the door and settled him against a pillow. “How’s the air?” he asked, half teasing, because fathers should tease sons even when their hands shook.
“Cold.” Grayson grinned. “Good cold.”
“Good cold,” Zander agreed. He found a comfortable angle on the ground beside him and looked up. Above the wall, the sky had begun its slow undoing from black to blue, thin as milk at the edge. A bird marked it—one dark point becoming two becoming a scatter.
“What else do ye like that isnae birds?” he asked, an honest question; he wanted other things to anchor his son to the world in case the sky failed them.
Grayson considered this with the seriousness that made him seem older than six and then younger than it in the same breath. “Stories. Dice.” He shot a quick look from under his lashes. “Nae cheatin’. Just the click.”
Zander huffed. “I’ll forgive the clatter if ye forgive your uncle’s loose purse.”
“I forgive him everything.” A yawn snuck up on the boy and stole the last of his sentence. “And sweeties. But Katie says me belly is a knave.”
“Yer bellyisa knave,” Zander said gravely. “Mineis a king.”
Grayson wheezed a laugh and then sobered. “Will there be sweeties at the Kirn?”
Zander had known this was coming. He’d heard the whisper of it in Katie’s chatter, in the way the maids’ steps picked up when talk turned to patties and pies.
He smoothed a hand over the blanket as he shaped an answer that wouldn’t be a lie and wouldn’t be a promise he couldn’t keep. “There are always sweeties at the Kirn.”
“Can I go this year?” The words came not as demand or whine, only as wanting. Want is worse to deny than greed; it widens a man’s ribcage and sets it in a vise.
He could say no. He could wrap the boy in a dozen blankets and build a wall of men and tell himself that safety was worth any small grief. He looked at the gate instead, at the arch of it and the morning beyond, at the yard where he could stand without strain for as long as the boy wished. “I daenae ken.”
Grayson didn’t pout. He did worse. He nodded once, as if bravery at six were an ordinary chore, and folded his mouth around disappointment to keep from showing it. His eyes went flatter and older. “Right.”
“We’ll see,” Zander said, hating how weak the phrase sounded on his tongue.
Grayson stared at the sky as if it might answer more directly. Then, with the sudden tilt of mind children are blessed with, he turned his head so fast the blanket sloughed off one shoulder and said, clear as bell metal, “Is Lady Skylar nae going to the Kirn? She’s a lady.”
Zander scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck and forced a laugh that had some truth in it. “Aye, she’s a lady. And yer healer. The two at once are a plague to a laird’s peace.”
“If Lady Skylar is at the Kirn,” Grayson said with the clear, ruthless logic of the innocent, “then shouldnae weallbe there?”
“I cannae decide just now, laddie.” He tried to find ground that wouldn’t crumble under him. “I’ll consider it and tell ye later.”
His son did not argue. He simply went small, like a bird folding its wings because someone had made the sky too narrow. Zander felt the crack of it like a blow.
“Right,” Grayson whispered. “Later.”
He wanted to take the word back and give the boy everything. He also wanted his son alive on the other side of winter. Those wants fought to a draw in his throat. He reached for the other subject that had been waiting like a well-placed plank over bad ground. “The tree,” he said, pointing up. “Ye showed Skylar the cuts. I promised ye a perch.”
The boy’s head came up like a hawk’s. “Truly?”
