The firelight moved across the room, making everything feel closer than it was. The chairs, the low table, and the distance between them that had seemed manageable in the doorway were harder to measure from here.
“She’s a remarkable wee lass. Ye should be proud of her.”
“I am.” The words came out with a directness that left no room for qualification. “Every day.”
Ava looked up and found him already watching her, and the thing she’d been so carefully avoiding for eight days happened anyway. That internal lurch, that sharp and inconvenient awareness of the specific quality of his attention and how it settled on her like something with real weight.
She looked back at her cup.
“Is that all ye wanted me for?” she asked. “For the report?”
A pause. “Is that what ye think this is? A report?”
“That’s what ye said.” She kept her eyes on her cup. “We were to discuss Esther’s progress in yer study.”
“Aye.” Another pause, with a quality she couldn’t quite categorize. “And ye’ve been avoidin’ it for eight days.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Caitlin says ye took three wrong turns on the way here tonight.”
Ava looked up sharply. “Caitlin talks too much.”
“She does,” Noah agreed, with the absolute equanimity of a man who found this entirely convenient. “Is that yer only objection?”
“I’m nae objectin’ to anythin’. I’m here, am I nae?” She set the cup down with slightly more force than intended. “I came. I gave ye the report. Esther is doin’ well, she’s readin’, she’s speakin’, she needs more time before ye hear her stutter, and she’ll tell ye herself when she’s ready. That’s the sum of it.”
“Ava.”
The way he said her name—low, deliberate, as if he had made up his mind—made the back of her neck prickle.
“The stutter,” she said quickly. “It’s gettin’ better as she gains confidence. Tonight, she expressed herself freely. She told me I daenae make her lessons scary.” Her voice caught slightly on the last word. She cleared her throat. “Which is the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in quite some time.”
A pause. “I can think of some competition for that.”
She looked up before she could stop herself.
He was watching her steadily, something in it careful and deliberate, and underneath that something she was choosing not to name because naming it would require a response, and she had absolutely no idea what that would be.
She put the cup down. Picked it up again. “Ye have a very particular way of bein’ quiet that feels an awful lot like talkin’.”
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The close neighbor of one. “That’s remarkably observant.”
“I’m remarkably observant.” She looked at him directly then, because looking away had stopped working anyway. “What is it ye actually want to say, Noah? Because we can go around like this for another hour, or ye can just say it.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“She’s goin’ to be all right,” he said finally. “Esther.”
Ava blinked.
That was not what she’d been bracing for. “Aye. I said that.”
“Aye, ye did.” His eyes hadn’t moved from her face.
The fire crackled. Somewhere deep in the castle, a door closed, muffled and distant.
Ava stood.
