He saw the moment Esther noticed him properly.
Her shoulders rose, and her chin dropped. She did the thing she always did, assembled herself together, making herself small and quiet, trying to take up less space.
Then she didn’t. She straightened up, raised her chin, and in a voice barely louder than the breeze, with just a slight catch at the start, she said,
“G-good mornin’, Uncle Noah.”
Noah went completely still. Esther had never so boldly looked him in the eyes and spoken so confidently. “Good mornin’, Esther,” he said. He kept his voice level with some effort. “Ye look well today.”
Her eyes searched his face with the wariness of someone waiting for the other shoe to drop, the correction, the impatience, the disappointment. When it didn’t come, something in her gradually unknotted.
“Ava s-says the loch has fish,” she offered.
“It does. Great fat ones that are very difficult to catch and very smug about it.”
Esther blinked. Then, carefully, the corners of her mouth moved. “Smug fish?”
“Extremely. They’ve had years of practice.” He held out his hand. “Shall we go see?”
She looked at his hand. Then, with the solemnity of someone making an important decision, she placed her small hand into it.
He didn’t look at Ava. He didn’t need to.
He could feel her watching from a couple of steps behind, and he could sense, without being able to quite identify it, the warmth and contentment of her attention, carefully kept in check.
He kept his eyes on the path ahead and walked with his niece toward the gate.
The loch was half a mile from the castle, past a stand of birch trees that had started to turn gold at the edges with the first signs of autumn.
Esther walked between them on the way out, her hand still loosely in his, her steps getting easier the farther they moved from the castle walls.
She pointed at things as they walked, including a cluster of mushrooms at the base of a birch.
"What are those?"
"Chanterelles." Noah crouched beside her. "See the color? Golden all the way through. They're safe to eat. Mrs. Ross uses them in the autumn stew."
Esther examined them with the focused intensity of someone filing information away for later. She straightened, moved on, then stopped abruptly to crouch again — this time over a rock half-buried in the path. She worked it loose with both hands, turned it over, and held it up to Noah with complete seriousness.
“It looks like a face,” she informed him.
He looked at the rock. It did, in fact, look somewhat like a face.
“Aye,” he said. “It does.”
She pocketed it. He watched her do this and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was enjoying himself.
Ava walked on Esther’s other side and said almost nothing, which he was beginning to realize was a deliberate tactic. She’d set this up, and now she was giving it space to unfold.
He found he was grateful.
The loch suddenly spread out from the trees, wide, grey-blue, and still, with the far shore lost in the morning haze.
Esther stopped at the edge of the trees and looked at it with her mouth slightly open.
“It’s b-big,” she said.
“Aye,” Noah agreed. “Bigger than it looks on the map.”
