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Her attention was drawn to the other men beside her, their words rising in anger as they squabbled over the jewels. She stopped them with a short command, though the oldest of the pair drew his hands into fists and punched the air, twice.
Intentions!
Staying expressionless, Marc looked back at the woman. Her fingers had crept to the knife at her belt, relaxing as she saw one of her men move off into the forest, though when she gestured to the other to tie them up Marc swore beneath his breath.
He could fight, he supposed, and win, but with an arm that needed some attention and Simon with a leg that was taking him nowhere he thought it better to wait.
The rope was thick and well secured, putting them a good length away from each other. When the man was finished Isobel Dalceann checked the ropes herself. Her flesh was freezing as her arm brushed against her prisoner’s and he thought for the first time that she was good at hiding her feelings.
‘We’ll unfasten you when the food is ready, but at every other time you will be tethered until we decide what to do with you. After dinner I will tend to your arm.’
Her last sentence heartened him. If she meant to kill them, surely she would not waste any time caring for them first? Then the import of what she said sunk in. The gash was deep and the light was bad and the few belongings seen in this provisional camp pointed to the fact that medical care would be at best basic.
‘I can wait.’
His saviour began to laugh and there were deep dimples in both her cheeks. He heard Simon next to him draw in breath and knew that his thoughts were exactly the same as his own.
This warrior queen was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, despite the scar and her garb and the grimace that was her more normal expression. Looking away, he tried to take stock of such thoughts and failed. Beneath his tight hose lust grew. God … the world was falling topsy-turvy and he could stop none of it. Shifting his stance, he bent his knees.
‘Wait for what? Edinburgh is almost a week’s worth of walking from here and by that time your arm …’ She stopped, her teeth worrying her bottom lip. ‘The sea may have cleaned it, of course, but the bindings holding you are well used.’
He frowned, not understanding her reasoning.
‘It is my experience that filth often finishes what a blade begins.’
Riddles. Another thought wormed into his head. Was she one of the silkies that the legends from these parts were full of? He had never seen a woman so easily able to manage the sea before and the colour of her hair was that of the sleek black coats of fur seals often sighted off the coastline.
Lord. The blood loss was making him unhinged and those knowing eyes so full of secrets were directing him to imagine things that would never come to pass.
He looked away and did not speak again.
The stranger would be screaming before the night was out despite the careful diction in his sentences. Isobel was glad for it, glad to imagine the weakness in him as he submitted to a mending that would not be easy.
He unsettled her with his verdant, vivid eyes, his high-priced golden bracelet and his French accent. Ian had wanted to kill him, finish him off and be done with any nuisance or trouble, but the thought of his blood running on the ground as his soul left for the places above or below filled her with a dread she had not felt before. They were probably David’s men, newly returned from France with the fire of the power of the monarch in their bellies, and no mind for the ancient laws.
What would they know of her and of Ceann Gronna?
‘Unmarriageable Isobel’ she was called now; she had heard it from a bard who had come to the keep with a song of the same name.
Swearing soundly, she returned to the food, panic subsiding as the everyday task took her attention; two days’ walk to the keep and another two to Dunfermline where the strangers could be sent by ferry across the Firth towards Edinburgh.
She wished Ian and Angus had not been with her, for she would have to watch them and the foreigners at the same time. Anything of worth had been taken, after all, and now their presence could only be a bother. Isobel doubted the third man would last the night, given his colour, but there was little in truth she could do about any of it.
She hoped that the green-eyed man would speak the French again so she might overlisten and at least know just what his intentions were.
The jewellery might tell her something of them, of course, but she did not wish to ask Angus for a look at the haul just to probe into the mystery of who he was. Nae. Better she never knew and sent him on, out of her life and out of her notice.
The simple silver ring on her own finger tightened as she turned it, a lifetime pledge reduced to just two years, and then a yoke of guilt. Sometimes, like now, she hated who she had become, a scavenger outside the new system of government imposed on the old virtue of possession, leaving no true home in any of it. Even the ground did not speak to her as it used to, whispering promises of the for ever. Once the system of lairdship had ruled this place, the great estates handed down through the generations, like treasured possessions and always nurtured. Until King David had come with his fealty and his barons, taking the land by force and granting it to his own vassals for their allegiance and loyalty.
Now possession was tempered by blood and war and betrayal. Sweat beaded beneath the hair at her nape and if she had been alone she might have lifted the heavy mass away from her skin and simply stood there.
But she was not alone.
She could feel his eyes on her back like a hawk might watch a mouse crossing a field. Waiting.
Had he not said exactly that to his friend as he sat there against the tree, his hose tight in places that made the blood in her face roar.
‘Alisdair.’
The name came beneath breath like a prayer or a plea, invoking what was lost and would never be again. She was glad when Angus reappeared from the forest with a bundle of dry tinder and a good handful of blaeberries.
Chapter Two
The fish and rabbit were tenderly cooked and when the one she called Ian might have given them only a very small portion she had gestured him to ladle out a full plate, with a crust of hard black bread in the juice.
The boatman had eaten nothing, his head lolling on to his chest in a way that was worrying. Marc saw the woman bring an extra blanket and lay him down on it with care. He also saw that she did not bind him again, but left him free. To die in the night without fetters, he supposed. Perhaps there was some folklore from this part of the world that a man should meet his maker unconstrained.
After she had finished with his comfort she came to him, loosening the ties at his wrists and directing him to come to the fire.
There was a flask of whisky waiting and she motioned him to drink. The brooding in her eyes lent him the thought that she had not meant to do this at all and he swallowed as much as he could before she took it back. He was pleased to feel the burn of it down his throat as an edge of calm settled.
He would need it. Already she had lifted her knife.
‘I have to remove the bad skin.’
He had not even answered before she poured whisky across his gash, fire against the hurt and his heart beating as fast as he had ever heard it.
Flames lightened her eyes into living gold and her fingers on the blade were dextrous. He saw she had another scar running from the base of her smallest finger right across the foot of her knuckles to the thumb. He wondered if she had got that at the same time as she had received the one on her face.
‘If you stay still, it will help.’
The message in her words was plain. Move and the agony will be greater. Like a challenge thrown down into the heart of mercy.
He wished he had a piece of leather to bite upon, but she did not offer it and he would not ask.
‘You are experienced in the art of healing?’
At this question both the men behind her began to laugh.
‘The art of killing more like,’ one of them muttered.
He saw her grasp tighten on the blade, an infinitely small movement that suggested wrath a hundred times its size. He trusted it also signalled care or humanity or just simple expertise. At the moment it was the best he could hope for. Marc was surprised when she spoke again and at length.
‘From experience I find healers are women with little mind for the ordinary. My opinion of them is tempered by their need to eke out some existence in a world that might otherwise be lost to madness.’
This train of thought was to his liking. ‘So you are not of that ilk?’
‘Witches and fairy folk are born into the lines that whelp them.’
As Isobel raised her blade into the light the dancing flames were reflected in silver.
‘But your line was different?’ Suddenly he wanted to know something of her. With her mind distracted by his pain and hurt, she might be persuaded to answer him.
But she remained silent, her lips firm as she cut into his flesh, the roiling nausea that had been with him since the rescue at the beach rising up into his throat as bile.
‘Lord Almighty.’
‘You are a religious man, then?’
‘If I said that I was would it help my cause?’
‘With your God or with me?’ she countered, turning the knife into live tissue and watching as blood filled the wound.
He swallowed.
‘There is sand and grit in the furrow and it must be removed.’
‘Grain by grain?’ He visibly flinched and she stopped for a second to watch him, a measured challenge in the tilt of her head and so close he could feel the warmth of her breath.
He shook and hated himself for it, but even as he held his hand to anchor the elbow to his side he could not stop it.
Shock, he thought; a malady that men might perish of as easily as they did the cold. On an afterthought he glanced over to the boatman on the blanket and saw that he had stopped breathing.
‘He left us as I poured the whisky across your arm.’ Isobel Dalceann’s words held no whisper of sorrow even though she had tended him. ‘Tomorrow would have been too hard for him to manage, so our Lord in his wisdom has seen him walk along another path.’
Two things hit him simultaneously as she uttered this. She was a spiritual woman and she was also a practical one. For some obscure reason both were comforting.
The pain, however, was starting to war with the numbness of whisky and he stayed quiet. Counting.
By the time he had got to a hundred and she placed her knife back on the hook across the fire he knew he was going to be sick.
She turned away and did not watch him throw up even though she had promised herself that she would. But this man with his bruised green eyes and gilded surcoat was … beguiling. No other damn word for it.
As long as he did not look as though he might fall over and mark the wound with the earth she would wait; patience had always been her one great virtue, after all.
‘Are you finished?’ She wished she might have inflected some empathy into the query, but the others were watching her and they would not expect it.
Nodding, he straightened. He still shook, though not with the fervour that he had done before.
‘The poultice I have prepared will numb any pain you have.’ God in Heaven, now why had she said that?
A slight smile lifted his lips. ‘Do I dare hope that the Angel of Agony has a dint in her armour?’
‘The needle that I will sew your hide up with is not my finest.’
‘Where is your finest?’
‘Lost in the skin of a patient who had no time to sit longer.’
‘A pity, that. Not for him, but for me.’
Unexpectedly she laughed out loud, as though everything in her world was right.
Ian stood and sidled closer. ‘Have ye drunk more of the whisky than ye used on him, Izzy?’ he asked and picked up the cask. Snatching it from him, she placed it on the ground and plucked an earthenware container from her bag. Sticks of fragrant summer heal and dried valerian were caught in twists of paper, but it was the rolled and cleaned gut of a lamb that she sought.
Taking the long sinew between her fingers, she wished the stranger might simply faint away and leave her to the job of what had to happen next, for no amount of alcohol would dull this pain.
With the needle balanced across the flame, she dunked the gut in boiling garlic water before threading it, feeling the sting of heat on her skin. A gypsy she had met once from Dundee had shown her the finer points of medical management and she had never forgotten the rules. Heat everything until boiling point and touch as little as you needed to. Alisdair had bought her silver forceps from Edinburgh after they had been married, but they had been lost in the chaos of protecting Ceann Gronna. Just as he had been! She wished she might have had the small instrument now with its sharp clasp and easy handling.
Her patient’s arm glistened in the firelight, the pure strength and hard muscle, defined by the flame, tensing as she came closer.
‘If you stiffen, it will hurt more.’
He smiled and his teeth were white and even. Isobel wished he had been ugly or old.
‘Hard to be relaxed when your needle looks as if it might better serve a shoemaker.’
‘The skins of all animals have much the same properties.’ Pulling the flap of skin forwards, she dug in deep. The first puncture made a definite pop in the silence, but he did not move. Not even an inch. She had never known a patient to sit so still before and she kent from experience just how much it must hurt.
She made a line of stitches along the wound. Blood welled against the intrusion and his other hand came forwards to wipe it away. She stopped him.
‘It is better to let it weep until the poultice is applied.’ She did not wish to tell him again of her need for cleanliness.
He nodded, his breath faster now. On his top lip sweat beaded, the growth of a one-day beard easily seen, though he turned from her when he perceived that she watched him.
‘The woman has the way of a witch. I do not know if we should trust her.’ His friend spoke in French, caution in his words, but the green-eyed one only laughed.
‘Witch or not, Simon, I doubt that the physic at court could have made a better job.’
Court? Did he mean in Edinburgh or Paris?
Flexing his arm as she finished, he frowned when the stitches caught.
‘It would be better to keep still.’ She did not want her handiwork marred by use.
‘For how long?’
Shrugging, she took the powders up from their twists of paper and mixed them on the palm of her hand with spit. A day or a week? She had seen some men lift a sword the next evening and others fail to be able to ever dress themselves properly again. Positioning his arm, she placed the brown paste over the wound and bound it with cloth, securing the ends with a knot after splitting the fabric.
‘By tomorrow you will know if it festers.’
‘And if it does?’
‘Then my efforts will be all in vain and you will lose either your arm or your life.’
‘The choice of Hades.’
‘Well, the Sea Gods let you loose from the ocean so perhaps the Healing God will follow their lead.’
