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When he nodded she felt relief flare in her eyes. ‘And Angus?’
‘Run off … several hours ago.’
His face in the light was harder than she remembered it to be and she saw Ian’s knife tucked beneath his belt.
His glance took in the brace of pigeons she had captured on the incline at the Alamere Creagh before coming back to her face. She saw him frown before he turned away.
Isobel Dalceann was like the space between lightning and thunder when all of the world holds its breath for what was to come. A woman apart from others, incomprehensible and unexpected.
He wished that just for a moment she might be gentle or kind or vulnerable, might smile or shake her head in the way of one who was uncertain, might come forwards and offer solace to Simon.
But she did none of these things as she gestured them to follow, only minions in her wake as the forest closed in about them, holding back the bands of rain. The dead birds hung at her side like an omen.
His arm ached hot and throbbing and the weight of Simon pulled him sidewards. Even a fool could see that if a village did not come soon he was done for and Isobel Dalceann was far from a fool. They came down tall dunes of sand into a sheltered bay, butterflies and flowers bordering a stream.
‘Put him here,’ she said finally as Simon gestured he could go no further. Laying down her own blanket, she knelt at his friend’s side.
Her hand ran across the injured leg and she felt the bruise rise up against her palm, the heat of infection surprising her. Last night this man had shown no sign of any injury save that of the ocean-cold in his bones and she cursed beneath her breath as she recognised her oversight. She should have tended to him hours ago when the fingers of badness might have been expunged more easily and the shaking had not overtaken all sense of ease. With a quick slash of her blade she opened the torn material in his hose from groin to knee. The swollen flesh on his upper thigh had been crushed and she knew instantly that there was nothing more that she could do. Bending to his chest, she listened for the pulse of blood.
‘Can you help him?’ There was a tone in James’s voice she had not heard before.
‘Help comes in many forms.’ Isobel was careful to take the emotion she felt away from her answer as she dribbled water through cracked and shaking lips, waiting for a moment while he swallowed to give him the chance to savour the wetness. Already she could feel the rattle of death in his chest, reverberating against her arm, a soft portent of an ending that was near. ‘My father used to say help was always only fiscal, but my husband insisted it was otherwise. He was a man inclined to the spiritual, you understand, before he died. Your friend here, though, needs another gift entirely and any aid given to another in reaching the afterlife easily has a reward all of its own.’
She saw the quick flicker of rebellion in his leaf-green eyes before he had a chance to hide it, loss entwined amongst anger. Biting down on her own grief, she laid her hand across the dying stranger’s throat, feeling the beat, weaker now and more erratic in the last emptying of blood.
He would still hear, she knew, still make sense of a world fading into quiet and she wanted him to understand the music inherent in a land his dust would be for ever a part of.
‘The smell of the sea is always close in Fife. We’re used to that here, used to living with the wind coming up the Firth funnelled into briskness and calling. The birds call, too, the curlews and the linnets, their song in the birch and the beech and the pine, and further west Benarty guards the heavens and gathers the clouds.’
Her land, its boundaries drawn in blood and fought for in a passion that was endless. The earth here would guard Simon, fold him into her warmth and hold him close. These were the old laws of dying, the rules that had been forgotten in the new kingdom of Scotland because men looked forwards now and never back.
She should be numbed to death, immune to its loss, but she was not and even a stranger who had walked with her for less than a day was mourned.
She had been married once? The thought made him stiffen as he watched her speak of the streams and the mountains and the flowers in springtime. Like a song of the living to the ears of the dying, he was to think later, and a prayer for transport somewhere easier and without pain. Her eyes remained dry.
A gift she had said, and indeed it was that, devoid of angst or panic or alarm. Simon simply slipped off and never moved again as she invoked a pathway to Heaven and talked of a good man that she wanted him to find there named Alisdair.
When death began to cool his flesh she stood, a little off balance. He would have liked to offer her his help, but he was uncertain as to whether she would accept it or not. As they looked at each other, the distance of a few feet felt like the world.
‘What was he to you, this Simon?’
‘A friend.’
‘And the other man, the one you held safe in the sea?’
‘Guy. My cousin.’
‘Then you are blessed with the love of others.’
The love of others! If only she knew. He stayed silent as Isobel turned Simon towards the ocean.
‘Spirits look eastwards for their home.’
‘I have not read that in any Bible.’ He tried to keep his voice even.
‘Some things are not written. They are simply known.’ Clearing a path to the sea, she uprooted bracken and small plants to leave an easy access.
He waited till she had finished before reaching forwards to take one of her hands. When he looked down he saw her fingernails were all bitten to the quick and that there was a wedding band on her marriage finger.
‘Thank you.’
She did not pull away, but stood still, her eyes this close ringed with a pure and clear gold. He tried not to glance down at the scar she wore so indifferently.
‘How long have you been married?’
She broke the contact between them with a single hard jerk. Lord, was nothing ever simple with her? Her hair had escaped the confines of a leather band and the lad’s hose had dropped to the line of her hips, and where the short tunic had hitched upwards the gap showed a good expanse of skin.
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘You look younger.’
‘Do I?’ For the first time since meeting Isobel Dalceann, he detected feminine uncertainty and a strange feeling twisted around his heart.
She had rescued him from a raging sea and sewn his arm up without flinching, yet here when he gave her a compliment she blushed like a young girl. The contradictions in her were astonishing.
‘We will wrap your friend in a blanket and leave him undisturbed until help arrives.’
‘Help?’
‘Angus will bring others.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Perhaps.’ Gathering a handful of sticks from the beach, she placed them in a pile. The scar on her hand in the fall of the eve was easily seen and he wondered again who had hurt her so very badly.
‘The keep you mention, is it your family’s?’
‘Aye, it is that and by virtue of long possession. The Dalceann have ruled the land around Ceann Gronna for centuries.’
‘ So you hold tenure direct from the Crown?’
Suspicion sparked across her face, changing eyes to deep brown. ‘Where exactly did you say you were from?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘But not from Edinburgh?’ The brittle anger in her words was palpable.
‘No. Burgundy.’
The tinder was set in the small fire and he flinted it, blowing at the flame until it took. Soon there was a blazing roar.
Isobel plucked the birds and threaded them through a stick she had sharpened with her knife. They were held in place by two piles of stones across the flames, more embers than fire now. She had added other berries he did not recognise, their red skins splitting in the heat. Everything she did showed prowess, competency and a knowledge of the bounty of this land.
‘What did you do there in France?’
‘Many things.’
‘Was soldiering one of them?’
He stayed silent. With no idea of the leanings of the Dalceann cause save the knowledge of an ancient patriarchal title, he needed to be careful. The unrest in Scotland had filtered into France, after all, and David’s hold on the country had always been tenuous. Edward the Third of England had his champion in the factions of Edward Balliol and the vagaries of clan law had never existed under simple allegiances.
Besides, his head swam in a way that was alarming and the prickling heat from the flames made him move back into the cool. If he had been stronger, he could have walked away into the night and tracked west along the Firth, but the shaking that had plagued Simon was beginning to plague him, too. Grinding his teeth together, he swallowed and closed his eyes to find balance.
He rarely answered a question, she noticed.
She also noticed the sweat on his brow and the way his cheeks had flushed with heat. It was his wound, no doubt, the badness settling in. She should unwind the cloth and wash the injury over and over with water that was too hot to touch, infused with the garlic she had so carefully stored at Ceann Gronna.
But here in the open, with nothing save that which she had already used, she wondered if it would not be better to leave it till the morrow when they reached the keep.
If she was a proper healer she might have been able to make the call, but warfare had taken up all the years of her life and it was true when Ian had said that she was more skilled in the art of killing.
Still she did have valerian and the special medicine from England to stop him thrashing about and hurting himself. He would be thirsty and the powders were tasteless. Her fingers felt the paper twists in the pocket of her tunic and she held them safe in her palm. James was large so the dose would be high. Not so high as to kill him though, she amended.
She smiled as she saw his gaze upon her.
‘I will fetch cold water from the stream before we eat.’
The rain sounded far away. He felt it on his face when he tipped his head, but the sky that it fell from was blurred and hollow, no true sense in any of it.
Isobel Dalceann sat watching him, the meat between them blackening on the stick, overcooked and forgotten. He should have moved forwards and taken it from the flame, but his hand felt odd and heavy, too much weight to bother with.
Closing his eyes, he opened them again, widening the lids in a way that allowed more light.
‘How do you feel?’
Her words were flat.
‘How should I feel?’
‘Tired?’
Understanding dawned. ‘You put something in the water?’ He made to rise, but his knees buckled under his weight and he fell to the side heavily. She did not blink as she watched him struggle.
‘Why?’ It was all he could manage, the numbness around his lips making it hard to speak. His tongue felt too big in his mouth.
‘Because you are a stranger,’ she answered, ‘and because everything is dangerous.’
He conserved his breath and closed his eyes. Was the concoction lethal? Already his heart was speeding up and sweat garnered in the cold. He should have been more on guard, he thought and swore at his own stupidity.
‘You won’t die,’ she said flatly, the firelight falling in rough shadows across her eyes. ‘It is an opiate of valerian and gentle unless you fight it.’
Such a quiet warning. He almost spoke, but the dark was claiming him, his world spinning into all the corners of quiet.
She cushioned a blanket beneath his cheek and another across his shoulders. Her fingers she passed beneath his nose, glad when she felt the gentle passage of air. She had not killed him and, unconscious, her prisoner would be so very much easier to protect.
Already she could hear them coming through the trees, the light that she had noticed reflected in the hills above a good few hours ago giving her knowledge of their presence.
Angus would be leading them and he would be looking for vengeance. Please God, that James had told the truth about leaving Ian alive, for if he had not …
She shook her head, repositioning her knife on the inside of her kirtle’s sleeve. These days she trusted no one, for David’s edict calling on the forfeiture of Dalceann land made everything tenuous. Troublesome vassals needed replacement with more amenable ones, after all, and there were many lining up for the rich largesse that was Ceann Gronna.
Even this one, perhaps? Her eyes went to James’s face.
He looked so much softer in sleep than in wakefulness. His nose had been broken somewhere in the past, the fine white line on the ridge leaving a bump to one side. His clothes still worried her, for the velvet surcoat was finely stitched, every seam doubled into dark green ribbon and his bliaud was of fashionable cotton. For the first time she saw a scar just above the fleshy cushion of his palm, dangerously close to the blue lines of blood at his wrist.
No small wound that. She imagined how it must have bled out and the effort it would have taken to quell such a flow. It looked deliberately done, too. Like the mark of a sacrifice.
But there were voices now, only a few hundred yards away. Positioning herself before him, she watched the track from where her clansmen would come, on the other side of the clearing.
Andrew came first, followed by Angus. Both looked for Ian.
‘Your brother is back in the glade where I left you, Angus,’ she said.
‘He hurt him. The one from the sea. He kicked out with his hands tied and brought him down. If he has killed him …’
‘He says he did not.’
As his glance flicked across to James, Angus pushed forward, intent written in every line of his face.
‘No.’ Isobel held the knife where he could see it and he stopped.
‘I am a Dalceann …’
‘And he is asleep.’
‘Drugged?’ Andrew spoke, his voice imbued with the quiet knowledge of something being not quite as it ought.
‘Aye. The wound ails him. I stitched it and cleaned it, but it still bleeds.’
‘And the other?’
‘He died a few hours back. The cold of the sea sat inside him like ice.’
A dozen Ceann Gronna soldiers shuffled into the clearing as they spoke and Isobel tipped her head at their coming, their full-length mantles folded against the chill.
‘I want this stranger unhurt. We will send him by boat to Edinburgh with the ferrymen from the landing-place and he will be no further nuisance.’
