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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.’
She was relieved as he moved a good distance away.
Everything ached: his arm, his head and his throat. The rain from above was heavy, wetting them with its constant drizzle.
He slept fitfully, curled into the blanket like a child, waking only as the moon waned against the coming dawn. Isobel Dalceann sat upright against the trunk of a tree. Her hair now was bunched under a hat so that the raindrops fell off the wide edge to dribble down the grey worsted wool of her overcoat. One hand played with the beads of an ebony rosary, glass sparking in the fire-flames and the way her lips moved soundlessly suggested an age-old chant. He could not take his eyes away from a woman whose knife lay across her knees, ready to take a life after spending the whole of an evening trying to save one.
‘I know you are awake.’
He couldn’t help but be amused. ‘Hard to sleep with the possibility of losing my arm on the morrow.’
‘How do you feel now?’
‘Sore.’
‘But not sick?’
He shook his head.
‘Then I should imagine you will get to keep it, after all.’
‘Your bedside manner lacks a certain tenderness.’
She smiled. ‘Ian hoped you might be dead by now. We placed the other man back into the outgoing tide and he’d like to do the same with you.’
‘Unshackle us and we will walk away in any direction you choose.’
‘The problem with that is you have the way of our names and our faces, and there are many who would hurt us here in the ancient hunting grounds of the Dalceann clan.’
‘If we gave our word of honour to maintain only silence …?’
‘Words of honour have the unfortunate tendency to become surplus to survival once safety is reached.’
‘Then why did you swim out to us in the first place?’
Her eyes flickered to the empty skin at his wrist.
‘The gold?’ He pushed himself up to a sitting position. Streaks of red-hot pain snaked into his shoulder. ‘You could not have known that we were adorned with such before you reached us.’
He caught the white line of her teeth. ‘But we could hope.’
‘Only that?’
She remained a shadow amongst the trees, her legs against her chest with a blanket around her shoulders. ‘A boat left the Ceann Gronna keep two weeks ago bound south with a dozen of our men aboard and Ian, Angus and I came from the keep to see if we could see any sign of its return. We thought it might be the vessel that had foundered.’ Her hand stilled for a moment on the count of the beads and she switched languages with barely an inflection of change. ‘You spoke with your friend today of a physic at court. Which one do you hail from?’ He was astonished.
‘You speak French?’
‘Fluently. My mother was from Antwerp.’
‘It might have been wiser to keep that to yourself.’
‘As a weapon?’ Deep dimples graced each cheek as she placed her fingers across her mouth. For the first time since he had been in her company he saw the coquette she might have played so very well in any other lifetime. ‘Why would I have need of one? Your friend can hardly walk with his bruising and your arm is bound and useless. Are you right-handed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then let us hope you have had practice with your other arm to fend off the enemy.’
‘Why? Are they close?’
‘You are looking straight at one, monsieur. As close as breath.’ No humour at all lingered.
‘A woman who has saved me twice can hardly be classed as an enemy.’
‘The most cunning of foes are those you know and trust.’
He knew she spoke from her own experience but, with a little chink of goodwill settling between them, did not wish to mention it and ruin the discourse.
Besides, here in the night with the moon upon them and the quiet call of birds that did not sleep, either, there was a sense of camaraderie he had never felt before with any woman.
‘What is your name?’ Her question came after many moments of silence and he hesitated. How much should he tell her? He opted for caution.
‘James.’
She turned it on her tongue twice. ‘I had a brother of the same name.’
He noted the past tense.
‘My mother took him with her when she left my father. I was six. He was three. The boat they used to escape foundered off Kincraig Point and they were both drowned.’
Her head tipped up and he saw her eyes watching him in the moonlight. Why had her mother not taken her? He did not like to ask the question, but she answered it for him anyway.
‘Enemies can operate under the guise of love just as easily as they can do hate, and it is my experience that all parents have their favourites.’
‘God.’ His expletive was filled with all the anger she must have felt as a six-year-old.
‘Were there other siblings?’
‘You ask too many questions,’ she said and stood, stretching. The outline of one breast was easily seen against her tunic where the material had slipped to allow the soft abundance an escape.
Mon Dieu, he was turning into a man he did not recognise.
Was it the light-headedness after the doctoring that had him ogling a woman who might still be tossing him back into an outgoing tide come the morrow?
But there was something about her, with her long dark hair and her prickliness, a female set apart from others and fierce. He could not think of even one man of his acquaintance who would have braved such a cold and angry sea.
He also wondered how long she had lived rough like this, lost from society and the discourse of other women.
Her travelling companions lay over the other side of the clearing, their snores mingling with Simon’s, a whisky pouch beside them, and an array of knives and crossbows against a rock at the ready.
Enemies. Everywhere.
The day pressed upon him with all its unexpected turnings. Guy lost, Simon saved and his arm sewn up by a woman who looked like a battered angel. With a sigh he closed his eyes and drifted into sleep.
She could hear him breathing, evenly, slumber taking over from pain.
He lay with his good arm tucked under his head as a cushion against the hardness of the ground, the drizzle sitting on his hair like small jewels. He was a puzzle, this James, with his careful green eyes and his golden bracelet and his way of making certain that all those about him were safe. She had heard the boatman and the one called Simon talk of the way he had rescued them from the trappings of rope and sail as the boat had foundered, clawing his way back to find whoever was left. The marks of bruises all over him told her that the task had not been easy, either, and his vigilance and guardedness here even in the face of pain was unrelenting.
Swearing beneath her breath, she balled her fists and listened to him take breath, quiet in the night and comforting. It was this comfort that had led her to speak of her mother, a subject she had not shared with one other person in all of her life. All twenty-three years of it. Lord, it seemed like so much more.
James. He didn’t suit the name, she thought. Too proper for a man who looked as he did. Too very orthodox and prim. She wished he might wake up so that they could talk again out here in the night alone with the rain to shelter their words from the others, but the day had exhausted him and she was glad that he lay in the arms of rest.
She couldn’t sleep because there were too many thoughts in her head, too many memories dredged up: her mother’s sadness and her father’s fury when he realised that his wife had escaped through one of the sea caves under Ceann Gronna. He had ranted and raved on the high battlements for all of the hours of the storm and when Isobel had gone to him to try to help he had pushed her away, screaming his hatred. Such recollections made her melancholy, a small child blamed for all the self-absorption and egotism of her parents.
She needed some space away from this stranger with all his questions inciting unwanted confidences she had never told another soul. Ian would not hurt them unduly for she had made sure he had understood the consequences should he fail to protect them.
Careful not to wake anyone as she packed up her things, she lifted a branch and disappeared like a ghost into the thickness of the forest.
Chapter Three
Isobel Dalceann was gone when he awoke next, the headache he had felt coming in the night now a pounding curse.
Simon looked about as bad as he felt, the shaking the boatman from Le Havre had been consumed by touching him now, and the red in his eyes as bright as blood.
The two Scotsmen sat by the fire, warming their hands across flame.
‘Is there water?’ Marc’s question was directed at the younger man.
‘It depends who’d be a-wanting it,’ the one called Ian answered, his arm coming up to hold the other back from the task of offering succour. Angus, he remembered Isobel Dalceann had called him. The lad looked remarkably like Ian. Perhaps they were kin?
‘My friend is hot …’
‘Then a swim in the cool of the ocean might do him good.’ He rose now and sauntered towards them, malice drawn into the long bones of his body.
‘I noticed a stream on the way here yesterday. That might do even better.’
Scowling, Ian changed the subject altogether. ‘The insignia on the bracelet we took from you—what does it mean?’
‘I picked the piece up in a trading city in the north of France. Perhaps it denotes a family connection or the acknowledgement of some property.’
‘Or perhaps ye are here to spy for the king?’
‘Philip the Sixth of France is too busy with his own problems to be burdened with those of Scotland as well.’
‘I was speaking of David of the Scots.’
‘As a purveyor of fine cloth newly come in from Brittany, I leave politics to the domain of those who understand them.’ Marc made his accent subtly stronger and shrugged his shoulders to underline the point. Indifference held its own defence. It was the intricate little gestures that made a person believe in a ruse rather than the large ones. How long had he known that? With difficulty he stood.
‘Cloth like that of your surcoat?’ Angus’s question implied interest.
‘Indeed.’ The scarlet velvet was rich in the morning light as he looked around.
‘Where is the woman?’ Trying to take any interest from the query, Marc knew he had failed when the other struck him full in the face. Reeling, he regained his footing, a trail of blood dripping across his left eyebrow turning the world red as the soldier’s instinct in him surfaced.
‘Isobel Dalceann is nothing to you, understand, for I saw the way you looked at her with the firelight in your eyes and want in your belly.’
The Scotsman drew a knife as he spat out the words; kicking out, Marc upended him, using the moment’s uncertainty to kick harder. Long years of practice made the task so easy he could have done it in his sleep. When the man lay still, he turned to find the younger one gone, the water pouch abandoned on the track. Laying his bound palms across the smooth earth of the pathway, Marc listened to movements fading into silence. He made for their keep probably. Isobel Dalceann had already told him it was within walking distance of less than two days west.
Edinburgh lay in the very same direction, on a fortified inner bay of the Forth, at least four days’ hard walk and Simon in no fit state to do any of it.
Grabbing Ian’s knife, he held the blade against the rope at his wrist, sliding back and forth in order to break the bonds. When he was free he cut the ropes binding Simon. His arm hurt like hell at the movement and bright red spread across the bandage, dripping off his fingers in a slimy viscosity. Wiping them against velvet, he looked around. A crossbow had been left and a blanket. Beckoning Simon to collect them while he knotted the discarded ropes into a longer length, he bound Ian to a hefty trunk of tree.
Not dead.
Part of him knew he should pull back his neck and slit his throat here in the quiet of the glade and out of the sight of others, but Isobel Dalceann had smiled at this Scotsman in the way of a friend and there was some hesitation in him that was disturbing, some unfamiliar notion to please.
Simon was coughing in an alarming manner, the breath he took shallow and fast.
‘I a-am f-freezing.’
Marc knew the opposite was the truth for he had felt the hot flush of skin as he had untied him. He stripped his tunic and the blanket away, then they made for the stream crossed yesterday back at the headland off the beach. His friend’s shaking had worsened, the slight tremors giving way to an uncontrolled jerkiness which lessened a bit as Marc dumped him into the water and held him there. Resistance faded as cold ran across heat.
‘God,’ he muttered as the red in his own arm spread into the stream and Simon began to cry.
Biting down on her bottom lip, Isobel thought of the moment her life had changed, from one thing to the other and no chance of turning it different. Her hand lifted to her face and traced the edge of scar into the hairline just below her left ear as consequences settled across her like a stone. If she could go back two years she would have and if she could have gone back another five then all the better again.
So many damn years of war! They were etched into her face as hard lines of age. Alisdair dying by her father’s hands, yet even as he had left this world her husband had incited mercy and pardon until blood dribbled down the side of his mouth, taking away words. Her father had always been unstable and she had spent much of her youth avoiding his heavy right arm. He hated her because James had gone and she was left, a daughter who looked too much like his ‘treacherous wife’.
The anger that congealed inside her sometimes stymied breath and, stopping beside a tree, she hung her head across her knees, fighting terror.
It always happened like this, unexpectedly vicious, the regrets of a lifetime channelled to that one horrific moment with never any solace.
Fingering the silver ring on her finger, she was glad for it. Inside the band Alisdair had engraved the word BELIEF. She had wondered if he meant belief in God or in him at the time he had given it to her. Now she used the word to mark her life. Belief in what she was doing was just. Belief in protecting those still left at Ceann Gronna. Belief in the old rights of land law and clan.
She looked to the west. Clouds darkened the horizon and the rain was falling harder than it had in the night. The pathways home would be muddy and difficult and the time it took to get back to the keep would double in such conditions.
She had been gone for four hours already and the sun was up. She needed to get back to make certain that the strangers were shepherded out of the Dalceann lands. With grim determination she turned to walk against the wind.
She saw the green-eyed one and his friend from a distance on the slopes a good two miles from where they had camped, but Angus and Ian were not with them. Her head tilted to one side, listening. Where the hell were her men? Why had they let these two make their way unaided towards Edinburgh?
James had removed the scarlet surcoat and wore it inside out now, the dark satin of the lining blending into the colour of the trees. The one named Simon hung on to his elbow, more in hindrance than anything else, his limp pronounced.
With care, Isobel skirted into the bush, watching as they came up towards her. James saw her first. Congealed blood lay on the white linen strips she had protected his wound with and he carried the arm high against his chest.
As he smiled she swallowed down a sudden and inexplicable need to touch him and her breathing tightened.
‘Where are the others?’
‘The taller man is tied up in the glade we slept in—’
She broke over his words. ‘Alive?’
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.