by Angel Payne
But most of all, she did not lower her gaze. Shivahn returned the soldiers’ stares with determined serenity, silently telling the swine this Irish bauble was not as crushable as their conquests on the Wexford battlefield last year. This foreign oddity had edges sharpened on the whetstones of injustice long before the screams of that night were buried beneath the winter of 1798.
As she half expected and fully hoped, her mettle worked—for half a minute. First, both men nervously darted their stares from her regard. But the venture only funneled all Johnnie’s fervor to his arms. Like a human grappling hook, he clamped his hand tighter around her upper arm.
“She’s the healer the captain ordered us to find last night,” he told his comrade in an equally agitated tone. “So let me through, Thor.”
But Thor—whose mum clearly had the sight when christening him—shifted only his hairy brows, causing a deep scowl across his leathered forehead. “The healer? You mean the one with them strange powers? The harpy who fixed that rebel’s leg back to him like it were no more than a doll’s joint?”
“How the bloody hell should I know?” Shivahn felt Johnnie’s discomfited squirm before he jerked her forward by another two steps. “Look, I’m tired and I’m—”
“She don’t look like a harpy to me.”
“Thor!”
The soldier cracked a grin, his teeth looking a jumble of dirty pebbles crammed against fleshy gums. “C’mon, Johnnie. No foul meant.” The smirk slid higher. “I was just wonderin’ if harpies has the same parts as other birds.”
At that, Johnnie’s attitude transformed, as well. As slick as the sweat he reeked of, he sidled closer to Shivahn. She stiffened, but his other arm caught her waist, locking her against him. She barely held back the rush of bile surging from her belly…or the dreading pound of her blood in parts lower than that.
“Ahhh,” the soldier growled into her nape, “Now I ken your meanin’. I must admit that very question ails my own head.”
Thor chuckled at his comrade’s stress on the last word. “Well, when my head aches, I rub it.”
“Me, too.” The swine’s mouth moved to her neck. His hand slithered around her bottom. “C’mon, healer harpy, what d’you have in your magic bag for my poor throbbin’ head?”
She yearned to scream with every ounce of air in her lungs. But she emitted not a sound. Doing so would only make her the breakfast “treat” for the entire regiment. Instead, Shivahn answered him with the hardest, wildest struggle her depleted muscles would yield. But when Thor added his brute’s strength to Johnnie’s wiry tenacity, she found herself dragged, dumped, and flattened to her back in the mud behind the guard house, watching the younger soldier kneel and flip open his breeches with practiced speed.
“Not yet!” Thor growled urgently at his mate. “We gotta blindfold her first!”
“Blindfold her?”
“They say she can make your staff fall off just by lookin’ at it.”
“Bloody blinkin’ Mary,” Johnnie muttered, grabbing at his groin. “Use your neckerchief, then. Tie it on her good.”
Shivahn fought Thor’s hands, tossing her head back and forth, but with a gritted oath, he grabbed her hair, holding her in place while he secured the kerchief around her eyes. She grimaced at the feel of the grimy cloth against her face, but some other part of her actually thanked Providence that she would not have to witness the taking of her innocence, only listen to the deed. Another part of her mind told her she also should be grateful for having seen her eighteenth summer without being defiled yet by these bastards. That thought was not so easy to honor.
She tried to turn the sting of her tears into spring raindrops, in a world she envisioned beyond her squeezed eyes. A world where folk smiled at each other again on the streets of Dublin, where children played in this mud…where English rapist bastards had been sent to hell, where they all belonged.
But the picture was not strong enough to obscure Johnnie’s pleasureful grunt as he leaned forward, thrusting aside the last of her underskirts.
Which doubled her surprise at his shocked oath, as he leapt away from her.
Nay, Shivahn discovered as she yanked off the blindfold a moment later, not leapt—the soldier had been yanked clear of her with seemingly no effort on the part of the medal-encrusted officer now towering over her. As she and Thor looked on, Johnnie dangled in the man’s grip like a mutt caught with his muzzle in the stew pot.
“Mister Treakle,” the officer intoned with little movement of his thin, grim lips, “and Mister Rankin. Good morning, gentlemen.”
“M-Major Sandys,” Johnnie squeaked. “W-We didn’t hear you comin’, sir.”
“Then it’s your fortune I wasn’t a brigade of United Irish insurgents.” Again with naught but a tremor of strain, he flung Johnnie back to the ground, before delivering a hard kick to the V where the soldier’s breeches still gaped open.
“Bloody Jesus!” Johnnie doubled over, tears in his eyes.
Thor stared at his comrade in silent sympathy, but dared not a gesture otherwise. The big soldier’s features reflected legitimate panic about the severity of his fate at Sandys’s hands. He fumbled into a trembling salute as the senior officer turned back to him. Mud sucked at the soles of Sandys’s costly patent boots, the only sound in the morn’s dense air.
Sandys stopped before the soldier, before flicking a brief glance at Shivahn. His nostrils flared in disdain, as if regarding no more than a mound of donkey droppings.
“Mister Rankin,” he said with equally efficient frigidity, “did Mister Treakle inform you of the urgent need for this woman in Cell Block Three?”
“A-A-Aye, sir.”
“Ahhh. And the last time we discussed the meaning of ‘urgent,’ Mister Rankin, I believe we also discussed the meaning of delays.”
“A-A-Aye, sir.”
“And their unacceptability to the proficiency of this facility.”
“A-A-Aye, sir.”
During Thor’s tremor-ridden of groveling, Sandys pivoted slowly back toward her. Shivahn winced before prudence could overcome impulse, for in one fleeting twitch across the man’s hard-etched features she saw the vague temptation to finish Johnnie’s violation between her legs.
Relief came in a dizzy flood when he regarded her as donkey leavings again. “Get up,” he ordered.
As Shivahn stiffly obeyed, he motioned Thor over with a flick of his hand. “Deliver her to Cell Block Three with no further delays,” he directed.
“Aye, sir!” Thor betrayed his own relief with the transparency of a three-year-old.
On the other hand, Shivahn’s reprieve was cut ruthlessly short by a second shiver, permeating her whole body. The dread thickened to the consistency of the gray slime coating the stone hallways Thor led her down, further and further. Dear God. Cell Block Three. She was journeying to the section of Prevot where they held the most notorious members of the most radical insurgent brigades. When such a valiant soul was finally brought here, the rumors claimed, they should treasure the memory of their last sunrise, for they would surely never see the sun again. They should also store the memory for the days, perhaps weeks, of agony and suffering to come before execution brought the mercy of death.
That was the instigating thought of her third and most violent shiver. It was followed by one slice of inner question: If the rumors of this abyss were halfway toward truth, what did Sandys want her for?
The answer was too petrifying to contemplate. And, by now, too final to battle. The number of insurgents she had healed was hardly a secret, but, she had assumed by now, hardly worth Sandys’s time, either. If he wanted to make an example out of any one link in the United Irishmen’s chain of aid, there were many more renowned than she.
That thought gave her little comfort, especially when a thick iron door banged to a close behind them. She looked to Thor, who directed her toward a row of twelve more portals, smaller but equally ominous, stretching into the oily murk ahead. Sandys entered the area from a do
or to their right. “Number six,” he commanded her, and snapped his hand again in bidding. He dismissed Thor with a jerk of his head.
He didn’t say another word as they paced to the appointed cell, making Shivahn certain that the whole prison heard her heart thundering for release from her chest. She twisted tight fists into her shawl as Sandys rifled through a ring of keys, praying he had somehow lost the fit for Number Six. Please God, Saint Patrick and every other angel or fairy who cares to listen, just the key to Number Six…
But her heavenly hosts were clearly off hunting celestial stag. With an economy of motion, Sandys produced the proper key and scraped it into the moisture-corroded lock. As metal scratched metal and finally clicked into place, she ordered herself to face the fate beyond the portal with the dignity the world had come to know of the Armaghs.
She was thankful for the life she’d had. She could not have asked for a finer heritage, nor a more beautiful place to call home. Her memory would be honored in Trabith Village for a fortnight, and the cottage she shared with Gorag, who had become both mother and father to her, well-tended by the village matrons until Saint Peter found the courage to come fetch that old man, as well. Oh, Gorag, I love you…
Sandys jerked the door open. The door screeched on the stone floor like a dragon having its claws torn out—much like the sound made by every one of Shivahn’s nerves. She struggled to remember her last sunrise. She saw only the weeping, cold opening before her, the ooze-covered walls spitting onto a floor covered by a mat of unrecognizable refuse.
And upon that mat, she saw the man.
She held back her horrified outcry, but could not repress her healer’s impulse to rush to him. She was glad Sandys did not try to stop her, either, for the man would find his arm broken in the doing.
She dropped to her knees beside the unconscious rebel, hardly aware of the sharp pebbles cutting through her thin skirts. Since he was rolled over on his side, tangled dark brown hair shielding his face and mingling with the blood on his upper back and shoulders, she could not tell if the Sídhe had brought her to one of the missing brigade members from Trabith—yet she dreaded the moment when she did find out.
With a determined breath, she gave his shoulder a gentle push. When he sprawled over onto his back, the air left her with a mixture of relief and pain. She knew him not, yet she had known him a thousand times over since requesting permission to forsake her sheepherding duties to fulfill her healer’s calling on the battlefields. She had known him in a thousand agonizing moments like this, when yet another broken rebel took over another part of her soul.
And yet, there was something different about this man…
As she searched his features for the accounting to that intuition, a moan vibrated from his full and uncommonly curved lips. The revelation came then, inundating her senses. He does not belong here, she silently raged. He does not belong here. Lips like that should be flirting in heaven, not dying in hell.
He shifted then, and a cut in the corner of that mouth released a crimson trickle down a jaw pummeled to resemble a quart of pickled octupus. And that wound comprised the best of the devastation. Shivahn did not know why they chose to blacken only one of his eyes, unless they agreed their handiwork on the first was impressive enough. Most of his left eye and jaw had been transformed into a giant black splotch, and a bloody ooze dripped from that side of his strong, remarkably unbroken nose. His right arm twisted out at an unnatural angle—broken in at least two places, she surmised with seething certainty—with an older scar dividing the breadth of his upturned palm. Smaller scrapes, nicks, and gashes peppered the rest of his face, as well as patches of skin which showed through his tattered shirt, threadbare waistcoat, and mud-encrusted breeches. The man’s body was the battlefield of Boyne all over again.
Yet he was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.
“My God.” Tears rasped her voice, but Shivahn did not care. She reached for him again, not flinching back this time. Her movement sent creatures scuffling into the shadows at her invasion of their moldy home, but she barely noticed the vermin. She only saw the unconscious face which she leaned over and began to wipe with a clean portion of her faded apron.
“My God, Brave One,” she whispered to him, “what have they done to you?”
Two impatient boot scuffs sounded from the doorway. “Save your mollycoddling for your gutter brats, Mistress Armagh,” Sandys’s snarl followed. “This bastard is slated to die next week as a criminal, not this week as a martyr. Can you keep him alive until then or not?”
Shivahn secretly admitted her insecurity about the reply to that. But she directed a steady nod at the officer nonetheless. She had no doubt this rebel had been through the ordeal of Sandys’s dreaded triangles, run the gauntlet of the battalion’s knives, and endured God-only-knew-what other atrocities of the English and their “necessary” measures to ensure a “peaceful” transition toward their “Legislative Union” with Ireland—yet he lived. More than that, he fought to live.
And if he could put up such a battle for his life, so could she.
“I need some water and some time,” she said to Sandys, managing to summon a haughty command to her tone.
Sandys jerked a quick nod. “You have thirty minutes.”
“I need sixty.”
The officer’s nostrils pinched. “Very well.” But as he turned to go, he snapped back once more, pinning her beneath the talon of a raised eyebrow. “It may behoove you to remember the door will be watched.”
She only nodded again, not trusting her mouth to any more civilized words at the monster who stalked away into the gloom. After the water arrived—if the pan of filmy muck brought by a drunken lackey qualified as “water”—she wiped away all she could of the crimson stains and clinging hair along the rebel’s face and neck, then prepared to direct her ministrations lower. With shaking fingers, she peeled away his shirt from his chest—
And suddenly realized she did not shake wholly out of fear. A hot, unfamiliar sensation made itself blatantly known in Shivahn’s thrumming pulse…surging to a flush across her face…
“By Saint Catherine!” she berated herself. Her healer’s hands had touched more shirtless males than an average doxy!
But this time, ’twas different. This man was different. Like the felled prince from one of Gorag’s more romantic fairy yarns, the rebel’s courage and honor were evident even in his wounded slumber, even in the food-deprived and battle-hardened muscles surrounding the broken bones of his arm. Aye, she saw his defiant strength in the bold jut to his swollen jaw…she felt it in the dogged heartbeat beneath the strokes of her suddenly shy fingers.
So much strength, yet so dependent on her alone.
That awareness blasted through her like a gleam of sun on the morning waves at Skiddy’s Beach, driving her into an equal tempest of motion. She tore open her sack and dumped out the contents, then began a swift, silent system of activity, moving according to soul-deep instinct and heart-consuming determination.
And finally, painstakingly, the heat began to come. It arrived as it always did, starting at the center of her mind, then stealing behind her eyes and into her nostrils, finally down through her mouth and filling her throat. Her senses ignited with the strange fire, alive with burning dread and joy, of frightened awe and reverent acceptance.
And after what seemed a minute and an eon in one, the heat spiraled down her arms and swirled into the tips of her fingers. One by one, they tingled to life, like a swirl of fireflies in each tip.
At that, she knew the time had come to set aside the bottles and ointments. After doing so, she turned back to the rebel, hovering her hands but inches from his battered torso. Her breath came in increasingly sharp spurts as she slowly, steadily lowered her arms.
Then started to administer him the medicine of her soul.
But minutes into the Giving, something went wrong. No, Shivahn amended herself, not wrong, different. Dear God, incredibly different. The heat did not drain fr
om her, as it always did. She grew warmer, instead, suffused with a shining sensation she had never known before, and never wanted to be bereft of again. Her heart froze, yet raced. Her mind exploded, yet sang. Most of all, her soul reeled with its first taste of true completeness; of whole acceptance; of utter oneness…
Oneness with this man she had never met.
But this spirit she had known forever.
She had no awareness of the tears streaming down her face until a shower of them splashed through her fingers and into his open cuts. The rebel flinched at the resulting stings, his lashes retracting as his eyes squeezed, his lips exploding on a groan.
“Oh, no,” Shivahn blurted, hastily dabbing at him. “Oh, Brave One, I am sorry. I am so sorry.”
He sighed as if in response to that, and her own breath clutched in her throat. When he rolled his head toward her, stretching in a way she could only describe as innately sensual, her heart and lungs shut down, as well.
But she still had the ability to move. Responding to a force beyond her will, Shivahn slid one arm beneath his head, the other into a careful embrace around his chest, and pulled him into the shelter of her lap. He sighed again, a more contented sound, and she smiled into his slumbering face, unable to remember the last time she had smiled with such undiluted joy.
Until he suddenly spasmed, and a moan vibrated his body. “Nay!” she rasped, pulling him closer and slanting herself atop him, as if the pain was cannon fire from whatever battle they had captured him from. “You will not die on me, you bastard,” she commanded him in a fierce murmur. “You will not dare. If you die, they have won. Do you hear me? Those British whoresons have won—do you want that? Do you?”
She pressed herself around him, willing herself into him, praying for the Giving to work far beyond what it ever had before. But he continued to lay limp in her arms, fevered sweat now breaking out on his upper lip and down his temples. He groaned with deeper resonance.
