Healer

by Linda Windsor

  How she wished for Ealga! But that was not possible. Brenna was now the healer. Trained, but untried in so many ways.

  ’Twill be no more than skinning the rabbit, she told herself. A few well-executed snips with her scissors on the outer seams, snatch out the skin—the man’s clothing—and leave him his decency beneath the covers.

  Though Brenna did her best, in her blindness and attempt to save the clothes that she might stitch them together again, she nicked him here and there with the sharpened tips of the blades. At length she tugged the last piece of clothing out from under the blanket—his braccae, inseam still intact—and breathed a sigh of relief. Then she crossed herself, praying for a steady hand for the washing to follow.

  She did so by feel beneath the blanket—soaking, wiping, cooling—until she at last covered his bare feet and tucked them in snugly. Now wiser than she wished to be regarding the source of those nighttime whispers and giggles, she gathered up the clothing scattered on the floor, relying on work to bury her newfound knowledge deep into the recesses of her mind.

  “Sure, I’ll have a good deal of mending to do before our prince will have need of these,” she said to her furry companion.

  Across the enclosure Faol barked and backed away from the hearth with a low rumble.

  “So it boils!” Brenna stuffed the clothing into a basket. “Thank you, Faol.” Upon crossing to the hearth, she lifted the lid and checked the nutritious beetroot stew she was preparing. “We need to thin it down for our guest and add hawthorn, I think, for when he gains his senses. He’ll need all the help we can afford for his pain.”

  Brenna ladled a portion of the brew into one of the two wooden bowls she possessed and put the linen bag of herbs she’d prepared into it. This done, she scooped a hot stone from the hearth and dropped it in to keep the mixture warm until the steeping was done.

  “There we go.”

  When the broth had steeped sufficiently to give to the patient, Brenna knelt beside him once more. Pillows raised his head enough that she could slip the nourishment through the man’s lips a scant spoonful at a time. Her patient strangled but once, wincing fiercely at the pain the convulsive coughing caused him. Brenna set aside the cup and held him, as if to protect him from the agony tearing at his wounds, until he finally quieted.

  As he fell back against her lap and pillows, he briefly opened his eyes. Unfocused, his gaze darted, panic-stricken, about his surroundings. The hearth fire, the dried herbs strung on a line overhead, the old cupboard that housed the preparations Brenna had been putting together for the spring fair.

  And then his gaze found hers and widened. “What the … who …?”

  Brenna knew this raw fear surfacing in his fevered eyes. It was the same as that of the wild animals she brought home to nurse. A foreign place … in the hands of a stranger …

  She smiled. “There now, you’re safe within my care, sir, though gravely wounded. You mustn’t stir overmuch—”

  His lashes fluttered and surrendered to the persistent unconsciousness. The fever heightened the already ruddy hue of a man accustomed to the out-of-doors. Though she’d noticed, when dragging him onto the pallet the night before, that neither his hands nor gold ring were indicative of a life of skin-callusing labor. Nay, this one’s calluses were those of a wealthy warrior, made by weapons and the reins of his horse.

  Perhaps he was a noble kinsman of the O’Byrnes. That would account for the expensive clothes and fine steed he’d ridden. She ran her finger along his cheek, noticing for the first time a thin scar slashed across it. It was from long ago and well healed, perhaps since childhood.

  “Who are you, fair stranger? Friend, foe, or innocent?”

  The question haunted Brenna through the next week as her patient battled for his life against the burning possession of fever. It attacked his lungs, making him struggle for every breath. Yet when he coughed up the yellow drowning, the effort tore at his wounds. Brenna sang to him or soothed him with the psalms and Scripture she’d committed to memory while at Avalon. The voice had as much healing quality as the hands, her nurse had said.

  When delirious nightmares punished him, she held him, talked him through his imagined travails, praying all the while that these dream demons were imagined. Yet the way he cringed in her arms and cursed vehemently at blood and gore, at murdering women and children, and at madmen and witches made them seem real. Too real … and familiar.

  Her only consolation came in his equal denouncement of the O’Byrnes and Gowrys.“’Twas foolrede! Neither side deserved to win. Tarlach claimed the victory, but he lost as much as the Gowrys.”

  “How could Tarlach lose more than his life?” Brenna ventured during one of the deliriums. Her blood ran cold with dread. Had the man in her arms been there? Had he seen her parents’ massacre? Surely he’d been no more than a child at the time. “Was it his soul?”

  The stranger looked at her as if she were an apparition and not what he saw in his tortured dementia. “His mind, lassie,” he railed at her, his voice dry and cracking. “He lost his mind … his honor. He had no right!”

  “No right to what, sir?”

  Ealga never dwelled much on the night of Brenna’s parents’ death, except to say that it was a bloody massacre, done in the dark and shame of night.

  “The children, lassie. There was no need to kill children.”

  Aye, everyone had been murdered. All except for her and Ealga. The nurse had bundled Brenna off to the safety of the hills. Joanna of Gowrys had foreseen the event and made certain her daughter would be spared.

  “God save the innocents! Would that I’d joined them, for they are surely better off than the likes of me now.”

  “What did you see? Did you see Lady Joanna … the witch?” If the stranger believed her mother was a witch, then he was Brenna’s enemy to be sure.

  He shook his head, clasping Brenna to him with his good arm. “Only if beauty and kindness be witchery. The dagger that killed her killed me as well. I am dead, but trapped in a living body, not much better off than Tarlach himself. I am too old to live and too young to die. ’Tis a damnable curse, worse than the one she put upon us.”

  Brenna’s heart shuddered to a stop. “You’re an O’Byrne.” It was a statement, not a question. Her patient could be no other.

  “Nay, never! I only go through the motions.”

  Relief washed over her, leaving confusion in its wake. If he was not an O’Byrne, who was he? Did she want to know? Could she ever close an eye again without fearing for her life?

  “What motions, sir?”

  “Life, milady. Better you should let me die.”

  The sheer force of his words shook her to the core. His was a torment that reached into the very recesses of his mind, far worse than what she’d battled thus far. His utter hopelessness explained why his improvement had been so slow. How tragic to possess cherished youth and wish it away for death! His despair seeped into her, overwhelming her.

  Despite her closed eyes, she saw a young boy with burnished auburn hair, blood seeping down his cheek. But it was the horror in his eyes that riveted her, made her hold the man in her arms even tighter. No child should see what he had seen.

  A sob wrenched free of her patient’s throat, only to be caught and muffled against her as she cradled his head. “Hush, a stór,” she cooed, bestowing without second thought the endearment that Eagla lavished upon her when the affairs of childhood—a skinned knee, a pet that died, or one that had to be let go—grew too great for Brenna to bear. Another and yet another sob shook the body of the man, but they poured from the heart of that boy. That poor, frightened child.

  And as Brenna held him now, understanding dawned. That boy had never smiled again. Never laughed or loved. The blackness that had enshrouded his heart that night of terror wouldn’t allow it. Brenna couldn’t see the blackness, but somehow she knew it. This was what needed healing. His body was strong, but as long as this darkness imprisoned the spirit of the child he’d been,
the man could not survive.

  Chapter Five

  Brenna surfaced from sleep on the wide pallet next to her patient. He was murmuring again … not that she could make out his words. A glance at the hearth told her that Faol had gone out, but as to whether it was night or day, she wasn’t certain. She’d lost all sense of time and routine since bringing the stranger to her cave. Thankfully she’d been diligent in preparing for the long dark of winter and was well supplied with food, fuel for the fire, and medicinal herbs.

  But the stranger wasn’t healing. Not as he should. His wounds ran deeper than the flesh, challenging her expertise, while his cries and murmurings aroused compassion. If only she could relieve his nightmares, give him a reason to want to live.

  And so she doted on him—singing, praying, reciting the Scriptures she’d been memorizing since she was old enough to speak. The Psalms were her favorites. In them she hoped he would hear the despair of God’s beloved turn to praise again and again. The words would remind him and her of the joy of God’s love, felt even in the darkest of times.

  As she repeated verse after verse, she watched closely for the bat of an eyelash, a movement of his arm or lips—any sign of response. But fever toyed with her, giving her hope one moment as it broke and returning to dash it the next. Her initial discomfort at ministering to the muscled planes of his body and that most male of his anatomy subsided with necessity.

  As a precaution she introduced a concoction of barrenwort and like herbs as an essential part of the stranger’s broth for their dulling effect on a man’s baser nature. Granted, he was weak and harmless. For now. But until he was well enough to leave and as long as she shared the same pallet, she would continue that precaution.

  During her chores Brenna found herself talking to the man as she did to Faol. She expected no answer but enjoyed the companionship she’d missed since Ealga’s passing. As though he might be interested, she explained about the herbs and broths she made for him, all save the barrenwort, and spoke to him encouragingly about the healing of his wounds.

  “You must recover, Adam.” The name seemed to suit him, given he was her first male patient and all but naked except for a cloth wrap about his middle. “The Father has a destiny for you,” she’d insisted, quoting Jeremiah. “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”

  And what was that destiny? Brenna propped herself up on one elbow to study his sleeping face. Of course he’d leave. No one would voluntarily isolate himself as her circumstance demanded. Perhaps he’d ride off to fight with Arthur.

  “Will you join our young Dux Bellorum and hold back the northern Picts from taking our beloved Manau? Or fight the Saxons to the south and east of us?”

  Though this Arthur was the first to bear the title and the given name, his enemies were more than the nameless Romano-British commander general who held off the initial Saxon onslaughts further south when her parents were but babes. For safety’s sake, it had been forbidden by law back then to address great personages by their given names—a deed punishable by death. But the previous Arthurs were also of the royal Davidic and priestly Arimathean bloodlines preserved by the church.

  What if Adam were of like parentage? Brenna fingered the gold ring on his finger, looking for a symbol and finding naught but exquisite knotwork engraved upon it.

  “Is your name recorded with those of the former Pendragons on the Sacred Isle, privy only to the church?” Brenna reached out and stroked his bristled jaw, giving rein to her imagination. “Have you blood royal roots here—a Pictish grandmother and a Scottish grandfather—like Arthur?”

  While Arthur was the hope of Manau, the people called his father, Aedan, uther, terrible, for abandoning them to the enmity of the Northern Picts and Saxons in order to succeed his father, Gabran, to the grander Dalraida throne in the West. Even worse, Aedan married a Romano-British queen instead of a royal from the Gododdin lineage. It was at the blessing of the church, but poorly received in Manau, nonetheless. “Faith, you could already be married in that mire of matches … or worse, married in alliance to the O’Byrnes.” Brenna’s brow furrowed as she eyed the precious ring on his hand. “Regardless, you’ll be going. Of that I’m sure.”

  A dread rooted in her chest, paining her already at the idea of being left alone once more. Granted, her companion hadn’t replied to the conversations she’d carried on with him, but he’d been there and taken the edge off her loneliness.

  Mathair Ealga said this was her worst fault: her reluctance to let an animal go once she’d nurtured it to renewed health. Of all her rescues, only Faol had come back. The white wolf went off at times to hunt and, no doubt, mate, but he always returned.

  “He’ll take care of ye, child, until he brings ye one to take his place.”

  Brenna pondered her nurse’s strange prediction as she rose to build the fire for tea. Stirring the banked coals, she thought back to the day Faol had singled out the stranger to protect, even at the risk of the wolf’s life. Suddenly she caught her breath, glancing sharply at the sleeping figure lying on the nearby pallet.

  Faith, had Ealga meant Faol would bring her a man instead of another pup?

  Nay! She dismissed the idea, focusing on adding kindling to the glowing red coals. What wishful thinking that was. The kind that could only lead to disappointment.

  Perhaps a soak in the hot spring would wash away such nonsense from her addled brain. That’s exactly what she needed. And she would see to it as soon as Faol returned from his wandering to keep an eye on the patient. The wolf would raise an alarm if Adam should gain consciousness or move about so as to hurt himself. In the meantime, the man needed to be fed.

  Ronan O’Bryne swam through a fog-like world of imaginings as thick as a bog mist. Some were horrifying, and others made him wish he could remain there forever. He’d seen angels and demons, felt unbearable heat and brittle cold. Voices damned him to the depths of Hades on the one side and pulled him back on the other with heavenly song. There’d been pain; then he flew above it. Whatever came at him, he surrendered to it. He was tired of fighting. Ronan craved peace, yet it was the one thing that would not come.

  His eyelids felt laden with lead rather than flesh as he forced them open. Above him a stone ceiling swirled slowly, blurring bunches of herbs and baskets strung on a rope across part of it. Their earthy scent mingled with the must of damp stone. It was not unpleasant. Just strange. Was he in a cave or a tomb? The dancing shadows of the herbs drew his attention across the ceiling and down to where a fire blazed in a cutout of rock to one side of the enclosure. The wall above it was blackened with soot from the rising smoke. A small pot hung from an iron trammel over the fire bed, but it was the large beast lying next to the blaze that arrested his breath.

  The white wolf! So it had been real. Somewhere in his memory he recalled a giant of a wolf lying beside him. But as to the circumstances, he was at a loss.

  As if sensing Ronan’s consciousness, the animal raised its head and looked at him with shining eyes alight from the fire’s glow. Unable to hold it longer, Ronan allowed his breath to escape slowly and closed his eyes again. He tried to make sense of what he’d seen, or thought he’d seen. So if the wolf was real, was the dark-haired angel with the heavenly voice also?

  God’s mercy, she’d drawn him to her from alternating bouts of utter blackness and relentless fires, battling for him with prayers and words of Scripture. There’d been something about her so familiar and inviting that he’d wanted to reach for her, touch her, cling to the promise of words he’d rejected in the past.

  A white wolf. A raven-haired beauty. Hadn’t Joanna of Gowrys been such a woman? Fragments of his memory circled in his brain until they finally connected. Joanna’s image was indelibly etched in Ronan’s mind. He searched through the fog until his angel materialized. The same dark hair and ivory skin. Such compassion when she looked at him.

  A shiver razed his spine. Could th
e rumors of the Gowrys changeling be true? Was he in her lair?

  Ronan cracked open one eye enough to see that the white wolf had lowered its head again. He didn’t believe in such superstitious nonsense. Nonetheless, images began to drift into his consciousness like floating leaves in a fall breeze. One moment she sang to him like a sweet siren bent on drawing him from the pits of Hades. The next, there was the wolf licking his face, as though tasting a prospective meal.

  Whatever the nature of his caregiver, he was in no position to do anything about it. Sorting delirium from reality would have to wait.

  Just as Ronan began to drift away into oblivion, he sensed, rather than saw, the animal stir. With great effort he peeked in time to see the angel from his fevered recollections enter the cell. Her dark hair was wet and spread like a tangled shroud over her shoulders and the coarse, shapeless shift she wore.

  “So it’s not boiled, has it?” she said to the wolf as she rubbed both its ears with her hands. The affection reduced the huge animal to a tail-wagging pup that rolled over and exposed its belly for further attention. “And how is our patient?”

  Ronan closed his eyes as she turned to look at him. Relief spread through him. He had not lost his mind. The woman and wolf were not one and the same.

  “He didn’t take much broth this morning. Once my hair is dry, I’ll try to get him to eat again.”

  But she was real, Ronan realized with a pang of alarm. He cracked his gaze at her again. She was the very image of the woman he’d seen drive a dagger into her breast and curse his father forever. She could be none other than the long-lost daughter of Gowrys.

  Humming to herself, the young woman sat down on a stool by the hearth and began to work a comb through her wet tresses, oblivious to his scrutiny. The motion twisted the loose shift about feminine curves that left no doubt that she was of age—and ripe enough to take a man’s breath away had his aching chest not been so stingy with it. That Ronan well recognized her voice as his angel’s conflicted with what he knew to be true. He was at the mercy of his sworn enemy.