Kiss of a Traitor

by Cat Lindler

  She gave a snort, drew her knife from her boot, and quickly cut away the cloth from around the bite. “You are fortunate to have been bitten by a copperhead rather than a rattlesnake or coral snake. Their venom is stronger. And fortunately for you, I have experience in treating this particular kind of bite. Plato instructed me in Cherokee medicine, and Jwana shared her knowledge of herbs and poultices. They feared I would become careless, as you were, at some point in my travels through the swamps.”

  Once she uncovered the wound, she examined the area and compressed her lips to keep them from trembling. Swelling and bruising surrounded the fang marks. Blood from the punctures had dried on the skin. “I have to find the correct plants before night comes.” She came to her feet. “But first, we must return you to camp so I can see properly. Why did you not return directly after you were bitten?”

  Dull red flushed his face. “In addition to blundering into a snake like a green London trooper, I twisted my knee when I jerked away from it.” He sent her a pointed look. “Surely you recall my weak knee, do you not? The one with which I unsuccessfully attempted to break the stone on your porch?”

  Willa swallowed her self-reproach and grasped his hands to help him to his feet. With his arm around her shoulders and her staggering under his weight, they trudged back to the camp. She eased him down and propped his back against a saddle. After wrapping cloth and tree moss around a branch, she lit it from the fire and went back into the forest.

  Willa soon found what she required: yellow dock—a common, waist-high weed with a thin stalk; long, narrow, rippled leaves; and tiny fruits decorating the stems like beads on a necklace. She selected young plants, green instead of red, and pulled them up by their thick taproots. When she collected an armful, she uprooted some plantains, low-spreading green weeds with broad, veined leaves.

  Aidan was semiconscious when she returned to the fire. Sweat dripped from his face and soaked his shirt. He had vomited in an area a few feet away—an ominous sign. She cursed herself for lolling in the pond when she could have been nursing him. A bite victim had but a slim chance of recovering without prompt treatment. Thank God Aidan’s assailant was a copperhead. A rattlesnake or coral snake could have killed him, perhaps even before she found him.

  She stripped the leaves from the plantains and yellow dock, washed them in the pond, and handed Aidan several yellow dock leaves. “Chew them and swallow the juice,” she said. “Try not to swallow the entire leaf.”

  “Will I get sick if I do?” he asked with a slight lift of his mouth.

  In no fit mood for his wit, though she suspected it masked fear, she fixed him with a stern gaze. “Do as I tell you.”

  “Most assuredly, madam.” Aidan slipped a leaf into his mouth and began to chew.

  Willa washed the yellow dock roots and chopped them into a fine paste. She combined them with diced oak leaves and plantain and set the mixture aside on a plantain leaf. When she glanced at Aidan, her hands shook. His eyes were closed; his mouth hung open and revealed the masticated leaves. She bent over him and laid her ear to his chest. At his strong heartbeat, she allowed herself to breathe again. After she scooped out the remaining leaves to prevent his choking on them, she pulled her knife from its sheath and held the blade over the fire until it glowed red-hot. She let it cool, as Plato had demonstrated, and cut into Aidan’s thigh, making X-shaped incisions over the fang marks until blood ran freely. He barely recoiled when she made the first cut and lapsed back into his comatose state. Other than his rising and falling chest and rasping breath, he lay motionless. She sucked out the blood and venom and spat out the tainted fluid onto the ground.

  Willa worked over Aidan for a full ten minutes as she kept the blood running and drew the venom from his flesh. A great deal had already spread throughout his body, so she would have to keep the cuts open and repeat the purging. She moved on to her next task, mixing the minced leaves and roots with water and forming the ingredients into a thick paste, which she smeared over the wounds. After bruising more plantain leaves, she laid them atop the poultice and bound it to his leg with cloth strips she tore from her shirt.

  With a cloth wetted in pond water, she wiped down his fevered brow and face. She covered him with a blanket from the bedrolls and turned back to the plants to make a medicinal tea. The poultice would draw some venom and keep the wounds from closing, but alone, it would not heal him. As she chopped yellow dock into a pot of water hung on sticks above the fire, Willa recalled that recovery could take weeks—if she’d found him in time. Come morning, she would have to get Aidan onto a horse and find shelter. Her experience of living in the Carolinas for five years warned her that the warm weather could not hold for long. The only secure place she knew she could find in this unfamiliar territory was the cabin they’d left behind a half day before.

  Willa reeled in her saddle. She suffered from lack of sleep, and her spine ached. The previous night blurred into an endless routine of waking Aidan to pour tea down his throat, bathing his body to cool his fever, and sucking out the venom from his leg.

  By dawn the effort seemed worth it. The fever persisted, and he labored for breath; his leg was swollen and painful; he was as weak as a kitten and overcome by periodic episodes of nausea; but he was lucid enough to get his feet beneath him with her assistance and hobble over to his horse. Hoisting him aboard became another matter and consisted of a fair amount of pushing, straining, and swearing—most of the latter on Aidan’s part. Willa finally solved the dilemma by insisting he step up on her back while she crouched on the ground. He resisted but at last agreed it appeared to be the only way he could mount the horse.

  “Hallelujah,” Willa whispered as the cabin came into view. The single word was the best she could manage. Removing Aidan from his horse proved easier than boosting him up. He swung his good leg over the horse’s neck and slid down, hitting the ground with a thud and toppling over onto his face. Vile oaths blasted the air.

  She hauled him upright once again, half-carried him into the cabin, and lowered him onto a bedroll she had spread out on the bed ropes. When his head made contact with the blankets, he passed out. “Thank heavens,” she muttered and dragged herself outside to care for the horses. After Willa harvested fresh yellow dock to counteract the venom, plantain for the inflammation and bruising, and white oak leaves to control the bleeding, she scoured the vicinity for other medicinal plants, such as willow bark, for fever and pain, from a tree beside a creek babbling through a forest gully. She noted the creek’s location as a source of fresh water. She peeled off wild cherry bark as a soporific and dug out resin from the pine trees. Added to the poultice, resin would keep the wounds clean and free of infection. On her way back to the cabin, she ran across witch hazel bushes, from which she plucked leaves and bark. When boiled in water and used to soak binding cloths, witch hazel would bring down the swelling in Aidan’s knee.

  Willa stumbled up to the cabin, a blanket filled with the plants slung over her shoulder. She let it fall beside the fireplace, checked on Aidan, and smiled to see him sleeping peacefully. Then she collapsed on the bench before the hearth, yearning to lie down on the floor and curl up into a ball. Yet other chores required her attention before she could rest. Fetching water from the creek, making infusions, and decoctions, and poultices, and … and food.

  She forced her eyes to open. Little food remained in the saddlebags, and Aidan had naught in his stomach other than medicinal tea—what little he had succeeded in keeping down. Willa doubted he could even tolerate solid food at this point. However, should she continue on much longer without eating, she would be of little use to him.

  Pushing her tired body up off the bench, she began to work. By the time she prepared all the medications, the sun was setting. Fresh food would have to wait until morning. A rummage through the saddlebags revealed a bit of cheese, a few stale crumbs of cornbread, one hard-as-a-rock sweet potato—and the flask of panther’s breath. A smile slanted one corner of her mouth.

  After
attending to Aidan and seeing that he rested comfortably, Willa ate her meager dinner, wrapped herself in a blanket by the fire, and sipped from the flask. The next thing she knew, it was morning, and thunder boomed in her head. No hot, hard body curled around her this time. No gentle hand cupped her breast.

  The thunder was due only partially to her indulgence the night before. Another storm blew about the cabin and ushered in the return of cold weather. She left her blanket pallet to stoke the fire and added wood to the coals to take the chill off the room. Then she went to Aidan’s side, frowning when he began to thrash around. From the evidence, it was not the first time. He had thrown the covers onto the floor sometime during the night. She placed her fingertips against his cheek. His skin was ice-cold, and he shivered so violently his teeth clattered. The fever was coming back on him hard. His exertion the previous day had clearly aggravated his condition.

  Willa covered him with every blanket she could find, including the saddle blankets. Piling them onto his quaking body, she tucked them in around him. Then she forced him to swallow an infusion of willow bark tea.

  While she sat on the three-legged stool beside the bed, she tried to organize the work facing her. First on her list was food. But she could not hunt until the storm passed. In any event, she was reluctant to leave Aidan alone until his delirium abated. He might rip off his bandages in his present state and harm himself, destroying all her hard work. So she waited for the storm and Aidan to quiet before she hitched his kit bag and powder horn over her shoulder, retrieved his pistol, rifle, and small animal snare, and left the cabin again.

  Willa tramped into the forest after feeding and watering the horses. The sun peeked out from behind dark clouds, but the cold day turned her breath into fog. She buttoned up her coat beneath her chin and continued on. The woods were thick with game, rabbits and squirrels mostly, and a lone buck deer. She allowed it to pass by unmolested. She could have brought it down, but with the burden of Aidan’s care, gutting and skinning a deer seemed like an impossible amount of additional labor when smaller animals would do nicely.

  A brace of rabbits and six squirrels hung from her belt by noon. Willa filled the kit bag with blackberries, wild onions, and winter corn she found growing wild in an abandoned Indian encampment on the forest’s western edge. She uncovered beans, squash, and pumpkins growing in amongst the corn and scooped up a ripe pumpkin. Before leaving, she marked the field’s location in her mind.

  Aidan was awake and alert when she returned. His fever had waned again and, by the scowl on his face, he wearied of lying in bed.

  “Before you speak,” she said prior to his uttering a word, “I shall not hear of it. You cannot leave this bed yet. You are frightfully weak with fever. Neither your snakebite nor your knee has healed sufficiently for you to be stomping about.” She set the pumpkin on the bench, let the kit bag tumble to the floor beside it, and slung the rabbits and squirrels across the loom. “I shall not have you undoing all my efforts, after having worked long and hard through day and night to save your life. You will not throw it away because your male pride demands it. I am perfectly capable of caring for us until you recover.”

  “Have you finished?” he asked calmly, his eyes dancing.

  She inclined her head.

  “Then would you kindly escort me outside so I can tend to my personal needs?”

  Warmth surged into her cheeks. “I will not,” she said firmly as she walked over to hand him the flask that once held panther’s breath. “I’m surprised you have anything left in you, considering the quantity your stomach expelled, but you can use this. You may not rise from that bed until I give you leave to do so.”

  Aidan looked at the flask, held it upside down, and shook it. His gaze darted to her. “You drank all my panther’s breath?”

  She pulled back her shoulders. “Indeed.”

  A small laugh erupted from his scratchy throat. “I must say I’m amazed to be the only one in this cabin spewing his guts. I trust you had the sense not to drink it all in one sitting.”

  “I fear so. And ‘twas quite good, thank you.” She sniffed and returned to the game animals while Aidan filled the flask.

  After gutting the squirrels, Willa hung them outside from a high branch to keep them fresh and prevent predators from stealing them. Then she skinned and gutted the rabbits. She boned them, cut the meat into chunks, and slid them into a pot of boiling water she hung over the fire. Wild onions, corn, and pumpkin seeds joined the meat to make a stew. After parching more seeds and corn kernels in the flames, she pounded them into flour, poured in water, and kneaded the mixture into dough. She formed the dough into small, flat loaves, arranged them on a tin plate, covered them with a second plate, and heaped coals on top. The remainder of the pumpkin ended up in hot ashes beside the fire to roast slowly.

  Aidan slept through the meal preparations, his arm hanging over the side of the bed, the flask still gripped in his hand and sitting on the floor. Willa retrieved the flask, poured the contents outside, and trekked to the stream to wash it.

  When she returned, her stomach grumbled at the redolent odors of rabbit stew and baking bread, all infused with the sweet scent of roasting pumpkin. She forced herself to tend Aidan’s wounds first. When she removed his bandage, he awoke and took a long, appreciative sniff.

  He slanted her a smile as she slathered more poultice on the snakebite and rewrapped his knee with a cloth soaked in the witch hazel decoction. “Had I suspected you could cook, I would have fetched you to our wedding sooner.”

  Willa kept her eyes lowered to the motions of her hands. “Please understand this, Aidan. You have no obligation to wed me simply because our fathers signed a betrothal contract when we were both too young to give our consent. In any event, I am well aware that you came to Carolina, not to wed me, but to spy for General Cornwallis, or so you assert.”

  His mouth flattened as he raised her chin up on his fingertips. “Should the time come, we shall wed not to satisfy a betrothal contract, but rather because I stole your virginity and carelessly left my seed inside you. Honor demands it. No man worth his salt seduces an innocent maid and leaves her to face the consequences alone.”

  Her body grew rigid. Honor? Because he was careless and left his seed in her? He did not steal her virginity; she gave it to him. Her innocence was not his to steal, but rather hers to bestow. She had deluded herself into believing he accepted her gift lovingly. But no, he stole it, as though he were a plundering thief in the night and she no more than a silver candlestick. Her heart had begun to open up to him. In a brief moment of weakness she fancied he harbored feelings for her. It now appeared as if she was the careless one.

  “Your only careless action, Lord Montford, was to darken my doorstep.” Her words came out choked. “And when you return me to it, I shall be elated to see the back of you.”

  She spun and stalked away. Aidan reached out to stop her and missed, nearly falling out of bed. A troubled expression reflected his bewilderment at her outburst, at the venom in her voice. “Come back, Willa, and let us discuss this matter.”

  She paid no mind to his entreaties and declined to return to his side until she slapped a tin cup of stew in his hand and dropped a wedge of hot cornbread into his lap.

  Chapter 21

  The weeks sped by in a blur. Christmas and the New Year came and went by unnoticed, merely days like any others in Willa’s daily routine. She nursed Aidan, bathing his skin when the fever returned, keeping his wounds free of infection, and providing the company and conversation he craved when cabin fever set in. She hunted game, gathered vegetables and early winter fruit not desiccated by frost, fetched water and firewood, and swept the dust and cobwebs from the cabin’s corners. She tended the horses, cutting dry meadow grass, picking corn to supplement their diet, and grooming and exercising them when the weather allowed.

  At night she curled up in a blanket on the floor beside the banked fire and listened to Aidan’s soft snoring, her muscles sore, her body
empty and aching, her heart bleeding. She had remained silent on the subject of his honor and her virginity, fearing open rancor would delay his recovery. Still, Willa suffered the cut of his words … and the loss of his touch.

  Her revelation surfaced one clear night while she lay awake and listened to the mournful call of a lone whip-poor-will, which sounded like a ghost calling out to the living. Some alleged the whip-poor-will’s call presaged death. Despite the omen, her thoughts concerned life, not death. She had fallen in love with Aidan, completely and irrevocably. Her swelling heart threatened to burst, but she had no illusions of his harboring any such feelings for her. As he had made so painfully clear, should he consent to marry her, he would do so merely because he had taken her virginity and possibly left her with child. She rubbed a hand across her flat belly. Had he? The idea neither frightened her nor filled her with joy; it simply produced a melancholy ache. A lone tear tracked down her cheek.

  She left her pallet, opened the door, and stepped outside. Bracing air stole the breath from her lungs. A frost rime coated the trees and pine needles like sprinkled sugar. She tightened the blanket about her shoulders and moved out into the clearing. In the moonless night, the glow from a million stars bathed the frost-laden trees in gelid light. She eased back her head to gaze upward and inhaled a deep, icy breath. Stars sailed like ships’ lanterns on a black, depthless sea. Their lights winked in an endless sky. Night creatures rustled in the forest. And above all, the doleful night bird continued its dirge, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, calling rhythmically in the darkness.

  The cabin door creaked, but Willa remained focused on the bird’s somber cry. Warmth settled on her shoulders and against her back. As he brought her into the circle of his arms and held her close, he bathed her in his heat.