by Sophia James
‘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.’
‘Nae.’ Angus paced across the other side of the fire. ‘He is not one of us. I say kill him here and now and be rid of any menace.’
In response Isobel kneeled beside James. Pushing back her sleeve, she made a cut in her palm and another across the thickened skin below the strange mark on his wrist. Pressing them together, she smelt the rusty tang of blood.
Hecate, Cerridwen, Dark Mother Take Us In
Hecate, Cerridwen, Let Us Be Reborn.
The oath of loyalty and attachment echoed around the clearing.
‘You would protect him for ever?’ Andrew asked the question.
She shook her head, knowing he was her enemy. ‘Nae. But I swear by all the gods of this place that I will protect him for now.’
Chapter Four
He was naked.
He knew that as easily as he knew he was safe.
Isobel Dalceann was there in the shadow just beyond the candlelight, watching him with her dark eyes and stillness.
‘Water.’ He could barely get the word out.
She moved forwards and he saw that one eye was swollen, the deep bruise on her cheek below grazed into redness.
‘Who hurt you?’ His whisper was barely audible as she leaned forwards to hear.
‘I fell.’
He did not believe it, nor did he understand the shift of caution in her eyes or the gentle way she took a cloth and ran it across his chest.
‘It feels good.’ All the skin on his arms was raised with pleasure, leaning into the cool, and he saw she had a band of cloth wrapped around her palm. Another hurt. He tried to reach up and touch it, but she stopped him.
‘You must rest. Your arm has festered and only strength can save you now.’
His arm? Sliced in the sea. He remembered the boat bound for Edinburgh. He remembered the wave as it had caught them broadside, turning the vessel into the cold and green, the ropes tethering him and the sailcloth, people calling from everywhere.
He had cut free as many as he could with his knife and released them. Simon. Guy. Etienne and Raoul. Then the wooden splint had come down from the mast, broken by force of wind and wave above, turning sharp.
Aching now. Right down to his fingers in a cramping stiffness. A band circled his arm, white linen soaked in something that smelt like overripe onion and herbs strangely mixed. He could not move a muscle.
‘My sword hand?’
‘Ian says cloth sellers should have no need for such a weapon,’ she returned.
‘You found him, then, in the glade?’
‘Worse for wear with the knots you fashioned. It would have been a slow death had we come too late.’
‘Like this one is?’
Her pupils dilated. Always a sign of high emotion. Marc shut his eyes. She thought that he would die soon. Tonight even, he amended, looking at the ornate golden cross above his bed.
Other words came close. An ancient chant in the firelight! Isobel Dalceann lifting his palm against her own and cutting it open, blood mixed in an oath of protection. Was he going mad as well?
The glow from the candle hurt even though his eyelids burnt in fever.
‘Where am I?’
‘Ceann Gronna. My keep on the high sea cliffs above Elie.’
The sea was close, the moon seen through the space between skin and stone at the window. No longer full.
‘How long?’
‘Three days.’
He breathed out, nausea roiling his stomach. Even in Burgundy when the arrow had pierced his armour and gone deep into his back he had not been as ill.
‘You have tended me, then?’
Sickness. The room was full of its grasp. Basins, cloths and vials of medicine lined up on the table. His clothes were neatly washed and folded on the seat of a white ash wooden chair decorated with bands of vermilion paint. He wished he might have stood and taken charge, but not one muscle in his body would obey a command.
Helpless. The very word stung with shock.
‘You have spoken in your sleep in French of battles and of death. It is just as well that none here understand you.’
He turned then, away from her eyes, because there was a question in them that he had no answer for.
Are you an enemy?
Once I was, he wanted to say, but now? The bruising on her cheek was dark.
He should have kept silent, should have held his tongue even in the grasp of delirium. So many damn secrets inside him.
‘When you are better, you will be sent by boat across to Edinburgh.’
‘Better?’ The word surprised him. She thought he would survive this, then, this malady. Relief had him reaching out and taking her fingers into his own. Just gratitude in it. The cool of her skin made him realise how hot he was.
* * *
Isobel stood still, the nighttime noises of a sleeping keep far from this room. Her room. His fingers were strong like his body, the skin on the pads toughened by work. She felt them relax as he fell into sleep again, but she did not put his hand down as she should have, did not move from her position at his side, watching him in the midnight.
Marc. He had said his name was that when she had called him James, shrugging off the other name with agitation. He had said other things as well in his delusion that had made her glad she was alone, his green eyes glassy with the fever that raged through him, taking sense.
A warrior. She understood that now by all the other marks on his body, sliced into history. Neither an easy life nor a safe one, for fire and shadow sculptured the hardness in him lying on her bed.
He had spoken of some things that she had no knowledge of and of other things that she did.
Things such as the sovereignty accorded to David of the Scots and the ambitions of Philip of France. A king’s man, then? If Ian or Andrew had heard the words he would be long gone by now, breathless in the raging seas off the end of the Ceann Gronna battlements, only memory.
Why did she protect him?
Her eyes travelled over his body, masculine and beautiful, and with real regret she covered the shape with a thin linen cloth. Wiping back her hair with the sudden heat, she felt the raised ridge of scar and frowned.
Broken apart. By trust. It would never happen again.
With a ripe expletive she turned from the sleeping stranger and walked to the window to watch the water silver in the Scottish moonlight.
The knock on the door a few moments later pulled her from her thoughts. Andrew stood there, a pewter mug of ale in one hand and the remains of a crust of bread in the other. He walked over to Marc and laid a finger against his throat, before coming back to the doorway.
‘He is still out, I see. Ye’ll be needing help I’m thinking, lass. This captive is a way from healthy and the rings beneath your eyes are dark.’
Shaking off his concern, she faced him. ‘He is making progress, none the less. A day or two and he will be fit to travel.’
‘To Edinburgh, then. Is that wise?’
‘He has not seen the keep or the structures within it. Nor will he be given knowledge of the tunnels or of the entrance from the sea. He knows only this room,’ she added. ‘We will blindfold him when he leaves so that nothing is seen.’
‘Something is always seen, Isobel, and he looks like no cloth merchant I have ever encountered.’ The frown on his brow was deep. Concern for the security of the Ceann Gronna Castle, Isobel supposed, and those within it. A just concern, too, and yet...
‘If we kill him in cold blood we are as bad as those who come to oust us.’
Andrew laughed. ‘When David sends the next baron this summer to try his hand at the sacking of the keep, you might think differently.’
‘So you would have him as dead as Ian wants him?’
‘Not dead, but gone. The day after tomorrow even if he is no better. Do ye promise me that?’
The cut on her palm stung when she shook his hand and her right cheek ached from where Angus had hit out in the clearing after she had invoked the protections.
Probably warranted, she thought. She didn’t recognise herself in the action, either, as for so many years any stranger trespassing on the Dalceann lands had been sent away without exception.
Why not him?
Why not bundle him right now into a blanket and dispatch him west? He could take his chances of survival just as the others had taken theirs, and if God saw fit to let him live then who was she to invite danger to her hearth?
The Ceann Gronna hearth. She remembered when as a little girl her father had remodelled the fireplace in the solar, burying iron beneath the stones for preservation.
Lord, and then her father’s actions had inveigled them all into this mess when he had stood against the king in Edinburgh and demanded that the lands around this place would be for ever Dalceann. He had taken no notice of any arguments Alisdair had put forward, but had forged on into a po
sition which he was caught in. The armies that had followed him home had been undermanned and he had easily rebuffed them, but by then they were outlawed. Surrender would undoubtedly mean death to them all and Isobel had long been one to whom strategy had come easily.
At twenty she had planned the defence of the next attack and the one after that. Now, they stood on the edge of the cliff with the world at a distance and no other great vassal of the king had ventured forth to try his hand at possession. Not for two whole summers.
So far the magic in the hearth had held. Except for Alisdair. But even his bones lay here in the earth of the bailey, defended by high walls of stone.
The unassailable Ceann Gronna Castle of the Dalceann clan.
‘We cannae hold on for ever, ye ken, Isobel. The new governance has its supporters.’
She nodded because truth was an unavoidable thing. When the time was right some of the Dalceanns would leave the keep by sea. Already the ground to the south was prepared. A different ruse and one bought with the golden trinkets and jewellery found in the French boat that had sunk a good two years before. There was still some left in case of trouble, hidden in the walls of her chamber. Alisdair’s idea.
‘If this stranger is as inclined to violence as Ian believes him to be, it would make sense to bind him in the dungeon under lock and key.’
‘You speak as if I could not subdue him, Andrew, should he become restless.’
‘Could not or would not, Isobel? There is a difference.’
His voice held a note of question and it saddened her. He had always been the father her own had not been—a man of strong morals and good sense.
A moan behind had her turning.
‘I will think on your words, Andrew, I promise.’
She was glad when he merely nodded and moved off, leaving her alone to tend to the green-eyed stranger.
* * *
She had said something of sea tunnels, Marc thought, and of an entrance from the water, but with Isobel beside him again, her hand across his brow, cooling fever, he filed the information away to remember at a later time.
His arm ached, small prickles of it in his chest and neck, the water she helped him sip tainted with a herb he did not know the name of.
