Healer (6 page)

“Nay, Father. No tracks of any kind. Our own were covered almost as we made them.”

“Aye, the storm,” Tarlach recalled. “The storm none of us saw coming.”

“As though hurled by vengeance,” someone observed.

Tarlach began to rock back and forth, drawing his cloak closer over his round shoulders from the unseen storm pelting his conscience. “Magic. Her kind could do such things in olden days.”

Caden started at the crackling voice of Rhianon’s maidservant.

“Be sure, they still do, milord.”

Keena, she was called—old, wizened, and filled with enough superstition for them all.

“By all your gods, woman, must you ever lurk about?” he demanded.

Keena bowed her head till all Caden could see was a wild tangle of salt-shot black hair. “I ever serve milady.” Her humble words sorely lacked backbone. “Where she is, there I be.”

Caden counted his blessings that it was not
always
the case.

“Regardless, old woman, none control the weather save nature itself.” Caden had yet to see a druid who could control the weather, the tales of old be dashed. Predict it, yes. He’d seen pious priests plying God with prayer for favorable weather and studying the heavens for His signs. The same signs that had spoken to the farmer and fisherman since time began. No magic. Just astute observation.

Like as not, Caden knew Tarlach wrestled more with guilt and shame than fear. Guilt for betraying a foster brother over a woman and shame for attacking in the night like a coward and slaying the chieftain when he was still dazed with sleep. The only magic involved was that of love turned bad. It was Joanna’s rejection of him that had changed the proud Christian warrior Tarlach had once been, one who had fought shoulder to shoulder with his foster brother in battle after battle to unite the Briton kingdoms against the Saxon and Pict.

As Caden glanced from his father to Rhianon, a glimmer of understanding flashed in Caden’s mind, slaying his disdain. Truly if Rhianon turned against him, if she were taken from him, Caden would lose his mind. His fists clenched against the thought. The burning rage that flashed within him told Caden there was no telling the atrocities he might commit to avenge her loss.

With a loud moan, Tarlach grabbed his head, rocking. “Even now she stabs at my mind. Oh heartless vixen, be gone. Be gone!”

“Sshh, Father.” Alyn gently coaxed Tarlach out of his chair and motioned for the steward to help him. “Caden?” the boy called over his shoulder in a plaintive tone.

Caden understood his brother’s panic. Tarlach was given to violent headaches from time to time. The physician warned that a brain attack might finish the work of the one Tarlach experienced the night of the Witch’s End.

Rhianon gathered her velvet skirts about her and rose. “Come, Keena,” she said to her nurse. “Let us prepare a headache powder for his lordship … something with a calmative as well.”

Caden caught her arm. “Nay, milady, let your nurse see to it. Your place is at my side. Vychan,” he said, addressing Glenarden’s steward. Tall and lean with snow creeping into his light brown hair and beard, the man had been in Tarlach’s service for nigh on ten years, succeeding his father before him. “Go with Alyn to help my father to his quarters.”

No stranger to Tarlach’s fits, Vychan nodded grimly. “Aye, milord. I’ll see to the Glenarden’s needs
and
his head pain,” he added with an unveiled look of distrust at Keena’s retreating figure. There was no doubt the steward thought the crone a witch. However, any woman stranger to a comb or brush was suspect in Vychan’s fastidious world.

Caden shoved his end of the bench he shared with his wife away from the table and stood to command attention away from the rush of aid to Tarlach. “Milords and ladies, many of you have seen the O’Byrne like this before. This day he’s suffered a fierce blow, and the wine has done little to ease his pain. But it would pain him even more should one man or woman retire prematurely from the O’Byrne hospitality. For Tarlach’s sake, let us eat and drink well, for we have a long day tomorrow. We will find my brother, alive or dead, and bring him home. We will give my father the peace he deserves!”

A chorus of “Huzzah” rose from every corner of the hall as Alyn guided Tarlach, still clutching his head, into an anteroom that had been converted into a bedchamber to save the aging lord from climbing the steps to the master bedchamber on the second floor. Ronan had taken that over at Tarlach’s insistence.

“Ailill,” Caden called to the clan bard, whose music had ceased upon Tarlach’s outburst. “Play us a song of better times, for if ever there was a night our spirit needed bolstering, ’tis this.”

As the music started, Caden slipped into the tooled leather seat vacated by his father. Batting away a dart of guilt, he helped himself to a choice piece of roast venison. He felt better already.

Chapter Four

Fever set in Brenna’s patient the next day. After applying fresh drawing poultices, Brenna sought to bring the heat down by wrapping her patient in a cool linen sheet drenched in spring water steeped with yarrow and daisy and cooled by snow. At times his teeth chattered like the lid on a boiling pot as the man drifted somewhere between This World and the Other Side. Not even the honey-sweetened tea of willow bark and dried ginger that she coaxed into her patient hour after hour to restore the fluids flushed out by the fever made any difference.

His head in her lap, Brenna tried to coax the last bit through his lips when he flung out his arm, knocking the wooden cup from her hand and sending it rolling across the stone floor of the cave. Startled by both the suddenness of the action and the patient’s strength, she inadvertently shrieked. Before Brenna knew it, Faol had the man’s arm in his teeth. Warning rumbled in the wolf’s throat.

“Gently, Faol,” she sang in a voice that had soothed both man and wolf since she’d brought the stranger home. The wolf’s dark gaze shifted from the now still man to Brenna. Ever so slowly the raised hairs on the animal’s neck relaxed, as did his grip on the stranger’s arm. “He knows not what he does,
cariad
. Now go to your rug.”

As though he understood her every word, the white wolf obediently returned to his station, where a beet broth slowly warmed.

Brenna felt the damp linen sheet covering her patient’s body. Still as hot as the skin beneath.

“Time for another bathing,” she observed to no one in particular.

Brenna gathered a basin of water from the hot spring and added herbal oils to boost his strength and snow gathered from the mouth of the cave to cool the water once more. The bath would not only minister to the man but stay the stench of the infection-poisoned sweat his body threw off in its fierce battle for life … although there had been a distinct, pleasant scent in the velvet tunic she’d cut away from him. She couldn’t quite make out the nature of it. An imported soap, perhaps. Very masculine. Very princely.

Who are you, my prince? And who would want you dead?

Yesterday it had been all she could manage to cleanse the flesh around the wound in order to treat it. Today more was needed. If God instructed His people to cleanse a dead man, surely the living needed cleansing even more for their battle against raging disease.

When she finished towel drying the man’s thick mass of dark auburn hair, she sat back on her knees, her brow furrowing. The very idea of progressing beyond his wounds heated her face and staggered her pulse. The older women of Avalon sent the younger away when tending male patients. By the time Brenna reached the stage in training where she was allowed to stay, Ealga had spirited her back to the land of lakes set like jewels by God’s hand into the mountainsides.

Father God, I would bring him clean unto You for healing. Banish this base curiosity worming into my thoughts like rot to an apple and use my lowly efforts to Your glory.

In spite of her order that Faol stay by the fire, the wolf inched closer and closer as she wrung out her cloth.

Bless him.
“We can do this, Faol. His face first.”

It was of exquisite proportion. His forehead was high to suggest intelligence, his cheekbones proud. The square of his jaw, like the Romanesque length of his nose, was angular and manly—like a statue she’d seen as a child traveling from the Avalon marshland back to her home in the mountains.

Once she’d finished his upper torso, trying not to admire it overmuch with eye or curious fingers, she studied the laces of his trousers and braided leather leggings, tied snugly about sturdy limbs. There had to be a way to remove the clothing and maintain decency.

“Remove only what is necessary.”

Exactly,
Brenna agreed as she remembered the long ago advice from her teachers. But given nature taking course over the long night, everything was necessary. Even as she painstakingly removed the clothing under the cover of a blanket, whispers of her fellow novices at Avalon regarding the bestial nature of that which prominently separated male from female plagued her. Word was that it had a consciousness of its own, even when the patient himself was unconscious.

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.