Healer

by Linda Windsor

  As though sensing her troubled thoughts, Faol left his favorite place by the hearth and came to her. After studying both her and the patient’s still face, the wolf began to lick the unconscious man’s cheek.

  Brenna pushed the animal away affectionately. “Off with you now! You’ve done your part. Best leave his care to me.”

  Instead of going back to his rug by the hearth, Faol dropped next to her patient—diligent, if not wholly obedient.

  “Silly pup,” she fussed. “Now I have to clean my hands again.”

  But she was Faol’s mama, and he was her guardian and dear companion. Love welled in Brenna to the brim. And thank You, Father God, for my faithful, furry friend. I can’t imagine life without him. Keep him safe and bless him with long life.

  Yet even as she prayed, she well knew that the wolf was hers for a time only. Like Ealga. She took a deep breath to break the vise closing on her heart.

  Faol cocked his head at her.

  “’Tis good for now, laddie,” she whispered. Beyond that, Brenna could not bear to think, lest her fear of being alone again become unbearable. “Father God willing, we’ve a man’s life to save.”

  Chilled to the bone, Caden of Glenarden led the dismal group of riders back to the fortress in the waning light of nightfall. He almost wished he were as frozen dead as his elder brother surely was by now, rather than tell Tarlach the dreaded news. At the lake, Caden first thought Ronan had tired of the waiting and, with the increasingly bad turn of weather, started back to Glenarden. Perhaps the howling wind had muffled his signal. But then the group came upon his brother’s riderless horse wandering in the pass, the horn still tied to the saddle.

  Evidently Ronan had tried to make it back to the keep, but something had gone wrong. They’d searched along the pass for any sign of Ronan or his possible assailant until the weather and darkening skies made it impossible to continue. Not even the dogs had a clue, not so much as a scent, although they’d behaved oddly about the lake, circling the riders and barking incessantly. The master of the hounds was at a loss to explain or control their behavior until they were well away from Gowrys’ ruins. Only then did Gillis mutter something under his breath about spirits of the dead spooking his furred charges.

  Shouts from the towers bracketing the main gate heralded their slow approach. The welcoming shouts smacked of relief, for the hunting party should have been back by midafternoon for the feast. Perhaps Caden should have sent Alyn back with O’Toole to let his father know what had happened.

  Cursed hindsight. Caden excelled with it. But daylight fairly raced to fade, and the snow thickened in the pass until it was nigh impossible to see. Were Caden as superstitious as Gillis, he’d think death’s angel curtained it off.

  The aged oak gates of Glenarden swung open, preempting further speculation. Tarlach himself shuffled out into the weather, flanked by some of the clan elders. Caden couldn’t see his father’s face, but he knew his bent figure, broad as a bear and just as dangerous in a temper. And if he were not already in one, the clan chief would be upon finding out his precious heir was missing, probably dead. And his wrath would fall on Caden, who never measured up to Ronan.

  Caden steeled himself, his fingers tightening on the reins of the riderless dappled stallion walking next to his own steed. God forgive him, he loved Ronan as a brother. Yet there was a part of Caden, a poison green part, that hated him and would not mourn the loss. Ronan had no fault in Tarlach’s failing eyes. He’d fought like a warrior at age six. He was the unanimous choice of the lesser chieftains as Tarlach’s heir. He was a wise administrator, cautious … everything Caden was not. Nay, Caden would not miss him overmuch. Perhaps now was the chance to show Tarlach his second son had merit too.

  Eventually. For now, the present must be faced. For the first time, Caden noticed that even the wind had ceased its wail, as if in anticipation of a greater storm approaching.“Where is my son?” Tarlach’s roar pierced the silence.

  It took great effort not to remind the old man that two sons were present. “Ronan is missing, my lord father,” he said instead. “We searched till the light failed us, all to no avail.”

  Tarlach staggered back as though struck broadside with a sword. A wounded growl erupted from his throat. An attendant rushed to the old lord’s side, only to be shoved away. Tarlach tore the cloak away from his face, exposing his wild age-shot mane to the elements, and narrowed his eyes beneath the bush of his brow.

  “I’ll hear you inside.” No offer, no invitation. An order.

  “We looked … ” Alyn’s young voice broke. “We looked everywhere, Father.”

  In the torchlight Tarlach’s hardened features relaxed upon seeing his youngest son. “Aye, laddie, I’m sure you did. But come inside before you take a chill. My heart could not take the loss of another son.”

  “If Ronan is lost, milord,” Caden said. It was a thin hope. One that might raise Tarlach’s esteem of him, if he found Ronan. At least there would be a body to mourn. “I give you my word,” he called to Tarlach as the old man turned to reenter the outer yard. “I will not rest until I find him.”

  Without acknowledgment, Tarlach continued his bent, shuffling walk through the round, thatched huts of those who lived within the protection of Glenarden’s thick stockade walls and headed toward the raised stone keep in the center of the compound.

  As if Caden did not exist in this world or in the old man’s own bitter one. It wasn’t new to Caden, but it hurt, twisting like a knife in his chest. Tearing open old scars and barely healed wounds. Again.

  By the time the men had seen to their horses and had their grim audience with Tarlach, a feast fit for kings awaited them. But the air was far from the festive scenes portrayed on the tapestries hung along the wall. The pall of Ronan’s disappearance blanketed the very air and choked any semblance of laughter. The eyes of man and woman alike blinked away mists of grief as the story circulated the room in hushed tones.

  “Gowrys!” Tarlach spat the name of his enemy and slung his empty bronze cup across the table where his sons and honored guests sat. The remainder of the population gathered on benches about the fire pit. The cup rolled off the table and onto the floor, where Tarlach’s hounds set upon investigating the untempting handout. A maid hastily retrieved it, wiping its rim with her apron, her eyes creeping to Ronan’s seat beside the chieftain.

  It was conspicuously empty. No one dared occupy it. Certainly not Caden. Not yet. He contented himself to be next to Rhianon, the bride he’d taken that spring. Never had Caden felt this way about a woman, and he had known more than his share.

  Beyond Rhianon’s golden crown of braided hair, interwoven with wine velvet ribbon to match her gown, Tarlach came into focus. He stared unsteadily at Caden, his head weaving from the drink in which he’d drowned himself. “You lost him, lad. You find him. You owe me that.”

  “On my honor, Father, I will find our brother and exact justice.” Caden meant every word. He would prove himself invaluable to Tarlach. Indispensable. Now was his chance to show his father and his bride he was every bit his brother’s equal.

  Tarlach rose on wobbly legs and lifted his freshly filled cup. “Tomorrow, at dawn’s light, we will search again for my firstborn. I will not mourn without a body. I will not!” He slammed the fist of his good arm on the table and leaned forward. “And if our search fails, then we will ride to the high hills at Leafbud and raze every Gowrys hovel until his fate is known to us.”

  “What if the wolf-witch has him?”

  All heads turned toward the youngest O’Byrne. Alyn had been unusually quiet until now … no doubt wracked with guilt for abandoning the search. In other men, Caden found such idealism disgusting. But in his youngest brother, it was pure charm.

  The youth pressed on. “What if it wasn’t the Gowrys, but she who spirited him off his horse?”

  For a moment the room was as frozen as the hunting scene embroidered by Caden’s late mother that hung on the wall. Glances, not words, were e
xchanged—some with fear and superstition, others with skepticism and mild amusement.

  Tarlach thawed first, sinking into his chair as though the wind had been snatched from his lungs. Despite his rantings over the she-wolf, it was obvious that this had not crossed his fevered mind. In his mind, he was the hunter. The witch, if she existed, was the hunted. With a trembling hand the old man made the sign of the cross over his chest. His gesture was repeated here and there around the room.

  Caden watched, fascinated to see the bear almost shrivel within the folds of his brat. Tarlach’s lips moved, yet nothing came out of them. Nothing coherent.

  “Father?” Alyn hastened to the old man’s side. “I’m sorry I mentioned her. Of course she couldn’t possibly overcome Ronan. He’s a fine warrior.”

  “Oh she could, laddie. She could, she could, she …. ” A whimper escaped Tarlach. “May God forgive me if it was I who put my son in her path.” He switched his attention to Caden. “Were there wolf tracks?”

  “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.