Her Da would say that her soft spot was showing.
So she forced her mind on the ale–brewing and the cider–pressing as the procession followed the winding path. The hard blue–gray rock pressed in on either side of them, opening only to reveal a steep crag or a rushing torrent of water, or a stretch of heath or valley. Late in the day they marched single–file through a thicket of oak, the clack–clack of the horses’ hooves dulled. Lulled by the rhythmic plodding of her donkey and the gentle ringing of harness and chain mail, Aileen jerked out of her dozing at the sound of the first cry.
It was an odd sound, like the whelp of wounded dog.
Dafydd scraped his sword out of its scabbard. His horse pranced, frightening her donkey into skittering aside. Dafydd cried something out in his babbling Welsh, and then pointed his sword forward. She strained to see around his horse through the thicket, but all she saw was faint movement ahead.
Then the woods erupted.
The creatures burst from the forest in a rush of sound, hurling their javelins with a whirr, and then flashing knives out from their belts. They hurtled toward the line of horses and men so suddenly that she simply sat upon the donkey transfixed, not feeling fear, not at first, for surely these were but furies of some sort, ripped from the Otherworld. Such faces as these she had never seen. She recognized them as human, but barely so. The hardness in those eyes … like chips of the slate mountains themselves.
The horsemen around her scraped their weapons free and met the challenge headlong. Dafydd shouted orders. Had the men really carried so many weapons? There was a kitchen’s worth of knives flashing in the gray light, and every man had his hands full. She hadn’t noticed that when they’d left the homestead, though she had wondered why she had been granted such a royal procession back to the sea.
Someone bumped her donkey. The beast skittered back to the edge of the woods, and then picked his way down to the rounded stones of a dried riverbed. Left alone with slack reins, out of the center of the fray, the beast lowered its head to munch on a dry tuft of grass. A sound alerted her, like the whistle of a gust through a cavern. She turned and saw one of the attackers racing across the riverbed toward her, hefting a lance upon his shoulder.
She sat, transfixed, staring into wolfish eyes. Blue woad caked his skin. Long fair hair flew out behind him. Reeds strapped around his feet muffled his footsteps. A scream surged in her throat, and then stuck. He splashed to the middle of the rocky riverbed, and curled his lips back from yellowed teeth. Sensing his victory, Aileen supposed, in the strange detached place she’d floated to in this unreal world where men spilled the blood of other men
She struggled to move her donkey. He flexed his fingers around the shaft of the javelin and leaned back to launch it.
A powerful crack rent through the clearing.
Later, she would remember that sound. At the time she was only vaguely aware of it, too concerned about kicking the beast into moving. Air whooshed across the riverbed. A humid gust swiped her cheek but didn’t rattle a single leaf amid the thousands littering the ground. She became aware of an odd buzzing in the air. Tiny whirlwinds sifted up dust beneath her donkey’s feet. An exotic perfume burst around her, like the distant smoke of fragrant wood–fires. The riverbed clattered as if with the sound of a thousand tinny footsteps.
The warrior stumbled to a stop.
His javelin clanged against the stones. The man swiped at his head, then at his thigh, then, more furiously, at his arms. He stumbled back and raised his arms over his face, twisted this way and that, clawing the air, grasping his invisible tormentors. Aileen tightened her grip on a donkey grown skittish.
The air filled with a louder clatter—Dafydd’s gelding as Dafydd urged the horse down the slope. Steel rang as his sword knocked against his scabbard. At the sound of the ringing of metal, the leaves ceased their rattling, the whirlwinds died, the buzzing eased, and a cold autumn wind gusted away the last of that odd fragrance.
Dafydd called out to the warrior digging his fist into his eye. The warrior glanced up, started to his feet, and raced into the woods. He cast a single backward glance at her—a glance that made her blood run cold.
Dafydd chased the man into the woods. Her chest heaved. She twisted around at the sound of a twig cracking, to find nothing but the shimmer of light upon a clearing. She tumbled off the donkey’s back, dragged her skirts off his rump. She held the reins and pressed close to his coat while she scanned the woods.
In the span of a heartbeat, it was over and done. She searched for signs of the Sídh, wondering why they tore through the veils that separated the worlds now, in this place, when not once before had she felt their presence upon this ground. Wondering, too, why they had now retreated.
“Are you injured?”
Curt, clipped words. She turned to glance up into Dafydd’s hazel eyes. She saw in them that strange look she sometimes received after healing a mainlander, a look teetering between wonder and disbelief.
She tugged her tunic straight. “I’m fine.”
He nodded and kicked his mount back up the slope, motioning for her to follow.
A pall had fallen over the wood, pierced only by the fading shouts of pursuit, an occasional cry in the distance. All that fighting, all the grunting and the yelling, over and done with, and in the span of a few heartbeats nothing was the same. The neat line of horses, donkeys, and men scattered this way and that, like a line of stakes she and Niall had dug into the ground one day to mark off the planting, only to have an unexpected gale scatter them into chaos.
So this was warfare. As unpredictable and fierce as lightning, as blinding and quick. A thunderous moment of men hacking away at each other, leaving a hollow silence stinging with the stench of sweat and blood and trembling with the moans of the wounded and the dying.
Aye, the wounded.
A man lay across the path, his face contorted. His leather cap lay like a broken eggshell in the grass. She reacted by instinct. Dampness seeped through her tunic as she knelt in the dirt by his side. Her fingers slicked over his bloody brow, searching for the wound.
His eyes flew open.
“Don’t fear.” She lifted her tunic and seized the edge of her undertunic with both hands. “I’ll bind your wound.”
She tore free a strip of linen. He didn’t understand a word of her Irish, but as she pressed the cloth over the slash upon his temple and felt her mind fading to that familiar calm place, she knew it didn’t matter that they spoke different languages. The words were not important. She rarely remembered what she’d said after a healing. It was the sound of the voice that mattered. Hers was a tone a man or woman or child understood even in the midst of delirium. She supposed it was the voice of a mother, the soothing lilt of lullabies and comfort–words, senseless soft syllables that echoed to some calm and tender youth, sounds that transcended madness and language.
She pressed the square of linen against the man’s wound. For all her skill, she couldn’t mend such a wound with a touch of her hands—that would take thread, a needle, rest, and time—but she could ward off the shock. She stroked lightly with her other hand, willing the throb of good health into him, stroking and lulling, stroking and lulling, until the man’s tight grimace eased, until she knew she could leave him for another.
She glanced down the path and the sight struck her hard. She’d seen enough war–wounds in her lifetime. The Irish Mainlanders often rowed their leaders out to Inishmaan when they’d been wounded badly in battle. Still, here she was in the thick of it. Men lay strewn everywhere. Blood ran in rivulets down the bark of trees. As she watched, someone plunged a dagger into the neck of a suffering horse.
Too many. Too many.
She staggered down the path. One man dead—nay, two. Another gone beyond her reach. They called out, waved to her. She could not answer them all. Too many. Her palms tingled. She must do something, she must start somewhere. She forced down the panic. The most seriously wounded first, wasn’t that what Da always t
old her? She fell to her knees next to a man with a hole gaping in his shoulder.
Time lost meaning. She bound wounds and passed her hands across their bodies in the way she’d long learned by instinct, so that no one thought her movements strange, just the smoothing of a binding, the clearing of blood off a stretch of flesh, a search for broken limbs. She stopped their bleeding with her father’s skill, then eased their pain with the stroking of her hands to ward off the shock that threatened—but only just enough for now, for others craved her skill, always others, calling out to her. Torn flesh, broken bones, the ravages of wood, iron, and steel—foreign invaders in tender flesh. Seeing to one after the other, she knelt again and again, working until her back ached, until jabs of pain speared down her neck, until the screaming within her head deafened her and then she hefted herself up to the next cry of pain.
She stumbled upon a group of men clustered in a circle, their heads bowed as if in prayer. She shouldered her way through and knelt by the wounded man’s side. She’d torn so much linen off her undertunic that stones bit into the bare flesh of her knees.
This wound gaped deep and ragged—and someone had made it worse by yanking the javelin out. This one, well loved by the silence of the men around her, clung to the last threads of his life.
But he was not lost. She felt the strength in him, pulsing beneath the armor of boiled leather. Shrugging off her mantle, she tore at the laces of her sleeves and yanked her tunic clear over her head. Her hair, tugged out of its netting, sprang down her back.
She winced when she pressed the thick pad of wool upon the man’s shoulder, for the anguish of this bloodied flesh rang in her ears. No need for words here, for the man lay blessedly unconscious, his breathing short and shallow. She yelled at the men around her for hemp to tie the binding onto his wound, even as she passed a hand across his flesh, trying to stroke away the ache. She willed him to breathe deeper. His body screamed, screamed—she had to force herself to keep her hands upon him for the screams throbbed in her own head. This one was close to death, aye, for a body could not take much more of such pain before stopping, shutting down, ending life instead of keeping to the harder path and fighting to be healed.
Her palms tingled as she set herself to the healing. Someone dangled a strip of cloth before her blinded eyes. She took it only long enough to bind the padding, already soaked with blood, onto the wound. A harsh thing, this wound, it sucked upon that light that flowed through her as greedily as a hungry babe sucked milk from a mother’s breast. Sweat ran down her brow, sweat in the cold air of the mountains when she wore nothing but a thin slip of linen amid a circle of men. But all her pressing and stroking was working. She felt the drain ease. Around her, the men talked in hushed, excited whispers.
Then, on the pretext of searching for other wounds, she ran her hands across his brow and over his body, willing her own strength into the body of this wounded warrior, willing him to rest easy for now, rest easy, rest easy.
Finally, she stood upon shaking legs. A thin drizzle winnowed between the trees. She told the man standing beside her to move the wounded warrior upon a horse. Somehow, the man understood her Irish enough to set to lifting the warrior upon a horse draped in boiled–leather armor.
“Will Roderic die?”
Rhys loomed in front of her. Dirt streaked his face and his mask and blood dulled the shimmer of his chain mail. He still gripped a sword in his gloved hand. She looked up and down this looming hulk of a masked man, and knew that not all of the blood staining his tunic and chain mail belonged to him. He’d caused as much bloodshed today as any of the enemy. He was a warrior skilled in the ways of hacking through human flesh. She trembled in impotence and frustration and fury and fear and the inability to comprehend all that had happened this day, while the stench of blood and death singed her nostrils.
“His fate is in God’s hands,” she said. “No thanks to the likes of you.” She stilled the urge to run from this place. He was all she hated of outsiders, the superstitious, ignorant destroyers. “See how the dead lie in piles—and mostly the enemy. How proud you must be. A fine warrior, you are, worthy of this glorious day.”
“I did not welcome this fight—they attacked.”
His gaze burned through her. She suddenly realized she stood before him in nothing but a filthy thin linen tunic, torn to her thighs, her mantle lost in the mud, her tunic padding for a man’s wound.
“Does that matter? I see the cold light of victory in your eyes. You and the men who attacked—you are of the same kind,” she snapped. “Bloody, greedy, heartless—”
“You’ve struck upon the truth.” His eyes were as cold as the mountains behind him. “We are the same, those men and I.”
“Demons like yourself—”
“More than that. We’re of the same blood. Of the same flesh.” He swept the point of his sword up to the dark woods whence the men had come. “Those men are my brothers.”
Chapter Five
She made it all look so ordinary.
Rhys peered through his open door to the mead hall. Men lay on makeshift pallets amongst the reeds, shifting in their sleep. Aileen drifted among them, whispering orders to Marged trailing in her wake. Now and again she stopped to pass her hand across a man’s brow, touch a shoulder, or check a binding. She slipped among the wounded like some red–haired angel of mercy.
And each time she laid her hands upon them, she transformed.
Rhys chewed on the end of a reed. Maybe he was seeing something that wasn’t really there. No one else seemed to notice. She had hands as slim as an Irish harpist he’d once seen in the Prince of Wales’s court. Those fingers fluttered over the wounded with the lightness of a leaf drifting down from a tree. A half–smile curled her lips, a contented smile, and it nagged at him where he’d seen such a look until he remembered the statues in the great stone churches of Normandy. Mother Mary as she held her child.
A woman who’d healed every ailment she’d touched. A woman with a touch of faery blood who can cure your curse with a pass of her hands. A miracle worker, like to be a saint.
Rhys closed the door and nudged his chain–mail hauberk off the bench. It slid into a heap of metal onto the paving stones. He sat down on the bench and brooded into the flickering light of his own hearth.
Like to be a saint.
He twisted the reed between his teeth. He’d seen enough battles with the Prince of Wales to know that at least two of the men sleeping in his hall should be dead. Another should die before the night was through. Yet all three showed every chance of recovery. From the devil’s hand, or an angel’s, the lass had power. A power she’d refused to use upon him even though he’d offered her a fortune.
He tugged out the reed and tossed it into the flames. Hate and treachery, horror and betrayal. Familiar emotions these past five years.
The door swung full open with a flash of light. She strode in as bold as a wife, clean linens draped over her shoulder. A bowl of water swished in her arms. Up close, she looked painfully human—haggard and weary.
No, she wasn’t saving any of that magic for him.
She clanked the bowl on the bench and then reached for the bloody cloth on his arm. “You’ll let me look at that wound now.”
He seized her hand. “My boy did a fine enough job.”
She wrenched her hand away. “Even the simplest wounds can fester.”
“It’s the deepest wounds you do your best work on, I’ve noticed.”
“You know I’m a healer.” She yanked a cloth off her shoulder and dunked it in the steaming bowl. “That’s your sword arm, is it not? If you want use of it within the week, pull off that rancid rag and let me at it.”
No, he wouldn’t settle for a dose of her broth, not now, not when he knew for sure there was richer witchery to be had. “You’ve taken a foolish gamble, Irish.”
“You are as stubborn as a bull.”
“You must have tasted it. The salt–air of your island. Your mother’s own cooking.�
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“I’ll taste it yet, I wager.” Something shifted in her eyes. “Dafydd tells me the ship will stay—”
“Yes, that ship will wait. I owe much gold to the merchant who owns it. Castle–building is an expensive undertaking, and I need this man to ship me more quarrymen in the spring.” He knew that the only thing this woman wanted was her freedom. Well, the only thing he wanted was a healing. “But you won’t be with the Irish laborers when I send them back to Ireland. Not after what I saw upon the field of battle today.”
“What you saw this day,” she began, straightening her back, which made her nipples press against her shift, “was nothing any doctor in Ireland couldn’t do if he was there so soon after the battle.”
“Was it compassion? Or could you not resist using your sorcery after so many weeks of hiding it?”
“Still with the sorcery.” She splattered the linen into the bowl and jerked up off the bench. “I’m sure if you call him, the devil will show his own face here quick enough.”
Oh, she was a sight. Her hair burst from the edges of the net she’d stuffed it in. Tight curls fell over her shoulders. Blood streaked her tunic. Saint or sinner, he didn’t know which. She was broomstick–thin yet quivering with anger from head to toe. And those eyes, those damned silver eyes, biting and snapping at him like a wolfhound’s. She looked him square in the face, mask and all, without fear.
This must be part of her sorcery, for him to notice such things in the plain face and thin body of a peasant woman.
He said, “You know what I want.”
“I offered to heal you once. You refused me.”
The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) Page 6