She held out her own arm. “Give me your hand.”
“My wound is on my face.”
“Are you to be the healer, then, telling me how to ply my trade?”
A moment passed. Anger and hesitation pulsed from him. Then, suddenly, she felt the scrape of his palm against hers.
A shock reverberated up her arm all the way to her shoulder. She absorbed this sensation while their palms lay flat upon one another, pressed hollow to hollow, his fingers stiff against her wrist. His pulse pounded against the pad of her fingers. When the shock passed, she blinked her eyes and focused her thoughts upon his hands. Hot hands, he had. Large and strong and heavy upon her own. His skin rasped like sand against hers. She suddenly sensed him with her own skin. Strange … he was pulling at her when it was she who was supposed to pull upon him.
She scented the hazelnuts he’d had for dinner. She realized she must smell them on his breath. She looked up, where his face must be, and knew in that moment that their lips were only inches apart.
She drew back and flipped his hand over so his palm faced up. He moved closer and she felt a flush rise up her neck as his knee brushed against hers.
She traced the skin on the back of his arm. Soft, downy hair tickled the pads of her fingers. Dark hairs, she remembered, on a forearm leathered from sun and wind. She’d watched the muscles in that forearm flex as he held his falcon that day. An elbow now. There wasn’t a bit of give in this arm, each ridge as hard as stone, but the skin as smooth as her own except for the ridge of a scar here and there. She trailed her fingers up over the ball of muscle, then into the valley. His muscles were as dense as rock.
She trailed her fingers higher, to the curve of his shoulder. She felt his discomfort like the hardening of a brick in the sun. When she reached the first ridge of the affliction, he flinched.
“It feels,” she murmured, tracing the edge, “like an old burn.”
“It’s no burn.”
“I wouldn’t know that, not seeing it myself.”
“Get on with it.”
As if it were that easy. As if he wasn’t doing what he could to make it impossible for her to concentrate, practically growling words onto the nape of her neck. Though she couldn’t see anything, she squeezed her eyes shut anyway and waited for the quiet to come over her. She waited for the soft slipping into peace. She was surprised it hadn’t come already. She flattened her hand over the edge of the affliction.
She took a deep, deep breath … and waited.
The rain hissed harder into the thatch above. Outside, in the mead–hall, a wounded man cried out in his sleep. Somewhere beyond the walls, a horse neighed and a man shouted across the yard. Aileen stroked higher. Smooth ripples, no more heat emanating from them than the rest of his skin. It was as if his skin were water and this part was but frozen ripples in a pond. She traced the affliction to the curve of his neck, to the throb of a pulse, searching for pain, for something, and there she waited, while beneath her fingers the pulse throbbed, throbbed, throbbed.
This couldn’t be.
I must concentrate on the task before me, not the man.
She took another breath, deeper this time. The fragrance of his skin filled her head, the fragrance of leather and horse and sweet mead.
The pulse throbbed, throbbed, throbbed.
She blinked her eyes open. She stared blindly where she knew her hand lay. Then she jerked up from the bench.
“Enough for one night.” She fumbled in the dark for the wet and dirty linens, giving up the overturned bowl as lost. “I’ll make up a salve for you and we’ll set upon it again another day.”
She stumbled her way through the dark to where she supposed the door was. She pushed it open. The dim red glow of the mead–hall blinded her but she did not stop her pace. Her feet scraped through the rushes. Her lungs ached for fresh, clean air. The palm of her hand tingled as if she’d scraped it upon a bed of nettles.
But when she’d laid that hand upon Rhys ap Gruffydd, she had felt nothing.
Nothing at all.
***
“Pay no mind to these girls, my lady. I know they’re bringing you water when you want lard, or hemp when you want linens. It’s not the language they don’t understand. They just don’t have a wit of sense in them these days.”
Aileen took the linens Marged offered and sank to her knees next to the pallet of a sleeping warrior. The morning light seeped in a white haze through the smoke–hole. On the next pallet, one of the wounded found the strength to sit up and tease a maidservant enough to send her skittering off, giggling.
“All they’re thinking about is the coming of Nos Calan Gaeaf—All Hallows’ Eve to good Christians. They’ve been racing here and there, collecting nuts to be thrown in the fire and fighting over the blade bone of a shoulder of mutton and choosing leek beds to be walking about nine times in the night—all to conjure up the sight of their future husbands.”
Aileen plucked at the crusted linen strapped across the man’s belly, listening to Marged’s chatter with half an ear. The Irish boasted some of the same Samhain rituals as the Welsh. She remembered more than one night in her youth raking out the ashes of the hearth–fire, hoping to find the footprint of her future husband marked in the ashes the next morn. Instead she found nothing but the scuffs of sleepy children who’d scuttled across the flagstones on the way to the chamber pot.
She’d given up those rituals by her fourteenth year, about the same time she’d given up all pretense of finding a husband.
“… peeling apples and tossing the peels over their shoulders. Do you know we’ve lost a sack of apples already, my lady, and Calan Gaeaf is still three days hence?”
“Could you hand me the water, Marged?” Aileen had quickly learned that the only way to communicate with the voluble housekeeper was to interrupt at will. “And will you stop calling me ‘my lady’? Did I not sleep in the kitchens last night?”
“That was but for a night. It’s sure the master will have you set up here, in the mead–hall, as soon as he sets one of his men to make the partitions.”
“I’ll be sleeping in the kitchens, thank you very much.” Aileen dabbed at a streak of dried blood on the man’s abdomen, around the padding over his wound. “I’m the oldest of a family of eight. I’ve boiled soup and spun wool and tended cows all my life. I’m no highborn guest, and I’ll not play the pretense from now until spring.”
“And a glorious thing that is, that you’ll be staying for so long. We’ve lacked a good woman healer in Graig for too long. More than one woman has died or watched her babe die in childbirth for lack of an experienced hand. Your ears must have been burning all night. The freemen’s wives have done naught but talk about you, my lady.”
“Did you not hear a word I’ve said?”
“What else will I be calling you then?”
“My Christian name is good enough. Aileen. In all my five–and–twenty years it has not worn out yet.”
Aileen wrung the blood out of the linen and tossed it over her shoulder, then swiftly retrieved it before it wetted the wool. It was Marged’s own best wool that draped her figure. She felt awkward doing common chores in such a fine, borrowed dress, but she’d given what was left of her own tunic to the launderer last night to be pounded free of soil and blood. She glanced up toward the smoke–hole and hoped this rain would stop soon. In this dank weather, it would take a fortnight for her clothes to dry.
“I’d best be learning Welsh myself, seeing that I’ll be staying here for a while.” Aileen gazed upon the sleeping man while her palms itched. “With no woman to run the house, you’ve got your hands full. I can’t have you following me about when you’ve your own chores to see to.”
Nor can I have you watching too closely, seeing too much, suspecting there’s more to this healing of mine than wood–anemone plasters and herb broths.
If there still is.
She gestured to the patient. “This man will need some of that plaster I had one of the gir
ls make up yesterday,” she said. “You remember, with the wood anemone?”
“Aye, I’ll be telling them, though only God will know if they’ll set to it, with their minds all a–flutter.”
Marged skittered away. Aileen dug her fingernails into her palms and took a look around the room. The tumble of healthy men who’d laid their pallets along the edges of the hall last night had long dispersed to their chores outside. Now, the hall murmured with the rustle of the wounded testing their sore limbs, with the banter of soldier and maidservant, nobody paying her much mind.
Shielded by the huge fire which roared in the center hearth, Aileen knew she could try to lay hands on him, if she dared. She flexed her fingers. She hesitated. I was exhausted last night, that’s all. She’d spent the night tossing and turning, wondering what was wrong with her, and by morning’s light she’d convinced herself it had been the situation, no more. She’d witnessed a bloody battle, had her own life threatened, felt the sudden presence of the Sídh, and spent a whole afternoon and evening in healing. It was no wonder that she’d no strength left for the likes of Rhys, no wonder she’d felt nothing but the power and intensity of a man beneath her hand.
The breath she sucked in burned all the way to her lungs. Look at yourself Aileen, with no more sense than these young maidservants flipping their hair. The coming of Samhain—that was what was causing her blood to roil. She’d be fooling herself to deny that Rhys, for all his faults, was a fine cut of a man. Samhain was rutting season for humans, and she was human enough to be swept along with it all.
She unfurled her fingers. There was only one way to know for sure. Clenching her jaw, she let her hand drift down upon the wounded man.
She felt it immediately—the sensation of dipping her hands into a thicker medium, the resistance against her fingers, and then a subtle current of life rippled through her, as if the sluice gates of a river opened upon a dry lake. Relief shuddered through her so strongly she didn’t sense the woman standing over her until the visitor said something in Welsh.
Aileen glanced up and found herself staring past a protruding belly to the hesitant smile of a young Welsh woman. The Welsh woman bobbed her head and began babbling in a soft, gentle voice, then thrust a package at her as Aileen stood up, leaving Aileen no choice but to grasp the gift against her. She listened to the gurgle of the woman’s words, thinking she’d have to learn some Welsh—and soon.
“She’s thanking you for saving her husband’s life—the one with the javelin wound in his shoulder.” Dafydd sauntered to the end of the pallet and snapped his fur–lined mantle free of drizzle. “She’s offering you a leg of lamb. Much prized.”
“Tell the young woman that I’m moved by her generosity.” Aileen’s gaze skittered away from Dafydd’s clear hazel eyes. In the rush of transporting the wounded yesterday she’d managed to avoid him, but now he stood before her with knowledge in his gaze, a dangerous knowledge. She fixed her attention on the young woman dressed in homespun, a girl no older than her sister Cairenn. “But tell her that it is my gift to her, and her growing family, that she keeps this lamb.”
Dafydd translated swiftly. The young woman smiled, bobbed, and then lumbered off toward the doorway without taking the leg of lamb.
Aileen said, “Wait—”
Dafydd raised his hand to silence her. “You don’t want to insult her.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her that you were moved by her generosity, and that you wish her health and happiness with her growing family.”
“A bit got lost in the translation, then.”
“You’d shame her if you refused her gift.”
“And what I am to do with this thing?”
“I’m partial to having it basted within a suet crust and served with mountain–ash jelly.”
“Very well. I’ll give it to Marged.”
Aileen turned on her heel and headed toward the door. Dafydd’s soft leather boots made no sound in the rushes. He shot out an arm to open the door before she could do it herself.
“You’ll be getting plenty more of that before the week is done,” he said, falling into step beside her as she made her way through the faint drizzle toward the kitchens. “It has been years since we’ve had a healer here. The Welsh don’t live clustered up in towns and villages like the English and most of the Irish—our people live on small homesteads scattered about these hills, hills that don’t make it easy for travel. This llys is the largest settlement in half a day’s ride.” He stepped around a pile of gorse and straw undoubtedly destined for the Calan Gaeaf fires, and tossed the hazel shoot he’d been chewing into the pile. “All our people are grateful for what you did yesterday. You’re needed here.”
“I’m needed on Inishmaan, as well.”
“But you’re staying until spring.”
A couple of hounds, scenting the lamb, trailed in the mud behind them, their muzzles in the air. “Your brother didn’t give me much of a choice.”
“My brother is not one for diplomacy these days.”
“Your brother,” she began, rising to a good Irish temper, “is the most arrogant, undeserving, con—”
“He is my brother,” Dafydd reminded her. “And the lord of this place.”
She felt the heat of a blush. Perhaps she shouldn’t speak badly of the lord of this house—especially to his brother—but she’d been too ill–treated to grant her host the respect he would normally deserve.
Dafydd reached over his shoulder and scraped something out of his quiver with his good hand. “See this?”
Aileen suffered a glance at the arrow gripped in his fist, then looked in surprise at Dafydd’s raised bow, somehow attached to his handless arm.
“A clever little device, isn’t it?” Dafydd paused in the courtyard. He raised the bow to show where his wrist lay snug within a molded leather cup hanging from the center. “I was nearly fourteen, and Rhys was ten, when he returned here one day from the house of Gerwyn ap Rhain, where Rhys was being fostered.” With a twitch of his leather–covered wrist, he turned the bow flat and nudged the arrow across a wedge in the wood. “Rhys overheard our father threatening to give me up to the church.”
She glanced at his fine purple mantle, trimmed in soft gray fur growing matted in the drizzle. “You like your comforts too much to be any kind of priest, I’m thinking.”
“Our father thought a one–handed man would make a better priest than a warrior.”
He twisted the bow level again and then dragged the tail of the arrow back with his good hand, curling his fingers over the bowstring. “For though I could shoot a lance as straight and as far as any man, a warrior needed two hands to use a longbow. And a Welshman isn’t a man if he can’t shoot a bow.”
He searched for a target free of danger and waited until the path was clear. With a twang, he launched the arrow. It cracked into the doorpost of a food shed, clear across the courtyard.
“On that day of Rhys’s return,” he continued, calmly fisting the bow back into the quiver, “I shot my first arrow alone. And my father relented.”
“Are you telling me Rhys made that thing for you?”
“A cruder version, but yes.”
“A fine, pretty story.” She swiveled in the mud and set her foot back on the path to the kitchens. “And it explains better than anything else why you stay loyal to him when your other brothers have rebelled. But will it get me home any faster by knowing it?”
“No. I suppose not.”
Aye, and it was home where she wanted to be at this moment, instead of in a world where good–hearted, intelligent children grew up into raging, senseless men. Aileen thought of Ma and her sore shoulder, hefting a basket overflowing with seaweed upon her back. She thought of the pile of wool tumbling in the corner of the house, waiting for long winter’s night spinning by the fire. She thought of briny fogs swirling outside the house fragrant with a peat fire, with stew bubbling in the cauldron. She thought of the soft white sea mists pillowing ar
ound the island, cutting it off from the rest of the world, from the eyes of outsiders, from warriors and their bloody battles and all the ugliness and pain of this world.
The homesickness cut through her sharper than the cold mountain drizzle, so sharp and so sudden that she stumbled in the mud. She shot out an arm to clutch a handful of Dafydd’s fur–lined mantle to right herself. She blinked her eyes open to a slate–gray sky, to a horizon lost in the clouds. Thinking of spring with its green shoots and bright sunshine was like thinking of a leaf buffeted farther and farther away by the wind.
The dogs took advantage of the ebb in Aileen’s pace to leap up and nip the coarsely woven fibers wrapped around the meat.
“Does the sun never shine in this wretched place?” She hitched Marged’s tunic up out of the mud. “It’s enough to make a woman mad.”
“Hiraeth.”
“Is that a curse in your wretched Welsh?”
“Hiraeth,” he repeated. Dafydd reached over and relieved her of the burden of the package so she could hold up her skirts. “There’s no translation for it in Irish. It means longing. A yearning for your birthplace.”
She met his eye for one moment too long. Too perceptive, this one. Far too perceptive. The kitchens lay just ahead, a woman’s place, and so she lengthened her stride toward sanctuary.
He persisted. “It can be a sort of sickness, hiraeth, enough to drive someone mad. I pray you never know the depths of it.”
“It’s sure I wouldn’t have known it at all if it weren’t for a certain Welshman. And you.”
“If you look hard enough you’ll see that every man, woman and child here is infected with hiraeth. And has been, since this thing happened to Rhys.”
The kitchen blasted a strip of light over the muddy paving–stones, and it was here Aileen swiveled and held out her arms for the package. But Dafydd paused with it slung upon his shoulder and stared off to some point beyond the wooden palisades.
“Five years ago I first noticed it,” he said. “A sharper chill to the winters, a staleness in the air. It’s as if the spirit of the place withdrew and left us all here. Instead of being banished from Eden, Eden has been banished from us.”
The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) Page 8