Facing an inquisition was supposed to help him sleep better? He crossed his arms over his chest.
His mamaidh sighed as if she could read his thoughts. “If it’s not punishment for a sin, then it’s an evil spirit beyond my skills to drive away.” She patted his cheek. “If you’ve no care for your health, you should at least care for your soul.”
He’d already tried everything she’d suggested, from turning his clothes inside out, to wearing a pouch full of St John’s wort and red verbena round his neck at night. The dreams continued. So far, the priest hadn’t proved any more successful. He’d begun to think the dream was his version of St. Paul’s thorn in the flesh, given to keep him humble.
The seductive rhythm of phrases recited in Latin hit Gavran’s ears. He spun around. The priest leaned over the woman. The death words and what-a-pity-you-die-so-young-and-all-alone tone sent a chill across Gavran’s shoulders and down his arms.
He stumbled across the room. The woman’s chest still rose and fell, rattling on the exhale like a loose wagon wheel. She wasn’t dead yet.
The priest touched a thumbprint of anointing oil to her lips and spoke the words again. He pressed his thumb to the top of his vial to repeat, passing her from the land of the living to that of the dead.
Gavran stuck out his arm and blocked the priest’s path. The priest’s eyebrows shot up, perching at a reproving angle made all the more severe by his bald head.
Gavran yanked his arm back. The lack of sleep must be wearing on him more than he thought. No man in his right mind interfered with a man of God administering last rites, yet letting him go on with the ritual felt like giving up on her. Giving up on her seemed like giving up on the dream woman all over again. “Pray for her healing instead.”
“I can pray for her healing, but we still need to prepare her soul for death.”
He hadn’t fought for the dream woman the way he should have. He wouldn’t repeat that mistake now, either. “She’s not dying this day.”
“You can’t deny her this. She can’t perform penance and needs forgiveness of her sins before passing.”
“She’s not dying this day.” He placed what he hoped was a soothing yet firm hand on the priest’s shoulder. “We’re grateful for your coming, but you’d best be on your way while the weather holds.”
The priest sputtered a string of incoherent words.
Gavran lifted him from his kneeling position by one elbow and nudged him out the door. “I promise we’ll send for you again if you’re needed for unction.”
His mamaidh pressed her three middle fingers into the space between her eyes. When she looked up, her face wore the same look she used to give him as a little boy when he accidentally tromped dung through the house. “Are you off your head? Removing a man of God from our home by force isn’t like yourself.”
His gut clenched. It wasn’t like him, and it’d be on him now if her soul stayed trapped between here and the afterlife. That was almost a fate worse than what he’d done to the woman in his dream. At least the dream woman would be free of her curse upon death. “I’ll prop her up so she breathes easier. Will you help me get some broth into her and brew a poultice for her chest?”
His mamaidh pursed her lips and huffed deep in her throat, but heaped wood on top of the coals and hauled a pot full of water over the growing flames. She poured a mug of broth. “Best not tell your dadaidh about how the priest left. He’s already fretting Tavish will learn of your dreams and refuse to let ya marry Brighde. No need to add to it.”
He’d had the dreams as long as he could remember, but anymore it seemed the dreams were the master and he was the slave—endure them, hide the truth about them, let them dictate every move he made.
Brighde would find out about the dreams after she married him. There’d be no hiding them then. Somehow it didn’t sit right to allow her to go in blinded. The dreams could well drive him mad someday. Someday soon. His whole life had started to feel wrong. Unbalanced.
He crawled onto the straw tic, slid an arm beneath the woman, and pulled her up to rest against his chest. Her head lolled back onto his shoulder, and her labored breathing eased.
It all felt wrong except for this.
Holding her this way felt familiar and comfortable. “Does she look like anyone we know?”
His mamaidh lowered to the ground next to them. Both her knees cracked. She rubbed at the left one, then placed her thumb on the woman’s chin and eased her mouth open. “If she’s from round here, I’d like to whip the eejit who let her go out alone so sick and no meat on her.”
She hadn’t directly answered his question, but she had continued to minister to the woman while she replied. His mamaidh had never been a skilled liar. When she tried, she had to stop whatever else she was doing to focus on the lie, which inevitably gave her away. Even an indirect deception froze her body in place.
His mamaidh didn’t recognize her, and she knew every member of every family in the kirk.
He tucked the woman closer. The bones of her spine and shoulder blades dug into him. She couldn’t be the woman from his dream because that woman didn’t exist, but something about the situation still felt off to him—a woman alone, sick in a ravine, who made him think of the woman in his dream.
Maybe she’d be able to explain it all away if he could speak to her. But to do that, he first had to ensure she lived.
Chapter 3
Ceana Campbell wasn’t dead. Again. The ache in her body assured her of that.
Why had she thought this time would be different from the others? She knew better by now than to expect to receive what she wanted. The wishes would never allow it.
A sharp beam of light cut across her chest from the shuttered window above, and she brushed her fingers over the solid wattle-and-daub wall next to her. The hands that built this one had taken great care to smooth the mixture of clay, sand, and straw flat over the lattice of wooden strips beneath.
Wherever she was, it wasn’t her family’s cottage, where she’d been headed. At the best of times, her dadaidh’s construction work looked more like someone threw handfuls of slop against a briar patch.
Her last memory was collapsing while crossing the dry ravine, her lungs full of so much pain when she drew a breath that she’d been convinced she’d finally be freed from this cursed existence. Someone must have found her and tended her, not realizing they did her no favor.
She dragged in a breath full of the scent of boiling oats and turnips, and her mouth watered. The coziness of it reminded her why warm, cooked food tasted so much better than cold, raw food.
She should leave before the people who lived here returned.
With one palm pressed against the wall, she eased herself into a sitting position and pushed to her feet. Her legs felt like cattails bending in the wind, and she slumped against the wall.
Leaving would be more difficult than she thought. She should have known that, if she decided to stay, they’d ask her to leave, and because she’d decided to leave, her body would force her to stay. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, Gavran’s mamaidh stood in the middle of the room, a wooden spoon in one hand.
Ceana’s chest felt like it collapsed in on itself, crushing what remained of her heart.
It couldn’t be.
The woman moved her back onto the straw tic. “Easy now. You’ve been sleeping for near three days.”
The voice belonged to Davina Anderson as well, and she watched Ceana with eyes the same loch blue as Gavran’s.
Ceana’s hands trembled. However she’d gotten here, she needed out. Before Gavran returned. She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t allow the wishes to make her see him again. It was the one promise she’d made herself.
Until this moment, she’d thought it was the one promise the wishes would allow her to keep.
“I can’t ask you to care for me any longer.” Her voice ground out in a bullfrog croak.
“Havers.” Davina folded a scra
tchy woolen blanket up under her chin like she swaddled a bairn. “Now that you’re awake, I’ll help you bathe. I can’t tell if we’ve patched all your ills ’til we rid you of the grime.”
In the time pre-wishes, Davina’d played nursemaid to the entire kirk. That seemed to remain unchanged.
She’d have to try another path if she wanted to escape. One the wishes were less likely to anticipate.
Ceana wiggled one arm out from under the blanket and pushed it down away from her face. “I can’t repay you for any of this.”
Davina waved her hand in the air and stirred the two large pots over the fire.
Of course, not money, either. The Andersons had been known for their generosity, too. But Davina had also been as superstitious a woman as she was a devote one. “Won’t a bath only bring me more sickness?”
Davina snorted. “If you ask me, that’s an excuse made by men too lazy to haul water.” She disappeared out the door.
Ceana glanced back at the light flooding in the window. The windows were too small to climb out—a protective measure against people climbing in—and that left her only the front door as a means of escape. She wasn’t going to waste time seeing if she could come up with a better plan. Davina wouldn’t be gone long.
She clambered to her feet again and stumbled back into the wall. Her head pounded, and the room bent around her like an image under rough water. The wish that doomed her to receiving the opposite of whatever she wanted seemed to read her heart as easily as a priest read the Holy Scriptures. Wisdom said to accept her fate and return to the bed, but if she did, she wouldn’t be able to avoid Gavran.
She stepped away from the wall. Her legs collapsed, and she bashed her palms on the dirt floor. She grit her teeth and dragged herself forward on shaking arms, past the table.
The cottage door swung open.
Davina rushed to her side. She scooped her off the ground and into a chair and wrapped her in the blanket again. “I would’ve helped you as soon as the men fetched the trough. Be still now.”
Gavran and Allan Anderson maneuvered a wooden water trough through the narrow doorway behind Davina.
Davina pointed toward the fire. “Put it down there. We don’t need her catching a chill again.”
Gavran’s gaze locked on Ceana, and his mouth drooped open slightly in the way that used to make her want to kiss it.
Now it made her feel like he was gloating over her.
Maybe she should have felt happy—or, at least, happy for them. If she couldn’t have felt happy for them, she should have felt some noble sense of satisfaction surely. Her sacrifice was responsible for their prosperity. She’d accomplished what she’d set out to do. They were safe.
Barring that, she should have definitely felt something marginally ignoble like pride. The fairy had wanted things the other way around, and she’d been quick enough in her thinking to spare Gavran and take the worst for herself.
Instead she felt as bitter and filled with rage as she had when she’d given up her small portion of food to her little brother and her dadaidh snapped it up out of the boy’s hands and ate it himself.
The same sense that she’d been played and had no way of rectifying it.
Of all the cruelty the wishes inflicted on her—
“Watch yourself!” Allan dropped his end of the trough with a thunk. “Are ye trying to knock me into the fire?”
Gavran’s attention snapped back to his dadaidh, and he lowered his end of the trough.
Ceana rocked back and forth in the chair. She’d bathe because she couldn’t escape until she had, but she’d find some way to make them want her gone. Surely that would work.
Davina draped the trough with cloth. The men returned with buckets of water and dumped them into the makeshift tub. Davina poured the pot of boiled water from the side of the fire into the trough and shooed the men from the building.
She held out her arms. “Let me help you out of those clothes.”
Ceana wobbled to her feet. Davina motioned for her to raise her arms above her head and tugged her leine off, then helped her into the trough. The water funneled in around Ceana, the same temperature as early summer runoff. Not quite warm, but not exactly cold, either. Her skin pimpled.
Davina shifted around behind her.
Ceana held still enough that the water didn’t even ripple. She wouldn’t allow herself to lean back and hide the rows of scars given by the farmer whose apples she stole last summer when muddy water no longer tricked her stomach into believing she’d eaten. Those scars ought to be enough to start Davina thinking about whether she’d been wise to insist Ceana stay.
Davina sloshed water over Ceana’s back as if no scars existed. “I ought to know what you’re called. I’m named Davina. Davina Anderson. The two you saw earlier were my eldest son, Gavran, and my husband, Allan.”
“Ceana.” Davina might recognize her family name. That might be enough to allow her to leave if Davina thought she had kin to go to. They might even take her there themselves. “Ceana Campbell.”
“Were you headed to the Campbell cottage, then, expecting to find family?”
She couldn’t tell Davina she hoped to find her parents and brother. It would only lead to more questions she couldn’t answer. “My aunt and uncle.”
“The Campbell cottage has been abandoned since Gavran wasn’t much more than a bairn.”
Why didn’t you know?
Even though Davina didn’t speak the question, it hung in the air. The hole in her story. In the history she remembered, her family would have still been there. In the history altered by the wishes, she had no way of knowing when or why they left.
Behind her, the cloth splashed into the water again. “Are you running from someone, Ceana Campbell? If there’ll be a husband or a dadaidh beating on our door in the night, I want to know.”
“Nae.” A pang built in her gut, pinching like it pulled little bits of her away. As soon as her three wishes took effect, she’d been erased. Left in the world, but with no history and gone from the memories of everyone she’d ever known. “There’s no one. They were the only family I had left.”
Davina hmmed and scrubbed at her back.
Ceana rested her arms on the side of the trough, bent forward, and let her eyes drift shut. It’d been so long since she’d been touched with kindness. She wanted it to last. Which meant it couldn’t. Maybe she shouldn’t try to grasp it for a few seconds—it’d only hurt more when it was wrenched away—but she couldn’t seem to help herself.
Fingers brushed her wrist, and she jerked upright. Davina held her palm, facing up. The scars on her wrist from where she’d tried to kill herself eight weeks ago glared stark and ugly against her pale skin.
No good Christian home would want her around once they knew she’d sinned by trying to take her own life.
She stared straight ahead. A griddle propped against the wall beside the fire pit, in her line of sight, mocked her. Davina used to cook her oatcakes sweetened with apple sauce when she’d come here to hide from her dadaidh after he’d drunk too much mead and his words turned cruel.
Ceana licked her cracked lips, but no long-ago taste of apple lingered. This had been her safe place once. The place she’d run to. The adopted family she’d loved as her own. She never could have predicted it’d become the place she needed to run from.
She bit back the urge to curse. Her wishes had more tentacles than an octopus. “Not every life is worth living.”
“True enough.” Davina stroked a thumb—bump, bump, bump—over the ridges. “I can’t see much worth in living life as a drunkard, a murderer, or a thief, hurting others for your own benefit.”
“I’ve been a thief.”
The words sprang out before she could stop them. Best they were out anyway. She wouldn’t change course now. Better to leave, leave before leaving would add another crack to her soul she could never hope to mend.
Davina released her wrist. She cocked an eyebrow, looking even more like Gavran
. “The Almighty sees the motives behind our acts, not only the acts themselves.”
Ceana turned her face away. That was the cruelest twist of the wishes. She’d try to steal food and be caught, her body eating itself to survive, until she reached the point where she wanted to die. Then the wishes yanked her back, forcing her to take just enough food, just enough of whatever she needed to keep her alive. She couldn’t die any more than she could truly live.
Davina tilted Ceana’s head back and poured the remaining half bucket of water over her hair. She stepped away and held up a blanket. “Wrap yourself, and I’ll find you clothes. With two half-grown girls, we should have something that’ll fit you.”
Now that part of her wanted to stay, the wishes should kick her out any second. “I can’t take your daughters’ clothes. I’ll wash mine.”
Davina made a tsking sound. “The hand that gives is the hand that gets, my husband always says. And your clothes weren’t worth saving. I’ve already had the men burn them.”
Ceana donned the clean clothes Davina left hanging by the fire. She buried her hands in the still-warm material, and her throat squeezed shut. Every small kindness might as well be a knife between her ribs. Curse Gavran and the wishes for this more than anything else. Better she never experience anything good again than that she be teased with it to have it ripped away.
She tightened the drawstring at the waist of the skirt. It fit loose even when drawn, though she suspected it was because she made a stick bug look fat rather than the girl who owned the clothes was large. Both Ros and Morna had been naturally slender when she’d known them.
A longing to hug Ros and Morna one more time spread through her. In the pre-wishes timeline, when Davina destroyed her knee and she’d been unable to walk for near a year without help, Ceana used to come every day after finishing her chores at home to cook and clean at the Andersons’. Ros and Morna had been too young at the time to handle it all themselves. She’d half-raised Gavran’s sisters.
She pushed the memories aside. No sense in torturing herself with thoughts of what was.
Cursed Wishes (Three Wishes Book 1) Page 2