A will of iron, had Rory MacLeod.
Rory pulled the stopper on the flask and handed it to Leith. “Tell me wha’ happened, from the beginning.”
Leith took a long pull from the flask, and did.
He spoke of being tended briefly on the battlefield by a MacBeith healer, but did not tell her name. He spoke of his subsequent capture, how they’d clubbed him down and rendered him blind. That had resolved itself, again under the hands of the healer.
“Always had a head like rock,” Rory muttered. “And I am grateful for it.”
“As am I.”
Leith went on, speaking of the wound in his arm, and his captivity. He left out a lot, including that the healer who’d tended him was one of MacBeith’s daughters.
“And Farlan?” Rory asked. “Did ye see him?”
“Aye. He came to speak wi’ me frequently.”
A muscle jumped in Rory’s cheek. He would not ask how his former friend fared. Too angry, and too stubborn.
“And that woman o’ his—she still leads the clan? I can no’ understand why they send their women into battle. ’Tis madness.”
“They do no’ send them as a matter o’ course. As ye ken, Moira is MacBeith’s daughter, and stepped into her slain brother’s place. To be sure, on the field we never guessed she was a woman.”
“And the other one?”
“Other one?”
Rory’s gaze burned green. “The one we seized there, and traded back for ye. To be sure, I did no’ ken she was a woman when we grabbed her. Just a whirling terror, trying to gut me. Not until I ha’ a good look at her did I realize she was no’ a man.”
“Another o’ MacBeith’s daughters.”
“Christ! Do they raise them to forget they be women?”
Nay, and nay. Leith thought of Rhian unfastening her bodice and drawing him to her breasts. Holding him inside her. All woman. The very description of femininity.
“Rory, we need to speak together.”
“Is that no’ what we are doing? But aye, ye will ha’ a wealth o’ information for me. Knowledge that traitor, Farlan, refused to turn over. We will talk. All night, if need be. And we will empty this flask. I am glad, Leith, to ha’ ye home.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
For a dayand a night, Rhian deceived herself into believing she could withstand the ache of losing Leith. She kept busy during the day, looking after Saerla, tending the others who’d been wounded in the battle, and sitting in on a meeting of the council.
Alasdair’s condition worried her. It worried everyone. He’d had to be carried from the field, something no one could recall having happened before. He was provided care first by one of the male healers. Rhian learned later he could be heard bellowing halfway across the settlement.
A bad wound to the gut, it was. Rhian knew from treating others how painful those were, and how hard to heal. Alasdair was a bull of a man, but even bulls could be taken down.
He was absent from the meeting of the council, and the council members appeared half frantic over it. They spoke little of the next steps to be taken as concerned MacLeod, and nothing of what would happen without Alasdair at the oars. At least they did not reintroduce the subject of removing Moira from the place of chief.
Rhian got almost no sleep that first night. She shied from the very idea of her bed where she’d been with Leith, and did little more than doze beside her fire. By the next day, her self-control and her endurance both began to erode. Her longing for Leith became an open wound, not unlike the ones she helped to tend.
She told herself over and over again she must bear it, even while doubting she could. She spent her loving energy on Saerla, who had a nasty cut to one arm, and who in turn studied her worriedly.
If Saerla said one word about it being best that Leith had gone, Rhian thought she would fly apart. But Saerla did not.
By nightfall of the following day, Rhian ached from head to toe as with a winter sickness. She began to fear her emotional turmoil would affect the child.
She went to visit Alasdair, installed in the rear room of the infirmary, fearing the worst. She found him fractious, which served to reassure her some.
