“I don’t ask that you injure yourself in my service,” he said, “but you have my deepest gratitude, lady.”
The words were polite—more courtly, even, than she would have expected. His voice was rough, though, and his eyes blazed green into hers.
Don’t assume, Sophia told herself.If you’re wrong, you’re embarrassed—and if you’re right, you’re in far over your head.
She cleared her throat. “Be grateful once we’ve seen the results,” she said.
Ten
At the best of times, Loch Arach was a large place. Now the halls and stairs stretched themselves out, almost infinitely long, taunting Cathal with their distance. Given what he’d just seen, he knew the sense of Sophia’s request that her laboratory be far from anyone’s lodging. All the same, as he strode through the corridors, he wished for a minute that he’d denied it and quartered her in one of the rooms next to Fergus, explosions be damned.
Sophia herself kept up better than Cathal would have thought. Potion covered, wrapped, and held firmly in both hands, she was only a foot or two behind every time he glanced back toward her. She didn’t complain or ask him to slow down either, though he did the first time he noticed that her speed came with a price. She was taking two or three steps to every one of his, and by the time they’d descended the staircase, she was showing it. Black curls were emerging from the sides of her wimple, her cheeks were flushed red-bronze, and her breasts rose and fell rapidly.
Even hurrying, even with two layers of wool and some pretense at courtesy in the way of his view, Cathal noticed these things. The lust that had started in the laboratory, at the nearness of her body and the feel of her small hand in his, still sent its tendrils outward through his body. He could ignore them better when he was walking. When Sophia had leaned toward his touch, eyes closed and lips parted in relief, his body had come to full wakefulness after the winter’s sleep. With an urgent errand before him and the castle full of people around him, he was still half hard from looking at her, still conscious of every breath of hers that reached his ears.
Triumph fed desire. He’d known that for years.
Had he forgotten the feel of it? He didn’t remember the aftermath of battle ever being quite so heated, or quite so intoxicating. There had been joy, yes, and lust when the women were willing and comely, but the temptation of Cathal’s memories had never been quite as intense as what filled him on the way to Fergus’s chambers.
Then again, he’d always been able to satisfy those urges quickly. The women he wanted had always been available. Since leaving youth for manhood, he’d taken care to ensure that. He’d been careful where he set his eyes and where he let his thoughts stray; he never stood too close or talked too long to a woman whose affections weren’t for sale in some way. Poets could talk all they wanted of courtly love, but pining after the moon was a silly modern notion. It would never last, and it, by God’s eyes, wasn’t for Cathal.
Now, perhaps, life had forced him into the situation he’d tried to avoid. That wouldn’t be new. At least there were advantages to this particular unlooked-for complication. If Sophia wasn’t for him, still she was pleasant to look at, and temptation was as enjoyable as satisfaction from time to time. If the potion worked, she would be gone before desire became torment.
In his right mind, Cathal told himself, he would find that an unmixed blessing.
Less mixed, at any rate. He wasn’t a saint or even a monk, had never had any aspirations along that line, and a strictly practical life would have been boring.
He grabbed the reins of his thoughts and pulled them away from his groin just before he and Sophia reached the doorway to Fergus’s room.
Either a helpful friend or her own exhaustion had sent Sithaeg elsewhere. The girl beside Fergus was Janet, one of the kitchen wenches. She gave Cathal and Sophia a startled look but spoke no word, only rose, bowed, and got out of the way.
“You should likely leave,” Sophia said with an apologetic smile, “just in case.”
Neither did Janet askin case of what? If she was a smart girl, she probably didn’t want to know. With another bow, she was out the door before Sophia and Cathal made it to the side of Fergus’s bed.
Duty, weariness, and his own aversion to watching futility had kept Cathal from visiting more than once in the last few days, and that had only been a swift look in. He’d felt guilty about that. Now he thought it had been wise. In the aftermath of Sophia’s cool annoyance, not to mention the proof of how dangerous her task could be, he saw that Valerius’s note had clouded his judgment, as the sorcerer might have intended. Had Cathal spent more time watching his friend’s decline, cloud might have become full eclipse.
In the afternoon light, even dimmed and scattered by the windows, he could see through Fergus’s skin. The shapes of muscle and tendon in his hands were milky and vague; his bones were more solid, like tiny chips of pearl caught in ice. The flesh of his arms was more translucent yet.
Fergus’s face was a skull, only faintly veiled, and his closed eyes were pools of milky water.
Cathal swore in Gaelic. Beside him he heard Sophia gasp, as she’d done the night she’d first seen Fergus, but her voice was less startled and more appalled when she spoke. “God’swounds!”
“You don’t believe in those,” Cathal said, unsure whether it was joke or accusation, only reaching for anything that wasn’t the man before him.
“Belief has nothing to do with profanity,” she replied, and Cathal could hear her controlling her voice, going from ragged to clipped with every word. “I’ll need you to hold him up, since I sent the maid away.”
“Aye,” Cathal said and knelt. The floor was hard and cold on his knees. He welcomed the solidity, even the pain; he cursed the contrast between it and the body he took hold of. Putting an arm around Fergus’s back was still possible, but the flesh itself had a wispy feel, and while Cathal’s hand didn’t go through his old friend’s shoulder, it felt as if it might at any moment.
Only the barest movement, the faintest sound, indicated that Fergus still breathed.
Have you reconsidered yet?
His whole body clenched, chest and throat and guts, a feeling he knew well from the heart of battle.
Fighting would do no good now. He wished, bitterly, that the situation were otherwise, that this was a problem he could solve with fist in face, sword in chest, teeth in throat. Remembering where he was, keeping his hands and arms gentle was all he could manage.
Physically, propping Fergus’s head up was no effort at all. Sophia could have managed it. A child might have been equal to the task. For Cathal, it was a joke. He had only to kneel, and wait, and keep still. Unable to look at Fergus’s face for very long, he watched Sophia instead. Also kneeling, across the bed from him, she unwrapped the potion with deliberate care.
