The woman stepped back, her eyes narrowed in disbelief, silent but looking pointedly at Glenna’s gown and then up to her face. She opened her mouth to speak, but the woman's husband, pulled her back again none too gently, speaking harshly in her ear. That Glenna had implied the whole village was responsible for Montrose’s condition was threat enough.
She turned and closed the small distance to Montrose, the crowd stepping away from the black as she eased him forward, and she stopped and dismounted. Montrose lay still as stone. She knelt down, searching for a sign of movement in his chest, a sign he was breathing, but she saw none. “My lord?”
Nothing. Panic raced through her. She leaned over him, her hair shielding them and pooling on his ash covered chest. “Montrose!” she whispered harshly into his black rimmed ear. “Can you hear me?Montrose! “
He groaned again and his words were lost and sounded deep and raspy as a wolf’s growl. She relaxed somewhat. The man was not dead. The sound made her wonder if his throat was burned,and that perhaps he was gravely injured. Her chest tightened and she touched his jaw and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
She turned to the men hovering around them. “Help him. Please.”
They looked at her dumbfounded, standing there as useless as ears on a stone.
“I am the Lady Montrose,” she lied easily and held out his signet ring as proof. “You must help my lord husband.”
Suddenly the men began to move swiftly, giving her helpful words of kindness. The smithy and his laddie rushed back carrying a long wooden door, and four of the men lifted the baron onto it.
“Where can we take him?” She asked, looking up and down the crowded village road. “Is there an herbwife? There must be someone who can help me.”
“You! Laddie!” the smithy said to his young apprentice with a gentle swipe at his head. “Go fetch Old Gladdys.”
Someone gasped. The smithy ignored them and turned back to her. “We shall take him to the tavern, milady. The old woman will come and help ye care for him.”
A fearful muttering spread back over the crowd, “Old Gladdys? The witch? Not her, surely….”
Glenna faced the smith. “Why are they wary?”
“The old woman ferried across from the mainland one day,” he explained.
“’Twas the day of the summer solstice,” someone else said in the dire tone of a Greek chorus.
The smithy looked at Glenna, shaking his head with exasperation. “She is naught but an old crone claiming healing powers. Some are suspicious. A few call her a witch because of her potions and strange Welsh ways, and she herself claims to be some kind of Druid, as if they still exist.” He laughed at the idea.
An older woman standing nearby crossed herself and mumbled something dark about witches and witchcraft existing beyond time.
“For as many who believe she is a witch, or question her sense and words,” the smithy continued, “there are twice as many who have been saved by her potions and will argue she is truly an angel.”
“Aye, milady,” said another woman, elbowing her way to the front of the crowd. “Old Gladdys saved my husband when he was injured from a scythe and his arm festered.”
“She saved my babe!” said another.
“And my daughter in childbed.”
“I care not what she is called,” Glenna said. “Only that she is skilled.”
“Take solace, milady. She has yet to send a single soul to his grave.”
“Although looking at her could surely do the trick,” a young man said and some of the crowd laughed. “Hers is not the face of an angel.”
But the men were already lifting the board with Montrose to their shoulders and moving slowly and carefully toward the tavern. Glenna turned to follow, but a rough hand on her arm stopped her. The spice woman would not let things be.
“I would advise you to take your hand away, spicewife,“ Glenna said imperiously, and she faced the woman once again. Then she glanced over her shoulder where the men were carrying Montrose and realized the woman’s husband was one of the men helping him.
Her gaze met the woman’s briefly, and then she turned to the black’s saddle and reached into Montrose’s bags. With a handful of silver, enough to buy more fine gowns than she could ever imagine, she pressed the coins into the woman’s rough hands and then held them tightly in her own. “I say to you that my young brother gave me this gown as a gift. What say you, spice seller?”
The woman slightly opened her hands and glanced down, her reaction first shock as the coins caught the sunlight and shone in her palm like fish skin, then she looked up at Glenna and smiledas brightly as the sun when she said, “I say your brother has a fine eye, milady.”
Inside the Steering alehouse,the men carrying Montrose set him down atop two oak tavern tables shoved together and stood around arguing over what should be done first, all of them talking to Glenna at once. The scent of stale ale made her belly wallow and her head was spinning. She was greatly worried. Montrose was still out.
The whole of the village, curious and noisy, looked to be shoving their way into the small room to see the great lord felled and almost burnt to death in the middle of Steering. A tavern maid set down a tray with some pieces of linen, a wooden bowl, and a ewer of water on the table next to him. The girl called Glenna milady, so she was feeling less fearful of discovery and more afraid of what she would do if Montrose didn’t awaken.
