He dropped her skirts and strode to the table. Grabbing a ewer, he half-poured, half-sloshed water into a basin. His hands were shaking.
Even in the room’s dimness, she could tell.
Especially when he snatched a small drying cloth off a chair back and his hand passed in front of the light cast by a candelabrum.
A thought — horrible and damning — popped into her mind.
Her brows shot upward and she stared at him, her fingers digging into her bloodied skirts.
“You do not thinkyoucaused me to cut myself?”
“It would not be the first time.”
“Dia!” She slashed the air with her free hand. “I have never heard aught more foolhardy!”
With an oath that would have done her father proud, she yanked up her gown, flipping it back to expose her legs. “See you, Raven — look here,” she cried, thrusting her right leg at him. “ ’Tis a wee scratch, naught more, and was done by my own clumsy hand!”
“How it happened scarce matters.” He set the basin on the night table, plunged the linen into its depths. “Only that it doesn’t again.”
“It won’t.” She fumbled to unlatch the buckle of her dagger’s thigh-belt, tossing the thing to the floor. “I’m not often so clumsy —” she broke off, her mouth twitching. “With mysgian dubh, anyway.”
He humphed.
“ ’Tis true.” Sheer stubbornness made her emphasize the point.
He turned a skeptical face her way.
Keeping her own expression confident, she looked on as he wrung out the cloth. His hands still shook. She swallowed, striving to find a way to reassure him.
But he’d clenched his jaw and when he stepped up to the bed, his gaze fixed on the tiny scrape on her thigh, she would’ve sworn his eyes darkened.
Indeed, they almost smoldered.
“S-surely” — she jerked when he touched the dripping, icy cloth to her leg and began wiping at the dried streaks of blood — “surely, you do not believe you have the Droch Shùil?”
“The evil eye?” He dabbed carefully at her inner thigh. “With surety, nae, though I’ve heard enough tales of those who have but to glance at something they admire and blight it — much to their distress!”
“Then why —”
“Because what plagues me is far worse,” he spoke over her objection.
His eyes still on her leg, he reached to dampen the cloth again.
“I believe yournickwas a warning.” He missed the basin rim by a good hand’s breadth. “I can’t risk daring Providence much farther.”
Gelis watched as he corrected his mistake, this time finding the bowl.
And still his gaze hadn’t left her thigh.
Not even as he wrung out the cloth.
“Providence brought us together, as I’ve tried to tell you,” she argued, not objecting when he lifted her knee, bending her leg a bit to better dab at the thin runnels of blood striping her calf.
“And” — she leaned forward — “if you’ve any doubt, I can assure you it was my own haste in drawing my dagger that caused me to nick myself. It had to do with the bull, not you.”
“The bull?” He looked up.
She nodded. “Did you not see his red eyes and ears?”
