But Eilidh… She was the one left behind.
Except, goodness gracious, that sounded dramatic even to her own ears, and she had a very high tolerance for such things.
Eilidh pushed those thoughts aside as she entered the stables and headed straight for Shadowbane. In the chaos of Ciaran’s arrival, all Eilidh had noticed about the horse was his dark coat and white star, the telltale markers that had made her recognize his lineage. But now, with the knowledge of his prowess as a warhorse guiding her, she saw the marks of battle. Scars on his flanks and sides. A patch where the hair was different, the clear signal that he’d been burned there, and it had healed imperfectly. There were even small scratches from the most recent flight, though Eilidh was pleased to see that the Buchanangrooms had already cleaned and applied healing salve to each one.
“Ye really are quite the hero, are ye nae?” she asked the steed, who tossed his head in pleasure as if he understood every syllable of this praise. Regally, he lowered his nose for her to pat, making it clear that this was a serious honor, indeed.
Eilidh regarded it as such.
“Thank ye for bringing him to me,” she said quietly, pressing her own brow to that white, shining star between Shadowbane’s eyes. “It is wondrous that ye managed it. No doubt ye are the cleverest of horses.” Shadowbane snorted in agreement. “But I dinnae ken how ye could have known to find us here, even so.”
There, alone with the horse, she spoke aloud the words that she’d been feeling, the thing she had been just self-aware enough not to say in front of her sisters.
“It has to be fate,” she confided in Shadowbane. “And ye willnae catchmeignoring the hands of fate.”
3
“Does this hurt?” the healer asked as he poked at Ciaran’s side with none-too-gentle fingers.
“Nay,” Ciaran lied, though he feared that his gritted teeth gave him away.
Indeed, the healer looked unimpressed. He hummed to himself in that annoying way of his, then turned back to his bag of instruments without offering a comment.
Ciaran was a warrior. He knew that it was inadvisable to lie to a healer. Pain was the body sending messages, and men who ignored those messages ended up dead. There was a time and place for pushing through those hurts—Ciaran had a flash of blinking blood out of his eyes as he fought against an unending tide of redcoats during the rebellion—but this was not one of those times.
He wasn’t forging courageously on to protect his people from the tyranny of the English.
He was justso bloody tiredof being in this bed.
He had been in Buchanan Keep for eight days now, including the one during which he had been completely unconscious, and he’d only been allowed out of bed long enough to attend tobodily necessities and, once, to be given a bath by a junior healer who looked as though he’d lost some sort of bet to end up with the task.
Ciaran hadn’t blamed the man. He, too, had been humiliated and furious that he needed help with something so simple as cleaning himself.
And yet, he’d been unable to deny that hedidneed the help. The effort of standing for only a few minutes had left him shaky and unsteady, had made his ribs ache and had caused sharp pains to lance through him with each breath. The pain was getting less each day, but it was still there.
No matter how much he wanted to pretend that it wasn’t.
“Ye will need a few more days’ rest,” the stern, old healer said without turning back to look at Ciaran.
Ciaran briefly fantasized about setting this bed on fire and dancing around the ashes.
“Surely I dinnae needdaysmore,” he protested, trying to sound pleading instead of faintly murderous.
He was not effective enough, because the healer turned on him with a forbidding frown. The man looked to be about a thousand years old, and his back was practically curved in two, but none of this served to prevent him from being stubborn as a mule.
“I dinnae ken how ye treat your healers over in Gunn land,” he said severely, “but in these parts, we listen to the healers so that we dinnae end up…” He paused and smiled.
Ciaran’s mouth practically dropped in shock. He hadn’t thought the old corbie capable of such a thing.
“Miss Eilidh, hello,” the man said in a decidedly different tone of voice.
There, at the door, stood the woman that Ciaran had—to his everlasting humiliation—mistaken for an angel when he’d first awoken. Looking at her now, it was easy to understand how he’dgotten there, however. Her golden hair was loosely styled in a long plait, but several tendrils had escaped the rope of hair, and they frizzed cheerfully around her face. She scrunched her nose cheerfully at the healer.
“Och, Master Healer,” she said warmly, and damn it if the old blaggard didn’tblush.Then she crossed the room and laid a hand on Ciaran’s shoulder. “Surely a little fresh air would do him good,” she said sweetly. “The sun on his face, a bit of walking, a crisp breeze—these things have been known to mend a man far more quickly than idling indoors.”
God help him, she was pleading his case. Ciaran wanted to feel stubborn about that, wanted to believe that he could manage his own affairs, but one look at Eilidh’s bright eyes and coaxing smile had the old healer melting in a way that Ciaran hadn’t managed in days.
“Ah, verra well,” the old man said, sounding chuffed, of all the things. “As long as ye ensure that he doesnae overexert himself, Miss Eilidh. Ye ken how these stubborn warriors can be.”
