Not long after the midwife had seen to Ivy and cleaned and packed up her bag, Alaric appeared, looking a bit harried, as if he’d witnessed firsthand Ivy’s long labor and had been tortured by it. Having perched herself on the bed with Ivy and her new bundle of joy, Claire stood at once and moved aside, making room. She caught the way Ivy’s smile transformed when she saw him, and how Alaric dropped to his knees as though he’d been struck down with wonder. His huge hand dwarfed the baby’s tiny head, but his touch was gentle.
Ivy introduced her daughter to the man Claire supposed would be her father, though she knew he wasn’t biologically. “This is Lily.”
Claire smiled even as she turned away, hiding the twist in her chest. Curiously, she thought of Jason at that moment, and how impossible it was to imagine him kneeling so raptly, his face undone with joy at the sight of new life. The sweetness of the scene between Ivy and Alaric made Claire strikingly aware of the emptiness inside her, which had nothing to do with time-traveling across centuries.
Claire tidied a bit more before she left them, slipping from the chamber with a basin and used cloths, leaving the new parents alone.Mother and father, Claire thought with a little ache of wonder, so happy for Ivy.
The warmth of it clung to her as she descended the stairs, the full basin balanced carefully. She was a bit surprised to find Ciaran in the great hall, and wondered if he’d kept vigil with Alaric. He sat at the head table, with no company, staring at the cup in front of him.
She smiled automatically when he glanced up at her. “It’s a girl,” she said brightly, unable to hold in the gladness. “Healthy, strong—she’s perfect.”
Ciaran’s eyes pierced her, but they did not brighten. His face hardly shifted at all. “Aye,” was all he said. His expression was unfathomable, but clearly he did not share Claire’s joy.
Claire’s smile faltered, and the stubborn part of her that always questioned why some people couldn’t be happy for others, said purposefully. “A daughter named Lily. Alaric and Ivy are... well, they’re over the moon. You should see them.”
Something flickered in his eyes then, but it was not joy. His mouth tightened, and the faintest scoff escaped him. “Aye. Beaming, I dinna doubt.”
Claire blinked at him, startled. The warmth she’d carried down from the chamber dimmed almost completely and she wanted him to know how odious he wasnotto share their joy. Starchily, she said, “Most people—friends and family—are glad for a safe birth and a healthy child. Or, at the very least, they manage to celebrate the simple joy of new life.”
He glanced at her. “Aye. May she thrive,” he said at last.
Claire frowned, for how empty the blessing rang.
She stared at him, unsettled by his coldness. Alaric’s joy upstairs had been so unguarded, so beautifully human. Yet here was his friend—alongtimefriend and close ally, she’d been told—who should have shared in that happiness. Instead, he brushed it aside with something that felt...less like disinterest and more like disdain.
Her first response was to wonder if maybe it was only a medieval thing. Maybe men of this time didn’t gush over another man’s child, not the way she might expect.
But that didn’t sound plausible. Everyone loved babies.
She didn’t know Ciaran well enough to judge him, not yet, not fairly—but she’d thought him merely reserved, a man who chose his words carefully. Now, for the first time, she wondered if he might not be a kind man at all. The thought cut more sharply than it should have. In some corner of her heart, sheknew that his character had already been established, born years ago by the stranger whose face she remembered, the one who had come to her in the wreckage of her car accident, the one she had held for years as something almost sacred. And here he was, so much less than she’d imagined.
It was nearly shattering. Even as she could never quite reconcile herself to one hundred percent believe that man had been real, she had let herself believe in him, not as a person she could find again, but as proof that such men existed. She had built something quiet around that memory, an imagined gentleness she returned to whenever she felt unseen and unloved.
Without another word to him, Claire moved on toward the kitchen, shaking off the damage done to the memory of her hero.
***
A week had passed since the babe’s first cry, and Ivy was well on the mend. Mother and daughter thrived, the little one drawing dozens of smiles from Alaric when he visited, which was often. Too often, Claire sometimes thought. She was glad for Ivy’s happiness, of course, but the chamber grew crowded when he was there, and Claire often felt like an intruder at those times. She’d taken to slipping out when Alaric visited, wandering the keep or the bailey to give them privacy.
Today was such a day. It was gray but dry, the air sharp and crisp, a typical autumn day. She meandered across the expansive courtyard, past the smithy with its glowing forge, past the granary where hens pecked for stray grain, until she noticed a low stone outbuilding tucked beneath the curtain wall at the firth-side of the keep. Its wide door stood ajar, and from within came sounds that caught her ear, low groans amid a rustle of voices.
She paused, curiosity risen, and followed the noise. Cautiously, she pushed the door open, her jaw gaping by what she discovered inside. The smell hit her first, sweat, blood, and unwashed bodies.
Inside, pallets of straw lined the walls and were laid in messy rows across the middle of the long room. Men were stretched upon them, some swathed in bandages that were stained with seeping blood. Others were pale and unmoving except for the rise and fall of their chests. A silent gasp fell from her lips—these were the injured and wounded of the Kerr and Mackinlay armies, and this a makeshift infirmary.
Never had she felt so immersed in the medieval world. Castles and people she could almost convince herself to romanticize—those she had seen in books, films, and glossy tourism brochures. But this—this dim, airless room where men fought not only their wounds but the rot and filth creeping into them—reeked of ancient times in the truest, rawest sense.
Toward the middle of the room, a boy no older than twenty clutched his side, teeth gritted against the pain, while an older man bent over him with a rag that looked anything but clean.
Claire’s nurse’s instincts made her surge forward. “You can’t use that,” she cried out as she crossed the room. “You’ll infect him.”
The man looked up, brows bristling beneath a furrowed forehead. He had a leathery face and a gray beard, and his sleeves were rolled up, and stiff with dried blood. Claire gasped when her eyes dropped to his hands. They were broad and work-worn but caked with filth, and it looked as if it had been weeks or months since he’d cleaned under his fingernails. She thought of everything those hands had touched, every wound they had pressed and probed, carrying sickness from one man to the next. Iron instruments lay scattered at the man’s side—clamps and blades dulled with use, none of them clean.
Her stomach lurched. She remembered lectures from nursing school, professors grimly recounting how, before antiseptic practice, infection had killed more soldiers than their wounds ever did.
The man, who might be the army’s doctor, fixed a dark-eyed glare on her for her interference. A string of guttural Scots poured from his mouth as he rose from his haunches, getting bigger and bigger until he loomed over her in a menacing fashion.
Claire’s pulse jumped, but she didn’t back away. His method of practice was very dangerous, would kill more than he saved. “You’ll cause an infection,” she said, her voice stringent with urgency.
