“I get the feeling you’re a troublemaker,” she remarked.
“Might be,” Mungan allowed. “Though I ken there’s a bit of that in ye, eh?”
With mock severity, her eye still on Ciaran, she denied any such thing. “Me? Not at all.”
“Aye, says ye.”
***
Heat pressed down on him like a forge gone mad. He fought to open his eyes, but they were leaden, sealed shut. The world came only in fragments—snatches of voices, the faint sting of cool cloths against his skin, the sound of water being wrung and sloshed. Yet none of it was strong enough to stop him from drifting.
The heat dragged him under again, down into the pit of memory. He was standing at Berwick again, a green lad seeing war up close for the first time. His boots sank in the mire as he bent toward the crumpled body at the edge of the heather. She moved—fingers clawing feebly at the earth. He crouched, gathered her as he once had, easing her into his arms. Her head lolled against his shoulder, but when he turned her face toward him, it was not the stranger from that day.
It was Claire.
Her gray eyes flickered open, finding his. Claire wore the same serene expression the woman had worn that day, frightened but resigned. Her lips were bloodied, trembling.His heart seized, twisting painfully in his chest. He could not breathe. The memory was wrong, impossible, but somehow Claire was dying in his arms.
Nae,he rasped, though in truth no sound left his mouth. The word only roared inside him.
Her lips moved. At Berwick, he remembered only the faint breath ofI’ve been waiting for you.
But then it was Claire speaking those words to him, at Caeravorn. And then the words themselves were different.
“You’ll be all right, Ciaran.”
He flinched as if struck. No! She was the one bleeding out, her blood hot and slick against his hands.
“Claire.” He clutched her tighter, frantic, but her form was already dissolving, sliding away from him like smoke in the wind.
No!
The cry never reached his lips. He was sinking again, into blackness, but her voice lingered, too strong for a woman dying.
“Stay with me, Ciaran.”
***
By the time Claire returned to Ciaran’s chamber that evening, her limbs felt like lead. She had spent the day running herself ragged between the sick house, the flu house—as she’d begun to think of it—and Ciaran’s chamber, forcing herself to remain strong and practical as she soothed frightened mothers and reassured weary children. But it was Diarmad who had frayed her last nerve.
Recovered now from his drunken stupor—Claire suspected Mungan had a hand in that—the man had reasserted himself with all the bluster of an incompetent physician certain of his own faulty wisdom. He was adamant that bleeding the feveredones was the only remedy worth pursuing, and worst of all, he meant to begin with Ciaran.
Claire had nearly lost her composure. “Over my dead body will you put one leech on him,” she had snapped, startling half the soldiers in the sick house. “Or on anyone else. It’s barbaric.”
Diarmad’s face had turned blotchy with indignation. “It has ever been the cure. The blood carries the corruption. Drain it, and the patient recovers.”
This came by way of Mungan’s translation.
“The blood carries oxygen,” Claire had corrected. “It carries life.” Her voice had risen, sharp enough to cut. “Take it away, and you weaken them. You’ll kill them faster, not save them.”
Diarmad had scoffed, muttering about ignorant women meddling in men’s matters—a hapless Cory had translated that part—but Claire refused to back down. She’d turned to Mungan, who had been hovering with the air of a man caught between loyalty and common sense. “You’re going to listen to him? A drunk?—who might still be drunk for all we know? You would trust him with Ciaran’s life?”
Mungan had opened his mouth, then closed it again, looking more uncomfortable than she had ever seen him.
Claire had pressed her advantage, her voice ringing out with authority. “No leeches. Not here, not now, not ever. If you want to try it, you’ll have to get past me.”
There had been a stunned silence before Diarmad began sputtering again until he’d finally thrown up his hands and stalked away.
She’d faced Mungan, who’d rubbed a hand over his mouth, not looking entirely convinced of her position.
