When sleep claimed her at last, it was not gentle. She drifted into feverish dreams, her body shivering against the cold, her lips cracked with thirst, unaware of days coming and going.
***
Ciaran dragged the bundle of spear shafts out from the armory and into the yard. Sweat trickled down his temple though the morning was cool. He set the spears against the wall and straightened, rolling his shoulders. Beside him, young Malcolm bent to stack them in order.
The gate had drawn a crowd. Villagers pressed close, their chatter rising to a buzz. Ciaran cast a glance over them, always a bit annoyed with the arrival of the tinker. He rubbed his hands free of grit and bent for another sheaf.
“What’s going on?”
He lifted his head and turned, finding Ivy Mitchell walking toward him, though her gaze was on the activity at the gate. He couldn’t help it, that his jaw clenched, merely at the sound of her very English speech. Alaric had tried to insist she was not anEnglishwoman, but Ciaran believed everything he’d heard and seen said that she most certainly was.
“Seems the tinker's come to call,” he said, dusting his palms together.
Her brow furrowed as if puzzling it out, and he turned back to his work.
“The man’s a clackit tongue,” he added offhandedly. He hauled the next bundle against the wall with a grunt. “And he’s nae one for working while his lips wag. Folk dinna care to waste the day hearing his blather, so they crowd early, hoping to be quit of him fast.”
Ivy’s mouth curved faintly at that, though Ciaran hardly noticed. The sound at the gates had swelled, then parted. The cart creaked through, the tinker’s mule tossing its head. Pots and scrap metal clanged against one another, the whole contraption groaning like it might come apart before it reached the bailey. The tinker, brash as always, shouted greetings as though each villager were kin and anxious for his presence alone, while his patched coat flapped wildly behind him.
Ciaran turned away, wanting to finish his chore and move on, outside the bailey and away from the annoyance of the tinker’s presence, but a sharp cry split the air. A woman shrieked, stumbling back, her hand pressed to her mouth, a stream of Scots’ words tumbling incoherent from her lips.
“A body?” Ciaran repeated the most significant part of her statement.
The press of villagers surged forward, voices rising. Ciaran started toward the cart, every muscle coiled. What the bloody hell?
The tinker’s hands shot up, words spilling fast. “Found her, I did! In the mountains, sprawled like the dead across the heather. Thought her a ghost myself, till I felt her still breathing. I’vebrought her here for the laird to deal with, same as any honest man would!”
The crowd gasped and muttered, Ivy among them now, having scurried forward to see ‘the body’.
Ciaran rounded to the open end of the wagon, his eyes falling on the bundle sprawled between pots and cloth.
And his breath caught.
A woman lay crumpled there, her hair pale and shrouding most of her face, which appeared fair but colored by heat, a fever mayhap. Beneath a swath of her hair that shrouded the upper half of her face, her lips were faintly parted, the fragile look of one hovering between life and death.
Jesu!
He sent a ferocious glower to the tinker, for not having made haste with his approach, for not having advised of this situation first thing. Annoyance evolved to fury, and Ciaran hopped up into the wagon bed just as the tinker hopped down, over the side.
Found in the mountain, my arse, he thought, always having suspected the tinker of nefarious appetites and behaviors.
Gently, he went to his haunches beside the woman, checking first for a pulse before he swept her hair aside, revealing her face in its entirety.
He jerked his hand back, frozen by the sight. Memory slammed into him—the field at Berwick, the stench of smoke and blood, the weight of a dying woman in his arms. Her gray eyes, burning with that odd calmness, her last words rasped in a voice weak with imminent death.I’ve been waiting for you.
Ciaran shook himself. This was not her. Of course it was not her, could not be. That woman had gone to her grave years ago. And yet the likeness was enough to stagger him, to briefly turn his knees to pudding.
“Do...do you know her?” Ivy Mitchell’s whisper broke through the haze of his shock.
His eyes cut to hers, raw, still snagged by the moment, the resemblance. “Aye,” he answered unthinkingly. Then, after a beat, harsher: “Nae. Nae, I dinna.”
Rigidly, he thrust aside pots and cloth with reckless force and gathered the limp figure into his arms. She sagged against him, her hair spilling across his shoulder and arm, the heat of her felt instantly, unmistakable as fever. For a moment he did not move, staring down at her with a stunned expression, feeling almost as if, before he moved, he needed to understand why she looked so exactly like that other woman.
Then he clenched his jaw, leapt from the wagon, and barked, “Summon the midwife!” His voice cracked hoarse with urgency, but it carried. Caeravorn had no healer, and the army’s barber-surgeon employed methods too coarse and dubious to tend the woman in his arms. Ruth, the midwife, would be better suited to the task.
He strode directly toward the hall while the tinker and villagers carried on with their business as if a half-dead woman had not just been discovered in the back of the cart. He was aware that Ivy hurried after him, but he concentrated on the woman, getting her safely abovestairs, where she might be tended properly. He shouldered his way into the first empty chamber he came upon, which happened to be directly adjacent to the one Ivy Mitchell occupied. More gently than he’d had cause to be in years, he lowered the woman onto the bed.
He stood rooted, still amazed by the uncanny likeness. The line of her jaw, the shape of her cheek, even the curve of her mouth—every detail struck him with the force of memory. Her lips were the same, full and pink-tinted, a shape he recognized too well, so familiar it unsettled him to see them on another face. And her hair—aye, that same wheat-blonde, the hue of barley fields beneath clouded skies.
