“Is it?”
“Aye, so, but ye be safe and warm here. My name be Molly, but ye can call me Mol, as everyone does.”
She bustled off and returned carrying a wooden bowl. With one arm, remarkably strong for an aged woman, she urged him up. “Drink o’ this. Broth, it is.”
He drank obediently. The broth was thin but warm and went down easy.
“There now. Ye rest and sleep as ye need, for ’tis the best healer, and we ha’ nay other to hand.”
And as she moved around the tiny place, leaving him to that rest, she began to sing in her ancient, cracked voice. An old song that surely he knew.
He slept and woke and slept again. Molly cared for him as if he were her own son, and a wonder that was, for it had been long and long since he’d known a mother’s care.
Sometimes when she knew he was awake, she chattered to himwith soft Highland words. Mayhap she did that when he slept also; he could not say. He dreamed, but not anything he remembered upon waking.
She had little to give him beyond broth and care. For all he knew, she beggared herself to feed him. No one came to the door, and it made him think it must be a lonely life she lived most the time.
She had a few animals, a cow at the other end of the bothy and some hens outside, for once he grew stronger she fed him eggs. The cow, so she said, was nearly dry, she having sold the last calf earlier on.
“No’ but that her milk would be good for heartening ye.”
His strength returned, under her care. Frighteningly, his memory did not, save in those elusive pieces.
Thoughts of a woman who loved him. Of long journeys upon the land. Most of all, though, memory lay in the music, in the songs Molly sang. Those stirred something in his heart and in his mind.
“I ken that song,” he said one day as he sat combing fleeces for her. “I just canna remember the name o’ it.”
“‘The Lover Lost,’” she told him, and just like that the whole of it came flooding upon him, words and all.
“Aye, so.” Arrested, he stared at nothing, his fingers poised.
Molly came and sat beside him. “D’ye still no’ remember yer place or trade, Ardahl?”
“Nay.”
“For here’s a curious thing. Ye carry a sword like any warrior or clansman returning from yon battle. All right and proper. Yet—I had a wee peek in yer pack. I hope ye do no’ mind.”
“I do no’.” God knew, what was hers had been his, and what was his must be hers.
“Let me show ye wha’ I found.”
She went and fetched his pack from beside the wall. Tattered and filthy it was, but she opened it carefully and extracted—
Aye.A harp. The one he carried. The pieces of it.
For an instant, his senses swam. He went so dizzy he had to clutch the old woman’s arm.
“Wha’ is it, lad?”
He took the broken back of the instrument into his hands. It had not fractured cleanly. The pieces had come apart jagged.
Like his heart.
A name appeared in his mind.Bradana. But nay, that was not it.Brada.
“My harp. This is mine.”
Her face brightened. “But the sword?”
