Turning back to the killer, he could see the making of a smirk in the man’s eyes. The man knew as he did.
Kill me or save the lass,he knew the man thought at that moment.
Torcall decided that he would remove the cloth mask off the man’s face and reveal his identity. If he knew who the man was, the rest of the day and the days later would have been spent hunting the man until he was found again. The hunter would become the hunted.
He reached for the man’s mask, and the girl coughed again. This time, the urgency in her cough was not mistaken. She had less time to live and probably even less than he would need to kill the man that stood defiant before him. For a moment, Torcall had been pleased to see fear in the man’s eyes, but he was faced with a choice that might decide the fate of the woman that lay in the middle of the road or that of the other women who were still going to roam the nights in the nights that would follow.
Torcall made a decision that he knew he would forever regret. In the process of it, he knew he had created another ghost to plague him in his dreams again. He lowered his sword from the man’s neck and hurried to the aid of the woman.
She was bloodied and had more stab wounds on her body than was even needed to kill her, yet she fought to live. But Torcall feared that it was in vain. She would not survive the morning, and worse, he had let the man who did those things to her live. Looking back where the killer had stood, Torcall saw nothing. The man was gone.
I had him by me sword,Torcall cursed under his breath before he felt the graze of the woman’s hand on his arm. She had tried to hold him but did not have the strength to even keep her hand on his.
“Ye will live,” Torcall lied to her. He had to because it was the greatest gift he could give to her at that time. He needed to lend her strength that she might fight alongside him to save her life.
He cut off a piece of his shirt and ripped it into many pieces. One after the other, he tried to bandage her wounds, hoping to minimize the blood loss from her. He whistled to his horse, but the steed was too far away to hear him.
I will carry ye to a physician. I will nae let ye die. If ye die, yer blood would be on me hands, for I have failed ye.He swore as he tried to move as fast as he could, but even he knew he had been too late. He blamed himself for going straight for her assailant when he could have checked to see if she still had life in her.
I could have saved yer life.Torcall blinked back tears in his eyes when he looked in her face and saw her eyes lay open, staring at nothingness. He pressed his hands together and put pressure on her lean chest, hoping her heart would not give up, but he failed. Torcall fell onto his backside, next to the dead woman, and he cried.
For years, he had promised himself that he would never do such a thing, for he considered it weak, but standing there defeated in more ways than one, he cried.
“Stay where ye are, or I shall slay ye,” Torcall had heard from a man just ahead of him. It took him a rather long while to realize where he was and how close it was to Ceana’s home. It was Ceana’s Faither that held a sword to him. Torcall slowly rose to his feet, picking up the knife that the killer had used to murder her.
“I didnae do this. It was another man, and he ran into the woods when I tried to stop him. I would have stopped him, but she coughed, and I left him to save her.” Torcall could not narrate his failure between tears. The more he spoke, the more the guilt bit at him, tearing at his flesh and his heart.
“Is that ye, Torcall?” The older man asked him, recognizing his voice despite his words being unintelligible.
“Aye,” he replied.
And then, they both had heard Ceana. Her father had tried to stop her from coming any closer, but she had come still. The look in her eyes had been that of horror and anguish that broke Torcall’s heart. He wished she had listened to her father and had not seen the body of the dead woman. She had seen so many deaths, and he knew this. Worse still, he looked at his hand, and the knife that had taken the life of the woman lying at his feet was in his hand. He wondered if he had confirmed her doubt that he might have been the killer.
“I didnae do this, Ceana. I swear it. I swear with me life and on the grave of me parents,” he said in desperation. Torcall did not move away when her father came forward and looked at the body. Ceana stood where she was still and did not come close to either of them.
Torcall wished he could have approached her without scaring her off. He wished he could have held her without rubbing off the blood of another woman over her.
“Ye bound her wounds?” Ceana’s Faither asked him. He walked closer and observed. Torcall’s shirt had been indeed cut into pieces, and he was bandaging her.
“Aye, I tried to save her,” Torcall replied quickly. The man who would decide Ceana’s opinion of Torcall stared at the body for a while longer before he rose back to his feet.
“He didnae kill her. True to his words, he tried to save her life,” the man told Ceana, and he saw her stiff shoulders drop in relief.
“Did ye see where the man who did this went?”
“Nay, I took me eyes off him, so I could save her but—”I failed“--he is long gone by now. The day is still dark, and we cannae gather men quick enough to chase after him,” Torcall replied with a heavy heart and a weak voice.
“We will find him, but we must ken the name of the lass and tell her family of her death. Today shall be a sad day,” her father declared. “Another one.”
Torcall stood there staring at her and could not bring himself to breathe relief until she nodded to him. She believed him, and in a day where he had failed in so many things, it was a little victory.
Ceana, for her part, said nothing. Instead, she watched Torcall take off the rest of his tattered shirt. He looked at the woman and sighed in despair. Beside him lay his sword, clean and void of blood.
Chapter Eighteen
Ceana knew the day could not have been referred to as pleasant no matter what happened. Another woman was dead. While the first two deaths had had a wrenching impact on the deceased's families and friends, she knew everyone would be shaken by the third death. There was significance towards a third event that everyone knew of.
The first death had been thought a malicious act by a person that Bridget had been terrible to or had just hated her for reasons known only to the killer. Then, there had been a second, and everyone had thought it a different killer possibly, another malicious person, or perhaps it had been a mistake. A third confirmed that it was a singular man going about killing young women.
