Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
“ A re ye all right?” Nathan asked her from the bed, his voice so much softer now that it was just the two of them.
She couldn’t get her temper to settle. The pure nerve of those bastards was more than she could fathom. Let them try to come to her for pain relief, or tonics to help their upset stomachs. She wasn’t going to give any of them anything if that was how they were going to keep treating her! She didn’t care for it at all. She had known all those men for several years, and they had treated her like an object to be moved out of the way.
“Aye, I’m fine.” Freya answered tightly, stirring the stew and then moving to get started on making tea for the both of them, although more for herself if she was being totally honest, as she needed something calming. She hadn’t thought that Tristan was willing to go to those lengths, but clearly she had been very wrong. The prospect of it all frightened her a little bit.
“Are they always like that?” Nathan asked, attempting to move once more and then giving up, sagging back onto the bed.
For a long moment, Freya considered what she wanted to say. “Nay. They arenae.”
They were acting like she had never met them before in her life and she couldn’t stand it. It hurt her more deeply than she had originally realized. She wondered if their wives knew how they had just treated her. She couldn’t believe that the elders she had thought to be compassionate, giving people were so ready to presume the worst about a man who was in dire need of their assistance.
“Dae ye think I’m a danger?” He asked softly, and she couldn’t help but laugh. She poured them both tea and moved back to her stool. To prove how stupid of a comment it was, she pressed against his chest, not even in an injured area, but there was unlikely to be a single part of him that wasn’t tender still. He hissed and tried to shrink away from her touch, and the only answer she needed to give him was the raising of her eyebrow. “Fair point, healer.”
She nodded, and started to sip her tea, thankful that her hands weren’t shaking.
It was her anger, her indignation of the whole thing more than anything else.
“I dinnae ken who I am,” he repeated, as if he wanted to ensure she understood he was telling the truth.
She nodded. “I ken that.”
“Dae… dae ye ken anything about me?”
She doubted a man of his large stature had ever had the need to sound so small in his life, so lost. She leaned forward to help him drink his tea, and took another moment to help prop him up on the bed with more folded blankets and pillows so that she could at least look him in the eye as they spoke.
While he was obviously in pain, she was having trouble tearing her eyes from him, and how much broader he appeared upright than he had before. More than twice her size. No wonder he was so damned heavy.
“Well, when they fished ye out of the ocean, all ye had on were some ripped trousers and a shirt.” She answered, her mind instantly flashing back to that moment. She hadn’t ever seen anybody look more like a corpse than that. “I dinnae ken how ye even survived. Ye must have a very stubborn soul in there.”
“I wish I knew.” He tried to laugh but coughed instead.
Freya couldn’t help but return the expression. She placed his tea in his hand, just in case he wanted to try lifting it, and she put her own down on the table before moving to the drawer where she had hidden his personal effects that he had had on him. Curling the ring into her palm, she grabbed the ruined bundle of clothing she hadn’t gotten around to disposing of and brought them back for his inspection.
He was moving the teacup now that he was more upright. That was a good sign, he was getting some of his strength back She smiled kindly and placed the cloth on his lap before carefully putting the ring and bundle on top of it.
He picked up each item in turn, and if he recognized any of it, he certainly made no note of it on his face. It all looked the same to her. He unfolded the shirt, pausing at an embroidered letter on the right-hand seam. His gaze narrowed. “A ‘J’? What dae ye think that might be fer?”
So, he could read, that said a good deal about his upbringing if nothing else. “I suppose that whoever must have made those garments fer ye must have put it there. Perhaps ye’re the forgetful sort.”
She barely could contain her laughter. Nathan cut a sharp glance up at her. “Very funny.”
Freya lifted one shoulder into a shrug. It hadn’t even been an intentional pun but she wasn’t going to deny that she had enjoyed it all the same.
“If only there werenae so many names that start with the letter ‘J’.” She grinned, waiting for him to look at the rest of it. “It’s either yer initial or that of yer clan? I dinnae ken all the various clans and who gets along with whom. Out here, the village is so small and isolated that we dinnae have tae worry about such things very often.”
The man nodded in understanding before picking up the ring. He tested it against his hand to ensure that it actually belonged to him, but he made no other comment. He didn’t even seem to know what finger it was that she had found it on at first. He dropped it carelessly back down to the pile of cloth. It was gold. Didn’t that mean anything to him? He was growing more interesting with every passing moment.
“I wish I could remember what I was doing, where I was going…”
If ye left somebody behind.
“It’s the strangest thing, ye ken? Some things are right here,” he motioned vaguely to his head. “And then everything else is just out of reach.”
“Perhaps I havenae been clear with ye about the extent of yer injuries.” It was the only explanation that she had. “By all rights, ye shouldnae be alive.”
“Then I clearly owe ye a life debt fer yer incredible healing services, Freya.”
Her heart skipped when he said her name.
“Never ye mind a thing about that. It is just me calling, nay gratitude necessary,” she said far too quickly as she turned away from him, back to attending to her nearly forgotten stew because she didn’t wish to have him see her blush intensely.
“Freya?” Nathan called to her, his voice heavy and his eyes starting to droop. “Ye have me gratitude all the same. I dinnae… I dinnae feel like a man who was ready tae die.”
She watched as he fell asleep practically upright. She took the empty cup from his hands and didn’t even try to lay him back down again. She would just wake him when the stew was finished.
Until then, she would curse herself for how much she enjoyed having him awake.