Chapter Twelve
Bram woke with the dawn. Yesterday’s rain still lingered in his breeches and braies, though the worst of the damp had yielded to the little fire he’d nursed through the night. Only a bed of glowing embers remained now, casting a faint ruddy light over the interior of the abandoned collier’s hut.
Anastasia lay asleep beside the dying warmth, her skirts gathered untidily around her, and the pale, curious coat she’d drawn tightly about herself was now mostly dry.
She breathed so quietly that for a moment he questioned whether she breathed at all, until the faintest plume of mist escaped her lips and drifted into the chill morning air.
Sometime during the night she’d rolled onto her side, chin tucked toward her collarbone, both hands folded beneath her cheek in place of a pillow.
Her skirt was spread about her in a rumpled circle of unexpected color against the earthen floor.
One bare foot had slipped free from the folds of cloth, her toes curled slightly against the cold.
There was something about her at rest that held his attention.
The women he’d known all his life—his mother, his sisters, the women of the glen—possessed a beauty worn into them by hard winters and harder work, by the particular endurance of lives that asked much and offered little ease.
Anastasia was not like them. There was a softness about her, in the curve of her jaw and the silkiness of her hair, that he had no ready name for, only a sudden awareness that he’d been staring too long, and that he wasn’t yet ready to stop.
He watched, counting the breaths. Three.
Four. Five. It made no sense, the urge to count them, but it was something he’d practiced regularly in the past three months.
The old ghosts—of the cell, the prison, the faces of men whose names he’d committed to memory—were quieter when there was someone else’s breathing to measure the world by.
In rest, her mouth had the faintest dent of a frown, not a petulant one but the sort mayhap left behind by long habit.
Even in sleep, she looked wary. But there was something familiar in the set of her brow, the stubbornness of her jaw, as if she were kin to the women of his own line—centuries removed, he might suppose, if he were willing at all to entertain even for a moment her claims of having come from the future.
He scoffed silently at himself.
By now, the fire had gone to a crust of red and gray.
He wrenched his gaze from her eventually and rose, every stiff joint voicing its protest, and stepped into the open beside the abandoned collier’s hut.
The air was hushed, heavy with the memory of rain; stray droplets beaded on moss-covered stones.
His bare feet made no sound in the soft, damp earth.
Hunger prodded at his stomach, a dull, manageable pain he planned to satisfy in some manner soon.
Out of habit more than true concern, he strolled around the hut, peering into the undergrowth for any sign of life other than their own, but there were no fresh tracks, no broken twigs or displaced dew.
Not far beyond the clearing, he discovered a patch of wild bilberries still clinging stubbornly to their branches.
They were small and tart, but plentiful enough that he quickly filled one cupped hand, paying little heed to the purple juice staining fingers already darkened by dirt and soot.
Nearby, rainwater had collected in a shallow hollow worn smooth into a slab of granite.
He knelt, splashed the icy water over his face, then rinsed out his mouth before drinking deeply.
The cold chased away the last remnants of sleep.
As he straightened, the chain from his iron cuff swung with its familiar weight.
The blasted thing. He found a granite slab and slammed his wrist down upon it, again and again.
The stone cracked on the third strike, but the iron refused to yield.
Cursing under his breath, he knew he would have to endure it longer still.
He gathered another handful of bilberries for Anastasia before making a wider circuit of the clearing, though he found little else worth eating. A few mushrooms grew beneath a fallen log, but he neither knew nor trusted them well enough to chance it.
Rolling his shoulders as he walked, he felt a familiar ache flaring across his back where old wounds lived.
His wrists were a constant, dull pain, the muscle beneath the scarred flesh protesting every movement.
Otherwise, he found no new betrayals in his body.
It would mend. It needed only to carry him home, and afterward to wherever Raghnall Hay had hidden himself.
He made his way back toward the hut, eyes still sweeping the silent woods. The mist clung to low hollows, and above, the sky was a uniform gray.
When the hut came into view, he saw that Anna was awake.
She stood several paces from the threshold, balancing on her left foot while the injured one hovered above the wet grass.
Her pale hair, still damp, clung in unruly strands to her cheeks.
One arm was wrapped tightly across her middle, her face creased with a familiar wariness as she slowly scanned the mist-shrouded clearing.
Even from where he stood, Bram could see the unease written plainly upon her face.
A moment later she whispered something beneath her breath, too softly for him to hear.
He approached without haste, taking care not to startle her, and yet she startled all the same.
Her whole body jerked, both arms flying instinctively away from her sides as her eyes snapped toward him, wide with alarm. The panic ebbed as quickly as it had come, and relief visibly washed over her, and she lowered her sore foot cautiously back to the ground.
Bram closed the remaining distance between them, lifting his hand to show her the bilberries gathered in his palm.
She stared at them for a moment before giving a small, distracted nod.
He noticed that her eyes glistened.
“What is it?”
She shook her head once, pressing her lips tightly together.
His brow wrinkled in response, and while he lifted her hand and dumped the berries into her palm, he prodded, “Tell me.”
“I thought you left... after all,” she admitted, still not meeting his gaze.
She busied herself with the wee feast, turning away from the weight of his regard.
Her confession landed with a heavy thud, and the nascent sympathy he’d felt for her sharpened into something raw and urgent.
The sensation was foreign—a stinging ache of pity, of protectiveness—that derailed him as surely as a washed-out bridge halted an army.
For a long moment, he simply let it wash over him, watching the fine tremor of her chin and fighting the startling urge to put his body between her and whatever terror she pictured in his absence.
He’d spent his life in the company of men who wore grief and pain like a second skin, who gutted their wounds and showed nothing, least of all this kind of naked fear.
Anastasia was not like those men, of course, nor was she like the women he’d known—the tough, earthbound, uncomplaining folk of the highlands, his own mother included, who had mourned their dead and then plowed under the sorrow with a kind of willful brutality.
This woman was possibly from a time beyond his comprehension, yet her fear—raw, undressed, trembling—was the most ancient thing in the world.
He felt a tightening in his chest, a desire to reach out, to offer something more than silence, and it embarrassed him to realize he did not know how.
He’d not ever been taught to comfort someone.
But he remembered, unexpectedly, his father, the old Mormaer, placing a hand on the brow of a dying horse, speaking in a voice so gentle he’d seemed a different man entirely.
Bram found that voice now, or something like it, and said gently, “I dinna leave, lass. I said I would nae.”
She nodded. A moment passed, and then she made a small sound—something between a laugh and a scoff—and pressed the back of her wrist briefly to her mouth, looking away.
“Sorry—I just... I was scared.” She swallowed and added, “Which of course is ridiculous since just yesterday I thought I should return to York by myself.”
“Fear has a way of improving a body’s judgment,” he said quietly.
She sent him a fleeting glance, showing a small but tight smile, as if to acknowledge his attempt to console her.
While Anastasia disappeared into the trees briefly, Bram searched around the immediate yard for a denser rock, upon which he might break the hinge of the shackle. He walked around the far side and searched under hazel brush crowding the stone and timber of the hut, but without luck.
When he came around the front again, he saw that Anastasia had positioned herself on a fallen log just outside the hut.
Her heel was tucked up onto her knee while she attempted to address the damage from the thorn.
She prodded gently, winced, then angled her face closer for a better look.
The thorn was still somewhere inside, he presumed, and likely a shifting needle of pain that was undoubtedly more than a trivial nuisance.
He asked, in the same careful tone he used moments ago, “Will I have a look, lass?”
She gave an almost imperceptible nod. “I didn’t want to bother you with it. But I can’t see so easily.”
Bram lowered himself to one knee before her. The damp earth soaked through his trousers, cold seeping into his skin, but he ignored it. Anastasia’s foot hovered between them, as filthy as was his own.
She stiffened almost imperceptibly when he took her foot in his hand, but she didn’t pull away.