Chapter Two
Morggán knew what wounds like the one in his thigh did to men who tried to walk on it, but after what he assumed was a full day passing, he tried anyway.
He made it a few paces, leaning on a tree, then another, before the world went thin and far away and he came back to himself on the ground with his heart racing and his mouth full of dirt.
He made two more attempts that saw him gain hardly any ground but might have caused more damage to his side and thigh, and then finally stayed where he dropped.
His men would find him. They always did. Someone would come back along the line of flight, counting bodies, calling names, looking for those unaccounted for. He was their laird; they would not stop looking for him.
He slept and woke and slept again. The light shifted through the branches overhead.
Thirst became a steady ache, and the pain in his side stayed steady and dull.
When he looked at the wound again, pushing stiff, darkened cloth aside, he saw enough to know that it was not a thing to be taken lightly.
The cut was high in his thigh, and deep, and it bled still though slower now.
He’d bound it as best he could, and that was all he could do at the moment, telling himself that his men would come.
He knew he’d be right pissed if he died in this manner, for Caerwyll’s ineptitude.
Once, he imagined he heard horses in the distance and tried to call out, but his shout was weak and obviously unheard, he reasoned, as the sound faded.
When he woke again, the light had shifted, thinning into long, pale bars between the tree trunks.
He lay where he was for a time, listening to his own breathing and taking stock of his status—his weakness, as it were—and it was in that quiet that he noticed the change in the shape of the space ahead of him.
Just inside the line of trees, where the ground dipped and rose again, a figure stood where there had been nothing before, far enough back that the shadows reached worn brown boots, close enough that he could make out the line of shoulders and the fall of hair.
She was, unmistakably, female, wearing a tunic and breeches, he realized in the next instant.
She didn’t move, didn’t come forward or slink away.
The leaves stirred above her, a branch shifted somewhere higher up, but she remained perfectly still.
Unmoving himself, he stared at her, wondering if he only dreamed her and her wild mane, taking in a pair of wide eyes and her stance, which suggested she was ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.
He didn’t reach for his sword, but stayed where he was, measuring the distance between them, and when he spoke, the words came out rough and dry in the quiet, louder than he intended even as they were scraped thin by thirst.
“Dinna run.”
But she did just that.
Her eyes widened even more, and she gasped without sound before she turned and disappeared into the deep dark of the forest.
***
It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at.
He was sitting where he had either fallen or lowered himself, with his back against the trunk of a pine and one knee drawn up, the other leg stretched out at an angle that did not look comfortable.
His head was tipped forward slightly, his hair falling into his face in a dark, untidy sweep that stirred when the breeze moved through the trees.
His clothes were unlike anything she had seen close at hand before, not the rough patched layers she wore and not the plain things the man had once owned, but heavier and darker, with dark leather crossing his chest and rows of small metal rings that caught the light beneath the folds of cloth.
There was a sword at his side, though his hand was not on it, and a thick strap crossed his chest, the buckle dulled and scuffed.
One of his hands rested against his thigh, the fingers curled as if they had closed in some distress.
The other lay loose against the ground, palm up, empty.
His boots were dark with mud, and what appeared to be blood covered the top half of one leg, not bright but dried and darkened, stiffening the cloth around it.
Astonished, she simply stared, marveling at the first person she had seen in ten years, aside from the man.
After a moment, she stared at the breadth of his shoulders, ridiculously broad even as he sat slumped, and at the way his chest rose and fell, shallow but steady, at the lines of his face that were so sharp and deliberate.
It occurred to her that she’d never seen a face—in those first eleven years of her life, when she did regularly see other people—that was so...
dramatic. He looked wrong in the forest, to her mind, but she couldn’t say why until she decided that he seemed wrong altogether, unlike any face or person she could imagine.
Charlie shifted behind her, and she lifted a hand without looking, letting her fingers brush the dog’s neck, and then returned her attention to the man. She watched the slow, uneven rhythm of his breathing and held her breath when he moved his head, lifting it, leaning it back against the tree.
And then his eyes opened.
They were a pale, clear color she could see even at that distance, and they found her at once, and she blushed furiously, wondering if he’d seen her approach.
But how unnerving, that he seemed not to search, but did find her immediately.
For a moment, he was as motionless as she, his gaze holding on her with a steadiness that made her fingers curl against Charlie’s fur and her weight shift back onto her heels.
His mouth moved, and when he spoke, the sound carried across the small space between them, rough and low, and she stood there further unnerved, having not heard another human voice in years, not since the man had died and the house had gone silent.
“Dinna run,” he said.
Charlie moved first, padding a cautious step nearer and then another, stopping again when she didn’t follow.
She stayed where she was and watched the man’s face, the line of his jaw, the dark stubble there, the way his hair lay across his brow.
He looked nothing like the man she had known, and yet the simple fact of another person in the forest made her chest feel tight and strange.
Confused and slightly alarmed—he was obviously injured but still managed to present a threat—she turned and fled, doing exactly what he’d asked her not to do. It was instinct, pure and simple, the same that would have sent her running from a wolf or a bad storm.
She took the slope too fast, her boot sliding once on dry leaves before she caught herself, then she was moving through the trees, pushing past branches that snapped back against her face and arms, the ground dropping away and rising again under her feet.
She kept to no path at first, only the direction she had come from, and then, guided by fear, she moved with purposeful abandon, zig-zagging a bit, hoping to conceal her route.
Charlie followed, running with greater ease and stamina than she had, maybe thinking it was a game, hopping at times directly at her side.
Her breathing grew loud in her ears. The forest blurred into trunks and shadow and light.
She didn’t slow until the house came into sight, and even then she crossed the small open space at a run and had to brace a hand against the doorframe before she could lift the bar and get inside, Charlie on her heels.
The door went shut behind her and she stood there, still, the air cool against her face, her chest rising and falling too quickly.
She pushed the bar back into place, then turned and crossed the room, then turned, walking the short length of the house back and forth, again and again.
She brought her hand up to her mouth, caught one nail between her teeth and worried at it, stopped, and dropped her hand again.
She went to the table, then away from it, then stood in the middle of the floor and stared blindly into the pot at the barely moving liquid inside the kettle.
There was a man in the forest!
She paced again, slow and then faster, puffing her cheeks and blowing out long breaths until her breathing began to settle and the pounding in her ears faded.
Then she paused again, staring blindly now, and told herself he might die. She then told herself that it wasn’t her concern, that the forest had a way of keeping what it wanted, as the man had said often enough over the years.
That was it: he would die, the forest would swallow him, just as it would the horse she’d found yesterday. That’s just how it was, what was meant to be.
She went to the lone window and shoved the oil cloth aside, peering out, not surprised that he was nowhere in sight, that he hadn’t followed her.
Yes, he would die—he was pale... there was a lot of blood all over him... possibly he couldn’t even stand.
She would just wait and not return until she was sure it was done. It wasn’t her business.
She bit her lip and dropped the cloth, shrouding the room in shades of gray once more.
What would the man have done?
The question came without invitation and didn’t leave even as she tried to ignore it.
The man had found her in the forest once, smaller than she was now and colder and maybe in worse shape than the man she had just run from, and he had not left her there to see whether the trees would take her.
He’d used the travois, had dragged her back to his house, had taken on the duty of her.
She scrunched up her face, resisting the way her brain was leaning.
The man in the forest was not a child. He was not helpless. He carried a sword, and likely didn’t need her help.
She sighed, frustrated.
Except that he had, maybe, asked for help, or had been about to.
She went to the door and rested her hand against the wood without lifting the bar. She stood there for a while, listening to the house and to the quiet beyond it, and to the memory of another man, the one who had saved her.