Chapter Two #3
“Aye,” he grumbled after a long moment and another quizzical perusal of her while he reached for his belt, quite sure he was only helping her to fleece him.
The buckle fought him, his fingers clumsy, but at last he worked it free and slid the sword and the dagger together off his hip.
He set them on the ground beside the travois, watching her closely as he did so, half expecting she would make an abrupt move toward the weapon and use it on him.
She didn’t move toward them, didn’t even look at them for more than a moment, her attention already back on him as if he and the weight of him were indeed her only concern.
The boots were next. Bending for them pulled at his ribs and sent a sharp reminder through his side that he was not meant to be folding himself in half just now.
He gritted his teeth, hooked one heel against the other, and managed to work the first one loose.
The second took longer, and when it finally came away he had to sit still for a moment, breathing through the ache, trying to catch his breath, before he could straighten again.
He glanced at her then, half expecting her to step in, to offer some assistance—honestly, she stood too close for one who was doing nothing.
She didn’t move but to lift her face and tilt it toward the south, as if listening to some sound detected, revealing the smooth column of her neck to him, her flesh pale and smooth, which was distracting enough that he didn’t bother to worry over what she might have heard.
Naught, it seemed, when she turned back to him, and resumed her waiting.
His gambeson was stiff with dried blood and sweat, heavy even before he tried to move it, and when he reached for the ties at the front, his ribs protested sharply enough that he had to stop and gather himself again.
He worked at the lacing in stages, loosening what he could, inch by inch, until at last he could shrug out of it without having to lift it over his head.
The effort left him unsteady, and he had to brace a hand on the travois frame at his side to keep himself upright.
He dropped the padded jerkin beside the rest of his gear and looked at her again, a flicker of irritation breaking through the fog of pain. “Guid?” he asked tersely, the one word all he could manage just now, having unconsciously switched to English himself.
Barely sparing him a glance, she stepped forward at last—not to touch him, but to tug the travois a little closer and nudge one of the straps out of the way so it would not catch.
“Good,” she said.
He drew a breath, set his teeth, and began the careful, humiliating work of getting himself onto the frame, inch by inch, while she stood close enough to watch and witness and yet far enough away that she never once laid a hand on him.
He was willing to be generous, however, since she hadn’t stabbed him with his own sword, or taken his few possessions and run off.
By the time he’d loaded himself onto the litter, he was nearly completely out of breath, and the pain was nigh unbearable so that he simply collapsed onto his back and closed his eyes, wondering if death, in fact, would be preferable.
His eyes shot open when finally she touched him, lifting his feet onto the center of the litter.
Almost immediately, she turned her back to him, taking several steps forward, moving the long rope attached to the litter up and around to the front of her.
He closed his eyes again and laid his head back, supposing he might be here for quite a while as he still couldn’t imagine how she intended to pull his weight, surely twice her own.
He felt the first tug but thought for sure it would fail.
He had expected the travois to shift and catch, or the straps to slip in her hands, or for her simply to discover—at once and decisively—that he was too large and she was too small.
Instead, there came a steady tug and then the faint scrape of wood against earth, and then the unmistakable sensation of being moved.
Not much, and not quickly, but indeed moving.
The frame creaked. The ground gave grudgingly.
She leaned into the straps with her whole body, not yanking or jerking, but setting herself at an angle and walking forward as if she meant to persuade the weight rather than actually pull it herself.
He felt the drag change as the front of the travois lifted a little, skimming over needles and damp leaves instead of biting straight into them, and understood dimly that the length of the straps had not been an accident.
She was using her weight, not her arms, and that, more than anything else, was what made it possible at all.
He closed his eyes after a dozen yards, when the ache in his ribs began to sharpen into something that demanded too much attention, and tried to lie still enough that he would not make it worse.
And yet, even the slow and careful progress jarred him anyway, in small, unavoidable ways, but it was better than the thought of being left where he had been, waiting to die, as he’d been.
When the travois stopped, he didn’t open his eyes at once. He sensed rather than felt her dropping the straps. A fleeting peek showed her further ahead now, clearing some brush from the path she intended to take.
They did not go far the next time either.
A fallen birch stopped them, its pale trunk half-rotted and low enough that he could have stepped over it on any other day.
She tried once to angle around it, then stopped, set the straps down, and went forward alone, testing the ground with her foot, pushing aside brush, breaking off a branch that would have caught the frame and tossing it out of the way.
When she came back, she pulled him in a shallow curve that brought them through with only a brief jolt that made him grit his teeth and fix his eyes on the forest canopy overhead until the worst of it passed.
It went on like that for a long while. Pull. Stop. Adjust. Pull again.
Sometimes she left him where he was and walked ahead to clear a path, and other times she only paused to catch her breath or reach for deeper stores of strength, mayhap. Once she paused to give a curt whistle, which brought her hound back into view.
Morggán had no idea how much time had passed, but realized that the light had changed, the shadows were longer now.
The pain in his side never left him, but it blurred at the edges, as pain sometimes did when there was nothing to be done about it, and he found himself watching her instead when he could—how she set her feet, how she leaned into the pull, how she paused to breathe and then went on without any sign of giving up.
It was not strength alone, he realized. It was perhaps only fascinating willpower.
So, a stubborn, determined lass, he deduced, though that might be all he knew about her.
That, and that her eyes were blue and her speech—both English and Gaelic—was odd, and that she wasn’t like any female of his acquaintance, certainly not his chatty sisters, in that she seemed to suffer no desire to speak at all.
By the time the trees began to thin in a way that felt meaningful, he no longer doubted that she would get him wherever it was she meant to take him.
Finally, the roof of a small, low house came into view between the thinning trees.
The young woman shifted the straps once more and kept walking, closing in on the small, derelict dwelling.
He closed his eyes again, acknowledging a weary, reluctant respect for the quiet, fascinating woman who’d just impossibly moved him through the forest, just as she’d said she would.
He had used the last of his strength not to move, but to stay—bracing, holding, keeping himself from slipping off the frame. With the house in front of him, there was no reason to keep fighting it. He let go, and the dark took him.