Chapter Three
By the time the light had faded to the thin gray edge of evening, the house no longer belonged only to her and Charlie.
In truth, she hadn’t intended to bring him inside her house, had left him sleeping on the travois just outside the door, waiting for him to wake. But he didn’t, not before it began to rain.
At first it had only whispered through the trees, a soft drizzle that barely reached the clearing beyond the forest’s edge.
She’d stood in the doorway watching it, one hand braced against the frame, telling herself it would pass quickly.
The man lay where she had left him, broad and motionless atop the travois, his dark hair dampening slowly beneath the rain.
Charlie stood at her side in the doorway with his ears pricked forward, watching him too.
Then the drizzle thickened into steady rain. Water darkened the fabric of the man’s strange outfit. The ground below the travois began to soften visibly, the flattened grass turning slick and muddy beneath the runners.
Still, she’d waited, hoping now the rain itself would wake him.
But when the cold water began dripping from the edge of the roof and she began to picture herself waking in the morning to find him half sunk into the mud outside her house like some carcass abandoned in the clearing, the thought sat poorly in her chest. She’d sighed with frustration then and had gone back out into the rain herself.
Getting him inside had not been easy. The door was too narrow to admit a grown man who outweighed her by a great deal, and the travois had been no use once she reached the threshold so that she was forced to slowly tip him off the thing.
She’d left it outside against the wall and went back for him while the cold drops of rain began striking hard through the trees overhead.
The ground quickly became soft beneath her feet and his bootless feet carved furrows in the muddy grass as she hauled him by stages toward the house, stopping again and again to catch her breath and adjust her grip on his shoulders or arms. He was heavy in a way the man had never been at the end, when she’d had to do so much for him.
This man was solid and unyielding, and twice she had slipped and gone down on her butt, losing her grip on him.
The doorframe proved almost impossible. She had to turn him sideways to force him through, one broad shoulder scraping hard against the wood before he finally slid over the threshold and onto the floor inside with a weighty thud that shook the nearest shelf.
For several moments she simply stood there bent over with her hands braced on her knees, breathing hard and listening to the rain striking the roof.
Charlie lingered nearby, restless now, circling once before lying near the fire with his head lifted watchfully toward the stranger.
She straightened slowly and looked at the man where he lay near the firelight, his face pale beneath the dark stubble along his jaw, his clothes soaked through in places from the rain and stiff with drying blood in others.
He remained inert and unconscious.
After a moment, she knelt and stirred the fire and hung the kettle over it almost automatically, more to give herself something familiar to do than from any clear plan.
Afterward she sat on the stool near the table and watched him from across the room while rain smacked steadily against the roof overhead.
He was breathing now, still, but she wondered for how long.
If he died, she would have to drag his body back out through the door, she thought with some annoyance.
But then curiosity—about the man, about his strange circumstance and manner—made her kind of want him to live.
She glanced again at the blood covering his upper thigh, knowing that wasn’t a good thing.
Perhaps, she thought, he would wake after a time and see to himself.
The day had not gone as it should have.
There was wood still to be brought in, and she had not done it.
There was no meal made, and it was too late now to be digging out the garden behind the house as she’d planned to do today.
She studied the sleeping man, listening to his breathing, watching the color of his skin in the firelight.
She told herself that the house would not come apart because she had not kept to her schedule of chores, or because another person now lay within it.
When at last she ate, it was standing, as she always did, her back to the wall, her eyes on him now where previously, she would let her gaze be entranced by the fire.
She’d meant to ration and savor her heaven-sent gift of yesterday, the bread and cheese, but felt she’d earned it today for certain.
Still, she ate only half of what remained.
She washed up afterward, as quiet as ever, and set things in their places with care that was more routine than deliberate.
Before she lay down, she went through the small, familiar rituals she had never quite lost from that other life.
She rinsed her face clean and scrubbed her teeth with the frayed end of a hazel stick she kept for that purpose.
The end was too worn now, and she trimmed it with her knife and then chewed distractedly on it until it frayed fresh into soft fibers, all the while staring at the sleeping man while she brushed her teeth.
Then she stood for a moment with her hands sunk into the wooden bowl, the cool water a balm to her sore flesh, and she listened to the fire and to the quieter, heavier sound of another person breathing in her house.
She lay down with her boots near to hand and the knife under her old coat-pillow, where she could reach it if she needed to, and she kept one eye on him while the fire burned lower.
In its light, his face looked different than it had in the gray of the forest—softer and yet more sharply made, the lines of his cheekbones and jaw standing out as if they had been cut from stone rather than grown.
His hair, dark and unruly even in sleep, fell across his brow, and the shadows caught in it and in the hollows beneath his eyes, making him look both harder and more worn than she had first thought.
He didn’t look like the man had looked at the end, all angles and thinning flesh.
This man looked built for weight and force, and as someone who might actually have used the sword he’d had with him, that she’d left in the forest with his other things and that she would fetch tomorrow at some point.
She watched the steady rise and fall of his chest until the fire sank and the room softened into shadow, and only then did she let her eyes close.
The day hadn’t been what it was meant to be, and right now it didn’t seem possible that tomorrow would return to normal.
She accepted that in the same way she accepted weather, or an injury, or the sudden presence of things she hadn’t planned for but couldn’t prevent.
When she slept, it was lightly, and she woke more than once to listen and make sure he was still breathing.
Morning came gray and damp, the rain not fully gone but reduced now to an occasional dripping from the trees and the roof edge outside. She woke slowly, confused at first by the shape stretched near the fire before memory returned in a flash.
The man had not moved much during the night. Once or twice she had woken to hear him making some low, rough sound deep in his throat, but he had never truly roused. Now, in the pale morning light, his breathing sounded wrong to her ears—too fast, too uneven.
She pushed herself upright beneath the furs and sat still for a moment, watching him.
The fire had burned low overnight. Its weak glow painted one side of his face in dull gold while the other remained lost in shadow.
Damp strands of dark hair clung to his brow and temples.
Even from across the room she could see a flush high along his cheekbones whereas yesterday he’d been as white as a ghost.
Frowning, she crossed quietly to him and crouched beside him, tentatively reaching out her hand, laying the back of her fingers against his throat beneath the rough line of his jaw. His skin was burning hot.
She snatched her hand back at once, surprising herself by how startled she was for having touched him, for the feel of flesh beneath her hand that was not her own.
After a moment, clamping her teeth, she tried again, pressing her palm lightly to his forehead the way the man once had when she’d been sick during a harsh winter long ago, the way her mother had done when she was a child.
The stranger’s skin was hot and damp beneath her hand.
She sat back on her heels uneasily.
The man had taught her enough over the years to recognize fever for what it was. Infection or bad blood, the man had explained. Sometimes a body fought through it. Sometimes it didn’t.
Her gaze dropped toward the dark stain high on his thigh. Bad blood, she guessed.
For several long moments she simply watched him while rainwater dripped steadily somewhere outside.
Frankly, she didn’t want to deal with the wound.
She didn’t want to cut away his clothes or touch him more than necessary or discover what lay beneath all the blood.
But then her conscience wouldn’t allow her to ignore the heat radiating from him now.
With visible reluctance, she rose and crossed to the shelves near the wall.
The small crock of salve sat toward the back where she kept it.
The man had taught her to make it years ago from rendered fat thickened with beeswax and steeped with crushed comfrey and yarrow.
He had used it rarely and carefully, mostly on deep cuts or burns bad enough that honey alone would not do.
She remembered the man explaining that honey kept rot out while the herbs encouraged flesh to knit itself closed again.