Chapter Four #2
Mentally shaking that image away, he tried again to reposition himself, readying to stand. Even a simple shift had him wincing and pausing, long enough so that she commented on it, her words without any emotion that he could discern.
“You... will die?”
A fleeting bark of laughter erupted from him—and pained him greatly—at both her fatalistic assumption and his inability to decipher if she wanted his answer to be aye or nae.
“Nae, this willna kill me,” he said.
Stalling while he waited for the pain in his ribs to ease, he pushed the fur slowly downward, until he realized that he wore yet his hose and braies, and then shoved the fur aside completely, knowing he wasn’t stark naked.
Morggán looked down and took in the bandage bound around the top of his thigh—somehow inside the hose that had been torn wide open by her hand, he presumed—and all that went with it.
He touched the edge of the cloth lightly, more in recognition than to test. “That’ll take me out ere the broken ribs do,” he said, and then lifted his eyes to her. “Ye did this?”
She nodded at once, a little stiffly, as if bracing herself for a rebuke. “It was dirty,” she said. “I cut the cloth away so I could see it. I washed and stitched it and... and put the poultice on it.” She hesitated, then added, almost defensively, “It needed to be done.”
“I wasnae chiding ye,” he said, when he saw the way she’d braced herself. “Two days,” he said after a moment, piecing things together slowly through the lingering haze in his head. “Was there fever?”
She nodded. “Worst of it was two nights ago and yesterday morning.”
As she spoke, she took an unconscious half-step toward him, her hand lifting slightly from her side as though she meant to touch him. The movement stopped almost as soon as it began. Her fingers curled inward abruptly, and she lowered the hand again, keeping her distance.
Morggán, assuming she meant to check his fever as she might have many times while he’d been out but apparently would not now that he was awake, lifted his own hand to his forehead.
His skin felt damp and slightly warm beneath his palm, but nothing like what must have been a high and dangerous fever if he’d been so debilitated by it.
“Naught but a low fever now,” he informed her.
“That’s good.”
His gaze lingered on her a moment longer, less in appraisal than in quiet consideration.
There was something in the way she answered him—in the careful choosing of words, in the way she spoke as if each sentence were a thing she set down and stepped back from—that made him think she had not had much cause to speak to anyone for a long while.
“I’ll nae trouble ye long,” he predicted. “My men—the mac Ruaidhrí army—will come for me.” He paused for breath and then added. “Are searching even now for me, I imagine.”
“Army.”
Sighing, still struggling for just one good long breath, Morggán studied her at length.
She had a way of speaking that left him uncertain whether she was asking or only repeating, as if she were testing the weight of a word before deciding what it meant.
He could not tell if she questioned him, or if she simply echoed what she heard because words themselves were something she didn’t hear too often.
Again, he was compelled to wonder how long she’d lived here, presumably by herself.
“Aye, the mac Ruaidhrí army.”
She made no reply, either in words or by expression, but picked up the bucket she’d set down and poured some of the water into a kettle, which joined another squat kettle already in the fire.
The first kettle hung suspended, but she shoved the second kettle of water directly onto the coals, wriggling it until it sat steady.
She added a few split pieces of wood from the small pile by the hearth and coaxed the fire up until the flames caught and rose higher.
“Ye’ve been here alone, then,” he said, another guess.
“I am not alone,” she said quietly, rising to her feet, brushing off her hands against each other. She took down two wooden bowls from one of the shelves and dipped one and then the other into the suspended pot. She offered one to Morggán.
He held up his hand. “Aye, and I will, but I need to step outside first.”
She only looked at him, not moving, the bowl still in her hand.
He added, “I have to relieve myself.” And when she seemed still confused by his need, he said more plainly, a bit curtly. “I’ve got to piss.”
A flicker of surprise crossed her face, followed by a quick, awkward retreat.
She turned her back on him at once, set the bowl down, and made herself busy with the fire again.
Then, as if the sense of greater, belated mortification assailed her, she stood abruptly and made for the door, leaving it open behind her.
Just as well, Morggán thought, certainly not keen to have a witness when he tried to stand, not in this weakened state and with his braies and hose hanging off him.
He put one hand on the packed earth and pushed. The wound in his thigh flared at once, hot and sharp, and he stopped, breathing through it until the edge dulled. When he shifted his weight, his ribs answered as well, a tight, grinding ache that made him keep still and set his teeth.
He tried again, slower, keeping the injured leg as straight as he could and lifting himself in stages.
The room swayed, then steadied. He stood and waited for his breath to come back, carefully gathering the cut parts of his braies and hose together before drawing a slow breath in preparation of bending down to collect at least the one fur to cover himself.
He managed it, but was sharply reminded again how weak and vulnerable he was at the moment.
He made his way to the door one step at a time and had to lean against the jamb as he came upon it.
The doorway was low and small and when he moved again, he had to duck and turn a bit to get through it.
By the time he stepped outside into a gray morning that smelled of rain and damp earth, his chest was burning with the struggle.
He started toward the trees, thankful that the clearing around the hut wasn’t so large and caught sight of her at the side of the house.
She stood in profile, pretending to be occupied with the woodpile, setting one stick straight, then another, though the stack appeared neat enough already.
The air was damp and her hair, loose at her shoulders, looked darker for it, the ends clinging slightly to his plaid that she wore.
The gray light caught the pale line of her cheek and the pink curve of her mouth.
What an odd, beguiling creature, he thought.
***
She should have left him in the forest.
She kept her hands moving at the woodpile and watched him only at the edge of her vision as he made slow progress toward the trees.
She didn’t want him here. It had taken her a long time to adjust to the quiet after the man died—which was how she liked it now—and to make the days fall into a proper, working order, and now there was someone else in it, someone she had to notice, someone she had to account for, someone whose breathing and movements she could not help but keep track of, someone whose presence was simply too impossible to ignore.
She stopped rearranging the cut kindling and laid her palms on the top of the pile for a moment, trying not to think about the way the house felt with him in it.
He was there now, whether she liked it or not, and the thought sat poorly with her.
Maybe he wouldn’t stay long. The fact that he could walk without aid felt like a small mercy, and she thought that maybe he would be gone today.
An army, he’d said, might come to collect him.
An army.
Sure, as she thought of everything together—horse, sword, man, wound—an army didn’t seem so far-fetched after all.
And yet, it did. For ten years she’d fought to make sense of what and how and where.
The few questions she’d asked the man years ago hadn’t produced answers that satisfied, and sometimes no answers had come at all.
But she’d buried that, her other life, how she’d come here—wherever this was; Scotland, was all the man had said—and had stopped asking questions.
And yet, it was revived now, with this new event, the coming of the big man and a horse and army and an injury, all of which didn’t belong to any reality she’d ever known, even as her own reality of the last decade was still a mystery to her.
For so long, when she’d tried to make sense of it, she’d only ever been satisfied with her own assumption about the man, that he’d simply been a hermit, a reclusive man living alone in the endless woods.
People chose odd lives, they hid, they went off grid, that was how she’d justified the man’s existence to herself.
But now this man—this man didn’t look like someone who had stepped out of that other world and life she remembered any more than the first man did.
She had told herself, for years, that the man was an exception, that his clothes, his tools, his way of speaking were just his—a choice, a kind of retreat from everything else.
Now there were two of them. And a horse. And weapons and an army.
A cold, old thought stirred, one she had not let herself consider in a long time.
She remembered movies she’d watched before coming here, and in particular a series that she and her mother had followed, where the world had ended, and what came after looked nothing like what had been before.
People had lived in the remnants of something broken and decimated, and had acclimated to that as the new normal.