Chapter Five
For the hundredth time, Morggán glanced around the dwelling, making note of a man’s things, tools she surely hadn’t fashioned herself, extra clothes that did not include so much as a single léine or kirtle, the scythe and saw that hung on the wall behind the door, both surely too large for her to wield.
Her husband, he assumed, gone now mayhap.
He wondered how long. The rhythm of her day suggested an orderliness that had been in place for some time, not as if she were scurrying or hurrying to manage the work of two people only recently.
She’d been in and out all day. At one point, she returned with two rabbits, secured in a pouch that hung from her belt, which she proceeded to skin with surprising efficiency at a worktable around the front left corner of the house.
Later, she returned with his sword and belt, and his boots and gambeson, and set them just inside the door in a neat, careful stack, then stepped back from them as if she had laid down an offering.
She spoke but rarely, most often when he asked her something, less often when he only made a remark.
“Have ye snares?” he’d asked by way of conversation. “Or do ye set box traps?”
“Snares.”
“Always rabbit? Or do ye find other critters caught?”
“Mostly rabbit.”
“Guid for stew,” he’d mentioned.
She’d nodded.
Her voice was sweet and soft, not timid exactly, but unused, was his assumption. Or maybe she kept her voice low on purpose, unacquainted with noise—another voice—altogether.
Admittedly, he was fascinated, and not only by her ethereal beauty—nae, not ethereal, but... something, he couldn’t name it as of yet. He only knew that she seemed out of place, even in her own home.
But aye, fascinated, he was, by her resolve, her steadfastness, the way she simply kept going.
By how she seemed not disturbed by his presence—numerous quick blushes aside—but simply went about her day, which now included attention to him or at the very least awareness of him, and how she seemed to have configured that into her hours, even as she showed no signs of hurrying about as she came and went.
At the same time no motion was wasted, neither was any made in haste.
She moved with a quiet, unremarked grace that did not match the cut of her clothes; dressed as a man, one might expect her to be rougher in her ways, coarser perhaps, yet every movement was clearly feminine, every action soft and graceful.
He thought she shouldn’t be so bonny, though.
Not with this lot as her life. Though young, she should appear haggard, this being her existence.
Her mouth should be drawn down, her lips thinned with perhaps a constant anxiety.
He might expect her brow to be permanently knitted into place, angled low over her striking eyes.
Assuming food was scarce, her cheeks should be hollow; the skin of her hands should not be so fine, should be hard and weathered past any softness.
Instead, she was... fresh, as if she’d lived a completely different life until only recently.
He didn’t press her for conversation, not yet, not after having observed that she seemed to go out of her way to make no noise herself, watching where she stepped, letting her feet fall softly, not swinging her arms so that there was scarcely even the rustle of fabric.
She offered him a bitter concoction, advising he should probably continue with the fever medicine for another day.
“Just to be safe,” she said, handing him the bowl of steeped liquid.
He swallowed it down in two gulps, but resisted shivering at the pungent taste.
“My thanks to ye,” he said, handing the bowl back to her.
She listened with her eyes, he realized.
When he spoke, she watched him intently.
Often her lips would part as she studied him.
It was almost as if she gleaned what he said from his expression, not from his words.
It made him wonder what sort of man had taught her the habit, and whether malice had anything to do with it.
At present, she was on her knees near the pot that had hung over the fire all day, stirring the contents with her short knife.
Steam rose from the rabbit stew and drifted into the dim space of the hut, carrying the plain, savory smell of meat and herbs.
She set a small pan near the edge of the coals as well, but Morggán had no idea what might fill it.
He stayed on his feet, as he had all day, one shoulder braced to the wall. Sitting would mean standing again, and however weary he felt, this was still better than forcing his ribs and wounded thigh through the misery of rising from the floor as he’d been forced to do this morning.
“You don’t talk very much,” he said at last, using his own tongue rather than the English she seemed to prefer.
She did not look up from the pan as she set it closer to the heat. “You do,” she replied, without a shred of either accusation or apology.
“I come from a large family—quiet is a rare thing.”
Again, she simply stared, and yet Morggán was smacked by an impression that she cringed inwardly at the very idea of constant noise.
Often enough throughout the day he managed both sides of the conversation.
Or rather, he answered questions he would expect any other person to ask.
She seemed to have no interest in questions, or in him.
He wondered if she would eventually ask when he was leaving, or mayhap she would simply tell him he was well enough to be gone.
“I am not entirely sure whether or when to expect my army, or even if any survived.” He chewed the inside of his cheek, thoughtful for a moment.
“I do not expect they would make for Ard Cael—not any one of them would want to be the one to have to say ‘aye, he’s lost’.
” ?Twas not arrogance, merely fact. No one would dare tell his mother they hadn’t been able to find him, that they’d given up.
“An army usually means...war,” she said with some hesitation.
Once again, Morggán couldn’t decipher her tone, whether she asked a question or made a comment.
She reached for a small pouch and unknotted it, spilling a measure of oats into a wooden bowl.
Morggán’s eyes caught on the bag itself, recognizing his sister’s stitching, and the silk drawcord.
Another boon provided by his fallen steed, he realized.
This struck him as bold, her using his provisions right in front of him, and making no comment about it.
He didn’t call her out, though, understanding as well as most that the act of survival had its own rules.
“Aye, and what will you do when it comes to your door?” He asked, watching as she added some broth from the stew into the bowl of oats, just enough to stir into a thick dough, which she took into her hands and shaped into several flat rounds.
“To the forest.”
His brows lowered. “That’s your plan?”
She turned her blue eyes onto him but said nothing, and then slid the first thin round of dough into the pan, which began to hiss at once.
“What if they come by night?” he persisted. “What if they creep and you don’t hear them in time to escape?”
“I heard you—or rather, Charlie did.”
A deep furrow creased his forehead. “Charlie?”
She pointed to the hound, who lay just beside her, his attention locked on her dough-covered hands.
“What of your man?” he gestured vaguely toward the pegs hammered into the wall, where hung those drab breeches and tunics. “Your husband?”
She shook her head.
“Your sire?”
Another shake of her head.
“A man lived here,” he deduced. “With you? Before you?”
“The man, yes.”
He waited. Nothing. Morggán sighed. In truth, conversation was a bit exasperating.
“What man?”
She shrugged, not with indifference or any wish to hide information, he surmised. It seemed she didn’t understand the answer herself. “The man.” She lifted her hand and pointed toward the hair falling over her shoulder. “With the gray hair. Gray eyes, too, but not... not like yours. He lived here.”
“With you?”
She nodded.
“Was he kin to you?”
Another slow, confused shrug. “I don’t think so—no, he wasn’t.”
“Ye prefer English to Scots,” he remarked, considering her switch.
She nodded.
She wasn’t simple, that much he knew. That might be all he knew, though; he didn’t know what to make of her.
“Your Scots is nae familiar to me,” he said, keeping to English now, “the cadence of it.”
“Okay.”
“Oh-kay,” he repeated, unfamiliar with the word.
She nodded.
“Ye have a name?”
Her head bobbed up and down again, slowly this time, but she said nothing.
Morggán grinned despite his vexation. “Would ye like to share it?”
Her reply was slow in coming and was accompanied by a look of wonderment. And then a frown slowly evolved. “Avery.”
“A-very?”
“My name is Avery,” she said, firmer now. “Avery Mercer.”
“Avery,” he repeated.
She didn’t smile, not visibly, but something about her softened. She continued to stare at him. Her mouth opened as if she might say something, but she closed it after a moment, her thoughts left unspoken.
He waited, and returned her stare, but she didn’t ask his name.
And then curiosity got the better of him. Morggán raised a brow. “Why do ye scowl when ye say yer name?”
To his great bewilderment, her eyes welled with tears, though none spilled down her cheeks.
“I... I haven’t said my name—haven’t heard my name—in so... in such a long time.”
This gave Morggán pause. After a moment, he breathed out half a laugh and shook his head. “I’m nae sure what to make of ye, lass. What is it, then? What are ye doing out here?” Surely, there was some sordid tale to explain... her.
She said nothing—offered no explanation, didn’t clarify anything.
She stared at him with no small amount of defiance, but even this, Morggán didn’t know how to interpret it.
She was an enigma, a contradiction at every turn.
He didn’t like puzzles, didn’t like things he couldn’t understand, people most especially. They weren’t to be trusted—couldn’t be.