Chapter Ten
Avery hadn’t asked him to turn the soil, though she had considered it briefly.
The man, when he lived, had assigned her labor without asking whether she wished to do it.
She had no interest in repeating that habit in reverse, nor in growing accustomed to dividing the day as though the house and yard and all the work belonged equally to them.
It had been hers alone before he arrived, and she reminded herself, quietly and without bitterness, that it would be hers alone again when he left.
But she’d begun noticing that the stronger he grew, the more restless he became.
Now that the fever and weakness had loosened their grip on him, he seemed unable to sit idle long before finding some task to occupy himself, whether carrying wood, hauling water, or now working the earth in the garden.
She didn’t think it had much to do with repaying a debt, since she’d insisted that he owed her nothing.
Rather, it seemed to her that stillness itself agitated him.
As though whatever kind of life he led with an army had left him ill-suited to inactivity, so that strength returning to his body brought with it the need to expend it somewhere.
The strip of garden adjacent to the northwest side of the house needed to be broken before she could set anything into it, and she knew well enough he could drive the worn thin shovel—the spade, the old man had called it—deeper than she might ever manage alone.
He moved more easily now, his strength returning in ways she could not ignore.
That knowledge had settled in her these past days like a stone in her gut, heavy in ways she didn’t examine too closely. The strength returning to him was not meant for tending gardens. It was gathering itself for something beyond these trees, for that war he’d spoken of.
She worked on her knees in a different section, breaking apart the earth with her hands, prying loose stones from the earth. He worked beside her, neither asking for instruction nor offering commentary.
The steady thrust of the spade into the stubborn ground became its own rhythm beside her, metal biting earth, the muted scrape and crack of roots giving way beneath it.
Occasionally he paused, not from idleness but to ease a careful breath through his ribs before driving the blade down again.
Even now he favored the wounded leg slightly when he shifted his weight, though less than he had even yesterday.
Avery sat back at last and pushed damp strands of hair from her forehead with the back of her wrist, inadvertently smudging dirt across her skin. Her eyes lifted toward Morggán almost absently.
He stood a short distance away with both hands wrapped around the worn handle of the spade, broad shoulders flexing beneath the faded dark tunic as he forced the blade deeper into the earth with the heel of his boot.
The movement pulled at him visibly now and then, a brief tightening through his mouth or brow betraying the lingering pain in his ribs, yet there remained something steady and unyielding in the way he worked, as though hard labor was simply another state of being to a man such as him.
She had known already he was strong, had known it from the first moment he’d dragged himself, bleeding and spent, onto the travois more than a week ago.
His sleeves had been shoved carelessly to his elbows sometime earlier, baring powerful forearms coarsened by old scars and corded muscle.
The sun glinted off the hair on his arms and threaded faintly through his longer hair as well, deep brown at first glance yet carrying muted hints of red when the light found it properly.
It softened nothing about him. If anything, it made him appear more vividly alive against the greens and browns of the clearing.
Her gaze drifted lower, catching the shifting movement of muscle beneath his arms and shoulders each time he drove the spade down and forced the earth upward.
There was nothing elegant about the labor, and yet somehow he made it appear less menial than it actually was.
And perhaps because he seemed wholly unaware of her watching him, she found herself studying him with a curiosity that felt less inexplicable and less uncomfortable as the days went on.
She understood that her fascination with him, the more time she spent with him, had less to do with the mystery of him—a man, a horse and sword, waiting on an army, anxious to return to a war she’d known nothing about—and was more acknowledged for the baser truth, what had teased her already, that he was very handsome.
Not boyishly handsome, not polished or pretty in the way actors and musicians had been in the world she barely remembered anymore, but something wilder and entirely male.
Weathered by wind—and apparently war—and years spent outdoors, his face carried lines and old scars that ought perhaps to have hardened him into ugliness and instead seemed only to sharpen the impact of his features.
He glanced toward her then, perhaps sensing her attention at last.
Avery looked away immediately and reached for another stone half-buried in the soil, though not before noticing the faint sheen of sweat along his throat and brow.
“You should probably take a break,” she said, trying for practicality and hearing something less steady than that in her voice.
Morggán merely drove the spade into the earth again.
“Aye, in a moment,” he conceded.
He would pause or stop at his own discretion, would do what he thought best or most wise or simply what he wanted, she’d learned pretty quickly about him.
Avery bent again to the soil, loosening another stubborn stone from the garden bed, this one requiring both hands, and tossed it onto the small pile of rocks she’d unearthed.
Something gave her pause then, something that didn’t belong, some faint sound that wasn’t the shovel digging, or small clods of earth being moved, or Charlie sighing in his sleep near the house. There was some distant rhythm beneath the ordinary sounds of the morning.
She stilled, one dirt-covered hand still pressed to the ground, and then rose slowly to her feet, brushing earth from her palms against the legs of her pants as she turned away from the garden plot.
Positioned as she was along the northwestern edge of the hut, the house itself blocked any clear view of the grasslands from there.
She moved around the side of the house instead, toward the front clearing where the forest opened slightly southward.
She could swear she heard something. She scanned the familiar ground of the rolling grasslands, and at first she mistook a visual disturbance for nothing more than wind moving strangely through the tall grass, a darker shifting ripple beyond the tree line where the land dipped and rose again.
Then the shapes resolved themselves into riders—people, men presumably—on horses, and not just one or two wandering aimlessly across the hills, but a company moving together in a lazy formation, their horses cutting a steady line through the spring grass.
Even at that distance she caught dull flashes of light where sun struck metal.
They were riding directly toward her house, it seemed.
Avery swallowed. Her breath slowed rather than quickened. Panic had never once proven useful.
“Mister,” she said as loud as she dared, still unable for some reason to use his given name aloud.
Behind her she heard the soft thud of the spade abandoned in the dirt.
Morggán came to stand beside her a moment later, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from him after the labor in the garden. His gaze fixed immediately upon the riders beyond the trees.
“They would have turned already if they meant to skirt the forest,” he remarked, a frown lowering his brow.
Avery felt something tense low in her stomach, having thought the same thing.
“We should go,” she said at once, already turning back toward the hut.
Her eyes searched automatically for Charlie. She found him sprawled near the front wall where the sunlight pooled warmly against the wood, asleep with one paw stretched awkwardly before him. She clicked her tongue sharply. The hound lifted his head at once and after a moment, rose to his feet.
“Wait,” Morggán said.
Frowning, Avery turned and stared at him and not the coming riders. “Wait for what?” she asked, a bit disturbed. She’d not managed to stay alive and unscathed all these years by waiting to meet people, to find out if they meant harm or not. “I’m not going to—”
“?Tis the mac Ruaidhrí,” he said. “These are my men, Avery. They’ve found me—or are about to.” He barked a short laugh, as if he couldn’t believe it.
Avery swung her gaze away from him and studied the coming horde more closely.
She saw it then, the plaid fabric draped across many shoulders, the same green, blue, and brown as the one that sat folded neatly inside the house, the one she’d taken as her own from Morggán’s horse.
Her own brow knitted, the relief she should have felt usurped by something entirely different.
His army had come for him.
He would leave now.
Avery remained where she was while Morggán strode forward toward the edge of the forest, probably meaning to call out to his men so that they didn’t ride right by, or turn along the forest’s edge.
She remained near the house at first, watching from a distance, but gradually drew closer to the grasslands, curiosity getting the better of her.
The riders had not yet seen the house hidden inside the trees.
They moved across the grasslands in a loose searching line rather than a marching formation, their spacing widening and narrowing with the shape of the land.
There were more than she first thought. Fifty or more, perhaps, as more riders emerged steadily over the rise behind the first.