Chapter Thirteen
The morning held no urgency, and so Avery chose a task that required patience.
Or perhaps, more truthfully, she had determined upon waking that she would not alter herself simply because an army occupied her forest now.
The decision had settled stubbornly inside her while she’d collected water, having to skirt around more than a dozen men, horses, and tents to reach the stream, and as she brushed her teeth.
She would behave exactly as she always had.
Army or no, the work remained. Wood still needed hauling, laundry needed doing, and snares still needed to be checked and reset.
Life did not stop merely because the world outside had suddenly remembered she existed.
Perhaps if she kept herself busy enough, she would not think overmuch about the strange disappointment that had settled over her, that Morggán had not come, hadn’t sought her out this morning.
Of course, there was no reason why he should. He didn’t need to check in on her—or with her. He owed her nothing, and he hadn’t left anything behind that was his to return and claim. Stopping by just to say good morning didn’t seem to be something he might do.
But still.
From the shelf near the rafters, she took down the small crock wrapped in cloth.
Inside lay the fat she had rendered months ago, saved from three rabbits taken in late autumn when they had been at their heaviest. She had cut the pale strips from beneath the hide, melted them slowly in a pot until the clear grease separated from the gristle, then strained it clean.
Now it rested in a hard white cake, still faintly scented with smoke.
She set it near the hearth to soften. Outside, beneath the lean-to where rain seldom reached, she kept a narrow trough fashioned from a split log.
Ash from her fire had been stored there for weeks—hardwood only, the man having once cuffed her lightly on the shoulder for using softwood and calling the result “good enough.” Softwood ash was weak.
It would not serve, the man had said. She poured a measure of ash into the trough and settled straw across the bottom, just as she had been shown, then set a wooden bowl beneath the small hole carved near one end.
When she carried water from the bucket and poured it slowly over the ash, it seeped downward, darkening as it passed through, and began to drip from the hole in a thin brown thread.
Lye. She’d never heard of the word before, not until she’d first learned the process, that ash and water together made something sharp enough to bite the skin.
The man had made her touch a drop to her tongue once, just barely.
“So you know it,” he had said when she recoiled. “And so you will respect it.”
“Aye, now what’s this then?”
Avery startled slightly and turned.
The kid Eòin stood several yards away near the corner of the house, carrying two empty wooden buckets. He looked faintly sheepish at having startled her but no less curious for it.
“Soap,” she answered after a moment.
His brows rose. “Soap?”
She nodded once and poured water slowly over the ash.
He abandoned entirely whatever task he had originally been about with the buckets and wandered closer at once.
“You make it yerself?”
“I do,” she said.
His brows lifted at that before drawing together again as he peered suspiciously into the bowl.
“You do not put flowers in it?” he asked.
“The sort the lasses favor? Soap that smells like gardens and summer fields, though it does little to hide the fact they’ve been sweating and stinking half the day—” He broke off abruptly.
Color climbed his neck with alarming speed.
“I-I do not mean that you smell,” he corrected quickly.
“Or sweat. Christ.” He dragged one hand down his face.
“Nor that flowers might conceal it if you did smell—which you don’t.
” His eyes squeezed shut briefly in visible agony. “Shite.”
Unable to help herself, Avery laughed lightly, not having thought he meant to insinuate that she did stink. “It’s fine, Eòin.” She didn’t know the words for “No harm done,” in his Scots language and so said them in English while she adjusted the bowl beneath the slow dripping lye.
Eòin watched another moment before glancing around the clearing. “The laird said ye’ve lived here alone for years.”
Avery nodded, continuing in English as he’d done. “I have.” She tilted her head at him. “Why do you all call him that? Laird.”
“Laird?”
She nodded.
“He’s the mac Ruaidhrí,” he said simply, though it explained absolutely nothing.
Eòin must have seen that in her face because his own expression shifted a bit, suggesting he didn’t understand how she did not know this.
“He’s chief of Ard Cael,” he elaborated. “Lord o’ the territory. The mormaer of all mac Ruaidhrí.”
Avery stared at him a moment, not sure that helped so much—except that Ard Cael she’d heard before, from Morggán only last night.
So, Morggán was like a... king? A mayor?
Sheriff? She couldn’t be sure, but was satisfied that she understood, better now, that he was an important person, certainly to the mac Ruaidhrí.
“He hates half the nonsense that comes wi’ it,” Eòin supplied without being prompted.
Before Avery could ask more—she really wanted to know what constituted ‘nonsense’— Eòin abruptly glanced past her toward the trees.
“The laird’s gone wi’ Tormod and Donnchadh.”
“Oh,” she said carefully. “Where?”
“Scouts returned before dawn,” Eòin explained. “Believe they found sign o’ the English trail northward. They’ve gone to see it.”
“I see,” she said, showing him a fleeting, distracted smile. On the trail of the English, because he planned to leave soon. And then, because she was apparently ridiculous, Avery thought, maybe that’s why he didn’t come to see me this morning, because he was gone so early.
Before that flimsy fantasy took hold, she shook her head to dispel her own nonsense, and concentrated on the ash and water and Eòin.
He was called off soon enough—Finlay shouting from somewhere round the front of the house, “Ye bringing that water, lad, or will making eyes with the lass be yer chore today?”
Eòin gulped down his embarrassment, grinned awkwardly inside his red face, and hurried off.
Avery carried on with her own work, and when the soap making was done, she washed the remaining residue from her hands and set the shallow wooden mold upon the shelf near the hearth where the slab might cool undisturbed.
The house now carried the faint scent of lye and rendered fat, though smoke from the fire already began overtaking it again.
Outside, the day had warmed. Sunlight filtered through the branches above the clearing, catching here and there upon bits of steel and leather and horseflesh among the trees beyond her house.
She wasn’t sure what kept an idle army busy all day, but took note that no one seemed to be only lounging about.
Men and boys—she was sure by now that there were several in this fighting army who were younger than her—moved about here and there, some busy with horses, some looked to be polishing the round shields that she’d noted yesterday, and a small group of men worked over the cook fire with Fergus—who was the main cook, she’d ascertained, and who kind of reminded her of an actor from a TV show her father and mother had watched, her father’s firm in charge off the marketing of it.
It was a show about a tough police commissioner who fought crime and city officials with calm intellect, sometimes creatively.
The resemblance was not uncanny; it was just that Fergus was as bald as the star of that show, and because he was stocky without being especially muscular.
Since she didn’t expect that she would be fed every night by Morggán’s army, and because she had no intention of growing dependent upon food that might vanish as soon as tomorrow, she left the house to see about her snares.
Even if she might again be invited to join them for dinner tonight or another, she didn’t want anything possibly caught in her traps to be left too long or be taken by foxes.
Charlie rose immediately when she stepped from the house carrying her game bag and a coil of cord. His ears perked at once, recognizing her intent.
“You’re only interested in me now because there may be rabbits involved,” she informed him.
She walked into the forest, where the trees thickened, and was forced to maneuver around horses and tents and occasionally people, giving everything a wide berth.
Eyes occasionally lifted as she passed. Conversations paused briefly and resumed again.
She didn’t hurry past it all, not wanting to appear as if she was trying to escape, even as their presence disturbed her in a small way she couldn’t quite name, aside from the very basic, they’re in my space.
Charlie trotted ahead through shafts of sunlight while Avery followed the narrow familiar routes deeper into the woods beyond the outer edge of the camp. Gradually the sounds of the army softened behind her until at last only the ordinary noises of the forest remained again.
The quiet eased her quite a bit.
The first snare had been sprung but empty, likely robbed during the night by some clever creature.
The second held a rabbit already stiff with death, and the third another.
Avery reset the empty trap automatically while Charlie sat nearby pretending not to watch the rabbits with desperate and hopeful interest.
“You’ll get some, you know that,” she informed him. “But you have to at least wait until I cook them.”
His tail thumped against the leaves.
Almost an hour had passed by the time she returned toward the house with the rabbits hanging from one hand. The camp seemed a little busier than before, with more people congregated inside the clearing immediately surrounding her house.
Avery walked around to the front and the door and was brought to a sudden halt, her mouth opening, the word what... mouthed.