Chapter Eighteen #2
As Morggán strode across the clearing, his attention fixed on the wounded, his gaze lifted almost absently, searching the confusion. It found her—and in the next breath he lowered his gaze and found Eòin's hand wrapped around hers.
This brought him to an abrupt halt. He didn’t just falter, but deliberately checked his stride, as though something had struck him squarely in the chest. His gaze locked onto hers, unflinching, and there was no mistaking the hardness that settled into his eyes, a cold, cutting edge that made her swallow nervously.
His jaw tightened, the muscle ticking visibly.
It was a judgment already passed.
Then, just as quickly, he wrenched his gaze from her. The look vanished behind the rigid mask of command, his attention snapping back to the wounded as he turned away and barked fresh orders.
It had been only a heartbeat, the heated look and savage reaction, but long enough to cause heat to rise into her chest. His questions from yesterday came back with unwelcome clarity. Has another man spoken to ye? Eòin?
She didn’t know if Eòin, too, had seen that feral look in Morggán’s eyes, but just then he released her hand, as if scorched, and strode forward, presumably to help with the commotion of so many wounded.
A man nearby cried out as another soldier lowered him from his saddle. Somewhere to her left someone shouted for water.
Avery turned, ignoring every instinct that might have seen her offering what little help she could give, and walked toward her house.
Not my army. Not my responsibility.
She clung to the thought, knowing even as she did that it was only partly true, and entirely self-serving.
It was easier to tell herself she was preserving a necessary distance than admit a quieter truth, that Morggán’s distrust irked her.
Beneath that lay something even less rational.
If she kept her distance from this chaos—from the wounded men and the unmistakably medieval reality unfolding before her—perhaps she could postpone, if only for a little while longer, whatever truth she still wasn't ready to face.
“Avery!”
Morggán’s shout reached her just as she was about to turn the corner near her woodpile. She frowned and turned, glaring at him from twenty yards away. Her fingers tightened around the damp bundle of clothing she still carried against her chest.
“Come,” he said. “Muir will need help.”
Even though she’d yet to think of a legitimate reason why she couldn’t or shouldn’t help, she shook her head.
Across the distance she saw his mouth tighten into a hard line, and something dark flashed across his face. Even from twenty yards away, she could feel the force of his displeasure.
She didn't care. She wasn't one of his soldiers to be summoned with a word and expected to obey without question. Just as she’d insisted he owed her nothing when first they’d met, she knew she owed him nothing now.
“Avery, now,” he called out sharply.
There were sensible reasons to refuse. She knew nothing of tending battlefield injuries, had no experience with shattered bones, crushed limbs, or the terrible injuries swords and axes could inflict. She wasn't a surgeon, or a nurse, or even particularly brave, and if she did the wrong thing....
But then, simple human kindness overrode her resistance, and she realized she could offer something—she wasn’t petty enough or angry enough with either him or her own personal, possibly real time-travel predicament to refuse it.
“I can stitch smaller wounds,” she called across the space. “Send them to me, inside.” And with that, she turned and continued around the corner.
***
The remainder of the afternoon passed in a blur of bloody wounds, poultices, stitches, and weary endurance.
The skirmish had cost them more dearly than Morggán had first believed.
None of the wounds alone would cripple the company, yet there were simply too many of them.
Sword cuts that needed sewing, spear thrusts that demanded careful cleaning before they festered, broken fingers and cracked ribs from men thrown from their horses, bruises already darkening across shoulders and backs where shields had failed to absorb the full force of a blow.
Muir scarcely paused long enough to wipe his hands before another injured man was brought before him.
After Avery’s infuriating reluctant offer, Morggán had sent Alasdair to the house first. The cut across his hand was clean and deep enough to require stitches, yet not so urgent that Muir needed to waste precious time upon it while men with heavier injuries waited.
Before long another was sent, then another after him, until word got around that those whose wounds threatened life remained with Muir, and those whose injuries were less dangerous found their way to Avery's door.
And yet, irritation with Avery lingered with surprising persistence, surfacing whenever the work about him grew momentarily quiet.
More than once, he caught himself remembering the sight of Eòin emerging beside her from the forest, her hand resting in his.
He had seen nothing more than that and told himself he should be grateful for the lad’s watchfulness over her, and yet it refused to leave him.
Had it stood alone, he might have dismissed it as nothing.
There had been no slyness in the lad's manner, no guilty haste when he finally released her hand. And yet, when coupled with Avery’s initial refusal to help, it was difficult to reason away either thing.
When at last he could step away, dusk had settled over the camp.
He and Lucas Thain had just spent the better part of an hour dissecting the day's engagement, agreeing that the English had anticipated their usual tactics and had lain in wait rather than trying to outrun the harassment, as they’d done on every other occasion.
Before another raid, they would have to devise a different approach.
Only then did Morggán make his way toward Avery's house.
If his annoyance with Avery had dulled over the last few hours, it returned with every step through the gathering twilight.
He found himself replaying the moment she had stood across the clearing and refused him, then the sight of Eòin beside her, and before that, the previous evening when she had withdrawn from his embrace.
None of it sat comfortably with him, and together it left him with a bitterness he could neither dismiss nor fully explain.
The door stood open. He slowed as he reached it, listening to the quiet within, before seeing that she was alone.
The last of the wounded had long since returned to the camp, yet she had left the door unlatched and wide, as though any man still in need might simply walk inside without knocking. That at least, he admitted grudgingly, he appreciated.
She stood with her back partly toward him, restoring folded lengths of clean linen to the shelf above the table.
A wooden bucket sat near the doorway, heaped with bloodied cloths awaiting the stream.
The house held the scents of fresh herbs, clean water, and iron-rich blood, while two bone needles lay drying upon a square of linen on her short table.
She looked weary. Loose strands had escaped the braid that had been neat and tight when last he saw her, softening the line of her neck and temples.
Her cheeks had lost their usual warmth, leaving her pale with fatigue, and there was a heaviness to her movements that he’d not ever noticed before.
Even so, she remained distractingly beautiful, and Morggán found that realization no less irritating than the rest of his thoughts.
Perhaps she sensed him in the doorway, or perhaps the silence itself announced his presence. She turned before he would have announced himself. For a heartbeat they simply looked at one another.
She didn’t lower her blue eyes, so that he imagined that whatever anger she had carried through the afternoon had not entirely left her either. After a moment, her gaze traveled over him with quiet efficiency, lingering briefly on the dried blood darkening one sleeve before returning to his face.
“Do you need stitches?” she asked.
The question was delivered with such cool indifference that it annoyed him further—as though there could be no other reason for him to stand upon her threshold.
“?Tis nae my bluid,” he answered, stepping inside.
She made to turn away, to return to her practical little chore, replacing the linen on the shelf.