Chapter 4 #2
He went and stood next to his brother’s body and watched the flames consume with difficulty what Sunshine had worn.
He didn’t want to think about what he’d just seen, but he couldn’t help himself.
There wasn’t a soul alive who wore clothing so fine—or so odd.
Perhaps she was a witch after all and he had put his hand to something so unearthly that he wouldn’t escape unscathed.
Then again, he was fairly certain that no witch alive could possibly be that beautiful under her clothes.
The soft knock on the door behind him startled him. He turned and saw one of his wee serving maids standing just inside his bedchamber.
“My laird, do you need aught?” she asked timidly.
Cameron forced himself to smile reassuringly. “Food, Brianna, if you would. Food and drink. Also, find Brice and send him to me, won’t you?”
The girl bobbed a curtsey, then fled. Cameron watched her go, then turned back to the fire.
It was smoking terribly as it strove to consume Sunshine’s clothing.
He threw yet more wood on, ignored the unsettling smell the cloth produced as it burned, and waited.
Finally, he heard a man clear his throat uncomfortably.
“Cameron?”
Cameron turned and smiled. “Was it your idea, Brice?”
Brice shifted uncomfortably. “What?”
“The idea to drown a woman whose only crime was to agree to help me try to save Breac? Did you think that up all on your own, or did someone help you?”
“Ah,” Brice began, “Gilly and Giric wondered and that led me to wondering . . .”
Cameron motioned for him to come in. He went to stand by the bed and waited for his cousin to join him.
“Look at her,” Cameron said mildly. “Look at what you almost killed because you’re stupid.”
Brice spluttered. “But she’s a witch—”
Cameron grabbed a fistful of his cousin’s hair and forced his head down close to Sunshine’s face.
“There are no witches, you dolt,” he growled.
“Just beautiful women, like this one. And if she dies, so do you.” He released him with a shove.
“Go think on that. Don’t let me see you until I’m sure she won’t precede you to your grave. ”
Brice shot him a look of hate, then stomped from the chamber, cursing him viciously.
And all was yet again right in Cameron Hall.
Cameron sighed, then put his cousin out of his mind.
No sense in wasting any more thought on that one until he was forced to.
He pulled up a stool next to the bed and put his hand on Sunshine’s face.
She wasn’t cold, which meant she lived still, and she wasn’t hot, which meant her fever hadn’t begun yet.
She was breathing. He supposed he couldn’t ask for more than that.
He pulled the blankets up to her chin, then rested his hand on her forehead and waited.
Brianna returned, carrying a tray which she almost dropped as soon as she saw him. Cameron jumped up and caught it before she did. She was trembling badly. Cameron looked at her for a minute, then shut the door with his foot.
“What is it, Brianna?”
She wrung her hands in her apron. "’Tis Giric,” she said miserably.
Cameron looked at the tray in his hands, then at her. “Should I drink the soup?”
She nodded.
“The wine?”
She looked very pale all of a sudden.
Cameron set the tray down on the floor, then pointed to the stool. “Sit. I’ll return.”
She sat down and looked at him, mute, her eyes wide with fear.
Cameron picked up the cup and went to hunt down Giric. He found him standing at the entrance to the kitchens, chatting up a buxom serving wench. Cameron handed his cousin the wine.
“Drink.”
Giric paled. “I’m not thirsty.”
“And I say you are,” Cameron said in a low voice. “Drink, or I’ll pour it down your throat.”
Giric reached for the cup, then flinched suddenly. The goblet slid through his fingers and clanged against the stone of the floor. He smirked. “Thought I heard someone behind me.”
“You did.”
Giric blinked. “Who?”
“Death,” Cameron said distinctly. “And believe me when I tell you, he will come for you long before he comes for me.” He leaned in close. “Don’t try to poison my wine again or you’ll find yourself staring up at the sky with my knife in your belly.”
Giric laughed loudly, though not easily. “Poison your wine? What a fanciful imagination you have, Cameron.”
“It keeps me alive,” Cameron muttered. He walked into the kitchen, fetched wine for himself, then gave his cousin one last lingering look of warning before he retreated back upstairs.
He shut his bedchamber door and bolted it, then looked at Brianna sitting on the stool.
“You’ll remain here tonight, gel. And I’d suggest you stay away from Giric. ”
She nodded, then went to sit on the floor near the fireplace. She looked away from Breac and shivered.
Cameron ate, tasted the wine himself, then wondered if he dared try to force any of it down Sunshine.
Her breathing was shallow and rapid. Cameron set the wine aside, then put his ear to her chest. He could hear gurgling inside her, but he’d done all for her that he knew how to do. He pulled one of her arms from under the blankets, then took her hand in both his own and bowed his head.
All he could do was wait.
Three days later, he sat in the same place and still held Sunshine’s hand.
She was burning with fever. He supposed that was better than being cold as death, which she’d also been.
He smoothed her hair back from her brow, then took the cloth Brianna gave him and bathed her face with it.
It didn’t do much to relieve the heat that burned within her, but he had nothing else to try.
He had no healer. The last woman who’d dared call herself one had met her fate in the loch.
His clan was, he had to admit, a damned suspicious brood.
He thought back over the past pair of days. He’d buried his brothers, buried Sim’s betrothed, then stood silently as the rest of his men had been laid to rest. He’d seen so much death that for the first time in his life, he’d seen enough.
He had finished with the priest earlier that morning, then retreated upstairs and actually knelt beside his own bed and prayed for deliverance. And he’d prayed for the woman in front of him who had been willing to help him but had been repaid with harm.
He turned to look at his hearth. Breac no longer lay there and the floor had been scrubbed.
The herbs, though, remained where Sunny had left them.
He rose with a groan, then went to fetch them.
He sniffed, but that didn’t help him overmuch.
It wasn’t that he didn’t have some knowledge of healing and such.
He could find plantain to take away the sting of nettles.
He could survive for quite some time on whatever he could gather from meadows and forests.
Trying, however, to identify the contents of bags of very old weeds that had surely lost any virtue they might once have had—and attempting that on the handful of hours of sleep he’d had in the past three days—was just more than he could manage at the moment.
“We’ll make tea,” he said to Brianna, selecting a bag or two at random. “I’m sure it will help.”
Brianna nodded and went to fetch him water.
He knew she would return instantly. She ran everywhere she went when she was outside his chamber.
If she didn’t return within minutes, he went to fetch her.
He’d only found her once being cornered by Giric.
He’d shoved his cousin out of the way, sent Brianna back upstairs, then snorted at the suggestion that he was bedding Brianna and the witch both.
Giric grew bold, it seemed.
He waited at the door until he saw Brianna hastening down the passageway toward him. He took the pot of water from her, tossed handfuls of dried herbs into it, then put it on the fire to boil. He had no idea if it would serve Sunshine, but it couldn’t hurt.
“My laird, she stirs.”
Cameron spun around and watched Sunshine turn her head. It was the first thing she’d done in three days. Maybe it was the smell of the herbs instead of death. He had to admit it cheered him as well, no matter which herbs had been responsible for it. He looked at Brianna and smiled.
“Well,” he said, pleased.
“A good sign,” Brianna offered.
“Aye, lass,” he agreed.
Of course, Sunshine moving could have been the last throes before death as well, but he didn’t say that.
He drew out a cup of tea, fished the herbs out with his fingers and threw them into the fire.
They hissed and smoked, but the smell was a far better one than what Sunshine’s clothing had produced, so he didn’t complain.
He carried the cup over to the bed and sat down on his stool. He slipped his hand under Sunshine’s head and lifted it up, then put the cup to her lips. She managed to drink a few sips, before she turned her head away.
“More, my laird?” Brianna said hesitantly.
“Give her a few minutes, lass,” he said, more hopeful than he’d been in days, “then we’ll try a bit more.”
“Of course, my laird.”
Cameron looked at the woman lying in his bed and sighed deeply. A pity he hadn’t met her before the battle, before he had a duty to wed Breac’s widow and raise his brother’s son as his own. A pity he couldn’t have met her when he had been free to love where he might have desired it.
A pity she was a MacLeod.
Unfortunately, he knew his duty. Whatever it took to see the clan kept safe, whatever it required to see that it continued to exist, that he would do. And that would not include having anything to do with a MacLeod witch.
But ’twas a pity all the same.