Chapter Twenty-Six
The great hall, so full of music and laughter the night before, was now a loud, crowded shelter.
Anna moved through the chaos, the air thick with the smell of damp wool and fear.
Families huddled on the floor with hastily gathered possessions, their children sleepy and fretful.
Along the walls, the old and frail sat with a quiet resignation that felt worse than the children’s cries.
It was a world away from the feast of just a few hours ago, and with every distant crash or cry from beyond the walls, the memory of that peace felt like a phantom limb.
Anna had hardly stopped moving since the fighting began, though at first there had been little for her to do beyond helping to settle the frightened people pouring into the hall.
Mairead had taken command with an efficiency Anna suspected could have rivaled Bram’s upon the walls, directing villagers as they arrived, ordering tables moved and blankets brought down from the upper chambers, and sending several women to the kitchens for every vessel they possessed that might carry water.
Fearchar came and went with messages and requests from outside, sometimes pausing only long enough to speak a few words to Mairead before disappearing again, and every single time the great doors opened, Anna looked toward them before she could stop herself.
Bram never appeared, though she knew perfectly well that he would not.
He was upon the walls somewhere, and every crash and distant shout penetrating the thick stone of the keep reminded her of it.
She had tried at first to distinguish one sound from another, imagining she might somehow determine what was happening by listening closely enough, but the effort only made her more anxious.
At times the noise diminished almost entirely and she would begin to hope the fighting had ended, only for another tremendous eruption of shouting to rise outside.
The first wounded man was brought in perhaps twenty minutes after the fighting began.
Anna had been carrying a pitcher of water toward one of the tables when the doors opened and two men appeared between them, supporting a third whose arms were thrown across their shoulders.
Blood covered one side of his face and soaked the front of his tunic, and Anna’s heart lurched so violently that she nearly dropped the pitcher as her mind supplied dark hair and broad shoulders before her eyes had even properly registered the man’s face.
A second later she recognized one of the younger men she had seen at supper the night before, and the relief that came over her was so immediate that she felt ashamed of it almost at once.
She set down the pitcher and went to help, and after that there was no longer much opportunity to stand about imagining what might be happening outside.
The wounded began arriving with increasing regularity, some walking under their own power with cuts that looked terrible until the blood had been washed away, while others had to be supported or carried.
One man came in with an arrow buried through the flesh of his upper arm, another with a gash across his scalp that bled so profusely Anna could scarcely see his face until Margaret washed it clean, and a third was laid upon one of the tables white-faced and gasping, one hand pressed against his side while blood seeped steadily between his fingers.
For Anna, the terror was specific and immediate: no ambulance, no paramedics shouldering through the door with bags of equipment, no emergency room ten minutes away.
There was only whatever knowledge these people possessed, the herbs and clean linen Mairead ordered brought, basins of water that rapidly turned pink and then red, and needles and thread that Anna tried very hard not to contemplate until she saw them being put to use.
She helped where she could. Etta worked beside her, far quieter than Anna had ever known her to be, tearing linen into strips, carrying water and holding men still while wounds were cleaned or stitched.
Margaret plainly possessed more practical knowledge of injuries than either of them, and Anna quickly learned to watch her whenever she wasn't certain what was needed.
Mairead, meanwhile, seemed somehow to keep track of everything occurring within the crowded hall.
One moment she was directing Anna toward another stack of clean linen, and the next she was across the room instructing someone to move a frightened family away from the tables being used for the wounded.
Shortly afterward Anna heard her telling one of the kitchen women to prepare food that could be carried easily to the men upon the walls if the fighting continued much longer.
She never seemed frantic, never raised her voice unless the noise around her required it, yet somehow people heard her and obeyed, and Anna found herself envying a composure she could not begin to imitate.
Watching her, Anna thought suddenly of Bram.
The resemblance had little to do with their faces.
It was in that same steadiness when everything around them descended into chaos, the same refusal to waste fear upon anything that still required doing.
Blood of the thistle, Anna thought, though she could not have said precisely why the phrase came to her.
Perhaps because there seemed something distinctly Scottish in both of them—hardy and stubborn, capable of flourishing in ground that should have defeated them, and somehow steadier when the world around them was at its worst.
Every particularly violent sound from outside still made her want to abandon whatever she was doing and run to the nearest window, but she resisted the urge.
Bram had told her to remain inside the keep, and while she had bristled at nearly every other instruction he'd issued that morning, she had no intention of disobeying this one.
Not while the occasional thunderous blow from somewhere beyond the hall made even these ancient walls seem to tremble, and certainly not while men were being carried through the doors bleeding from whatever was happening on the other side of them.
She thought of him as she had last seen him in her chamber, fastening his sword belt in the gray light before dawn while the first horn still seemed to reverberate through the keep.
She thought of the argument they'd had and the truly appalling proposal that had begun it, and then of the way he'd caught her before leaving and kissed her with all the certainty he had been unable or unwilling to put into words.
At the time she'd still been angry enough with him to resent his insistence that their conversation was not finished.
Now she would have given almost anything to have him standing before her proposing marriage badly all over again.
“Anastasia?”
She looked up to find Etta holding a folded strip of linen toward her and realized she had missed whatever the younger woman had said.
“Sorry. What do you need?”
“Hold this here.”
Anna took the cloth and pressed it against the wound in the man’s shoulder while Etta reached for another length of linen with which to secure it.
Only then did Anna notice how much blood covered her own hands and had worked beneath her fingernails, drying in the creases of her knuckle.
A month ago the sight might have turned her stomach.
A month ago, she reflected as she increased the pressure when the wounded man groaned beneath her hand, a great many things that had become almost commonplace to her would have seemed unimaginable.
The doors opened again while Etta was tying off the bandage, and Anna’s head came up immediately. Three men had entered, two supporting the third between them, and she had identified all three before she was even aware that she had been searching for only one face.
It wasn't Bram.
Relief came first, swift and instinctive, followed closely by guilt.
Someone else had been hurt, someone else’s son or brother or husband had been carried bleeding into the hall, and still some selfish part of Anna rejoiced every time those doors opened and the wounded man wasn’t Bram.
She hated herself a little for it, until she glanced toward Etta and discovered that the younger woman was staring at the newcomers as well.
Their eyes met for only a moment before Etta looked away, but Anna had seen enough to know that Bram’s sister was doing precisely the same thing she was.
As the morning wore on, Anna gradually lost any reliable sense of how much time had passed.
Daylight strengthened beyond the narrow windows but reached the hall only grudgingly, leaving candles and lamps burning in its darker reaches, and she knew it must be getting later mostly because Etta eventually pressed a piece of bread into her hand and insisted that she eat.
She managed two bites before setting it down beside a basin and forgetting about it entirely.
The wounded continued to arrive, though sometimes several came within minutes of one another and at other times there would be a blessed interval when the doors remained closed long enough for Anna to begin hoping that perhaps the worst was over.
It was during one such interval that the horn sounded again.
Anna might not have thought much of it if Fearchar, who had been crossing the hall at the time, had not stopped so abruptly.
Mairead turned toward the doors as well, while several of the older men seated along the wall raised their heads and listened.
When another blast followed, Anna heard at once what had caught their attention.
The sound was fainter than those that had come from above the gate and seemed to reach them from an entirely different direction.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
Etta had gone pale beside her. “Mama?”
Mairead was already moving toward the doors. “Stay here.”