Chapter 12
Twelve
DARCY
By midnight, Gilda’s fever had climbed high enough that I stopped pretending I wasn’t afraid.
The second camp had been quiet for hours, though quiet in a forest filled with frightened, displaced people was a relative thing, made up mostly of softer noises rather than silence.
Somewhere beyond the shelter, a baby whimpered in its sleep before being hushed against a mother’s breast, men murmured as they changed the watch, branches shifted overhead whenever the wind moved through the trees, and the goat rattled its tether against a tree while making a determined attempt to eat the corner of someone’s wool blanket.
Inside, the low fire had burned down to red coals, and the air smelled of smoke, damp wool, sweat, and the sharp green bitterness of the herbs Eadgyth had steeping in a clay cup.
The healer sat on the other side of Gilda’s pallet, her gray hair covered by a linen veil and her broad, capable hands moving with the unhurried certainty of someone who had spent most of her life healing.
She’d arrived before sunset from another cluster of refugees farther north, summoned by Hild, who apparently knew everyone in Sussex and most of their private business, and within an hour Eadgyth had inspected Gilda’s wound, complained about the first bandage, approved of the honey, changed the herbs, and informed me that hovering didn’t improve anyone’s chances.
Gilda lay beneath two blankets upon a pallet of bracken and straw, her round face flushed with fever while sweat darkened the hair at her temples.
The woman who had spent the past week arguing with everyone within reach, including a child who had brought her the wrong cup, had gone frighteningly quiet, and the silence was worse than any complaint.
Eadgyth peeled back the dressing.
I looked away for the space of one breath before making myself look again. The sword cut had been cleaned, but the flesh around it was swollen and angry, and the red streak I had noticed earlier had crept farther toward Gilda’s shoulder.
My stomach dropped. I wasn’t a doctor. I wasn’t a nurse, a paramedic, or anyone who should have been making medical decisions beyond first aid and the sort of emergency care firefighters learned because sometimes you reached people before the ambulance did.
I still knew that was bad. I also knew exactly what I wanted, and the thought of it was so painfully ordinary that I almost laughed.
Ibuprofen. A boring little blister pack of tablets from Boots, the sort I had bought without thought and tossed into handbags, station lockers, bathroom drawers, and the glove compartment of my car.
Antibiotics. Sterile gauze wrapped in plastic.
A thermometer with actual numbers instead of one woman’s hand pressed to another woman’s forehead.
Fluids in a clear bag hanging from a metal pole.
Someone in clean scrubs telling me what was happening and what came next. An actual hospital.
Instead, we had willow bark, honey, boiled linen, herbs whose names I kept forgetting, and a time that didn’t know what bacteria was.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
Eadgyth glanced at me without lifting her head.
“The fever is strong.”
I rubbed both hands over my face, feeling soot and exhaustion drag beneath my palms.
I liked the healer, I also wanted to shake her until antibiotics fell out of her ears.
She dipped a cloth into cool water, wrung it with surprisingly strong fingers, and laid it across Gilda’s forehead before looking at me again.
“Sit.”
“I am sitting.”
“You are crouching like a cat waiting to pounce on a rat.”
Excellent. Another terrifying elderly woman. Apparently 1066 was full of them.
“Darcy.”
I turned.
Wulfric stood in the entrance of the lean to, his broad shoulders nearly filling the opening.
His fair hair was still damp from washing away the worst of the battle, and someone had found him another cloak, dark brown and badly patched, though he wore it as if it belonged in a great hall rather than on the back of a man sleeping in a forest with half his possessions gone.
One good thing? All of my modern clothing would have burned when the Normans set everything on fire.
“What?”
“You have not eaten.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I did.”
“When?”
I considered lying, but his expression suggested I should save the effort.
“Earlier.”
Eadgyth made a disapproving sound. “The girl has not eaten all day.”
I looked at her, the traitor. “You are not a part of this.”
Wulfric lowered himself beside me, bringing with him the cold scent of the night air and steel.
“I brought food.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You are.”
“That is an extremely arrogant thing to tell someone.”
“You have looked at the bowl three times.”
I looked down.
He had given Eadgyth a wooden bowl and was holding a second containing some kind of stew. Steam curled from the surface in fragrant little ribbons.
The stew was thick with barley, onions, and a few precious pieces of meat, and the smell alone made my empty stomach tighten hard enough to betray me.
He held out the bowl as Eadgyth pointed to the door.
“Eat elsewhere and rest.”
I stared at her. “I’m not leaving.”
Gilda stirred and every muscle in my body tightened at once.
“She sleeps,” the healer said. “I will call you if she wakes.”
We sat just outside the shelter beneath a low overhang of branches, close enough that I could still hear every movement within.
Firelight slipped through the entrance and warmed one side of Wulfric’s face while the forest beyond remained dark, the trunks rising pale between pockets of shadow and moonlight.
I ate because arguing required energy, and I had very little left. Women I knew back in my own time were always jealous that I didn’t care much about food. It was fuel, nothing more. Sometimes, I’d go all day before I realized I was hungry.
The first spoonful of the stew nearly made me groan.
Someone had added wild garlic and enough salt to pull the flavors together, and after hours of smoke, blood, fear, and the cold damp that seemed to creep through every layer of clothing, the warmth spread through me so quickly I realized I had been shivering.
Wulfric nodded. “I knew you were hungry.”
Instead of saying something snarky, I shoved another spoonful in my mouth. Once I’d swallowed, I touched his arm.
“Thank you. You’re always feeding me.”
I took another spoonful and looked toward the shelter.
“Ibuprofen.”
His brows drew together. “What?”
I looked down into the bowl.
“In my… where I come from, there’s medicine you can buy almost anywhere. Little tablets. Cheap. Ordinary. You take them for pain or fever.”
He was quiet for a moment, and I became acutely aware of how close I had come to saying too much.
“A miracle.”
In this time something so simple would be a miracle.
Inside the shelter, Gilda made a low sound. I set the bowl down so quickly pottage sloshed over the rim and onto my fingers.
Eadgyth’s voice came at once. “She sleeps.”
Slowly, I sat again.
“You cannot keep doing that,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Waiting for every sound as though it is the beginning of a disaster.”
“I’m not.”
He said nothing, the infuriating man.
I picked up the bowl again, though my appetite had vanished.
* * *
For the next two days, my world shrank to the lean to and the narrow space around it.
Eadgyth tended the wound, cleaning it, replacing the honey dressing, brewing willow bark for fever and pain, making Gilda drink whenever she woke, and muttering over herbs whose names slid out of my exhausted brain almost as soon as she spoke them.
I did what I could to help. I carried water, boiled cloths, held the cup when Gilda was too weak to manage it herself, changed blankets when the fever soaked them through, and helped lift her while Eadgyth adjusted the pallet beneath her.
Mostly, though, I sat and waited. That was the hardest part.
At a fire, there was always something to do.
A hose to drag. A door to force. A room to search.
A person to move. Even after the flames were out there were reports, equipment checks, tea, jokes, the practical rituals that kept everyone busy enough not to think about all the things that could have gone differently.
Here, there was no fire to fight, there was only Gilda breathing too quickly beneath a wool blanket while I counted the spaces between one breath and the next.
Whenever I left, even for a few minutes, my skin crawled. What if the fever climbed or her breathing changed? What if something happened while I was gone?
By the second evening, Eadgyth caught me moving the same clay cup from one side of the shelter to the other for no reason at all.
“Get some sleep.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are walking into things.” She narrowed her eyes at me.
“That branch moved.”
She pointed toward the entrance, but I ignored her and stayed where I was.
Then Wulfric appeared behind me silent as a ghost.
“You sent for him,” I accused as Wulfric bent and picked me up.
Eadgyth looked pleased with herself.
My head ended up against his shoulder, one of his arms beneath my knees and the other firm around my back, as the warmth of him soaked through my clothes with alarming efficiency.
“Put me down.”
“Nay.”
I would have objected more forcefully if I’d possessed enough strength to lift my head.
Instead, I let him carry me through the camp while firelight flickered between the trees and people pretended not to watch.
His stride was steady despite the uneven ground, and every now and then the edge of his cloak brushed my hand where it rested against his chest.
For one exhausted moment, I let myself lean into him. That frightened me enough that I nearly asked him to put me down again.
He carried me into a small shelter, lowered me onto a pallet, and pulled a wool blanket over me.
“I need to go back.”
His hand settled over mine before I could throw the blanket aside.
“You think if you stand watch long enough, death must ask your leave before entering.”
The words found something inside me with such precision that for a moment I couldn’t breathe.
“You don’t understand.”
The instant I said it, I knew I was wrong.
“Aye,” he said quietly. “I do understand.”
Aelfwyn. Her name sat between us without being spoken.
“I should’ve noticed Gilda was getting worse.”
“You are not her healer.”
“I saw the wound.”
“So did everyone.”
“I should’ve checked her sooner.”
“You were moving a hundred people through fire.” He ran a hand through his hair, the leather tie gone. The blonde was mixed with gold and honey, down to his shoulders and thick enough to make women envious.
“People die when someone misses something,” I said, thinking of Brian’s radio going silent, the warehouse roof coming down, and the report saying there had been no way to reach him in time.
No mistake and no one to blame. No single moment I could go back and change. I hated that most of all.
Wulfric didn’t tell me everything happened for a reason, or that I had done my best, or that grief would someday make me stronger, because both of us knew how useless words became when someone you cared for was dead. He simply sat beside me, his hand still covering mine.
Two people who knew that sometimes you could do everything right and still lose. His thumb moved once across the back of my hand.
When I woke, gray morning light seeped through the shelter entrance, thin and cold, and for one awful second I didn’t know why my heart was racing, then I remembered.
Gilda.
I was on my feet before the blanket hit the ground.
The camp blurred around me as I ran, wet leaves slipping beneath my boots while voices rose behind me. Wulfric followed, though I didn’t look back.
I reached the sick shelter and nearly collided with Eadgyth, who stood beside the entrance holding a cup.
“What’s happened?”
The healer frowned and took a drink of ale.
“Must you always arrive as though the Normans are chasing you?”
At the look on my face, she moved aside.
Gilda’s eyes were closed, but the terrible flush had faded from her face.
I touched her forehead and my throat tightened when it was cooler than it had been.
Gilda opened one eye.
“You look like something the dog rolled in.”
I laughed so sharply it hurt. “Your fever’s down.”
“Aye?”
From behind me, Eadgyth said, “It is.”
When she nodded, relief hit me so hard I had to sit back as Gilda watched me with sleepy irritation.
“You are very dramatic.”
“You nearly died.”
Her hand moved weakly against the blanket and I took it, holding it gently. For the first time in two days, I let myself breathe without counting the next one.
I sat there with my hand wrapped around hers while dawn slowly brightened the shelter and the camp began waking outside, returning to life one cough, one footstep, one crackle of fire at a time.
A horn sounded from the edge of camp, meaning arrival not the Normans. It was scary how quickly I’d picked up on the different sounds and their meanings. I looked at Wulfric, but he was already moving.
A moment later, Wystan appeared in the entrance, breathing hard.
“Riders,” he said. “From the north.”
Wulfric’s expression sharpened. “How many?”
“Three.”
“Do you know them?”
Wystan swallowed, his young face pale. “One bears King Harold’s colors.”
The relief drained from Wulfric’s face as something cold settled in my stomach, because I knew what news was coming.