Chapter Six #2
The cut across his ribs had opened at one end where she had caught it with the flat, and there was a thin line of red down over the binding she had put on it. That was what he thought she was looking at. He reached for the shirt to put it back on.
“Stop,” she said.
He stopped.
She came over. She did not touch him. She looked at the ribs first. Then her eyes went up over his chest and his shoulder to the whole left side of him. The skin there was pulled and silvered in patches the size of coins, gone soft and pale with the years, older than anything else on him.
He had known her since she was small enough to ride on Hamish’s shoulders. She had known about the illness her whole life, the same way she knew the colour of his eyes. The marks it had left on his face had been there every day she had ever looked at him.
She had never seen what it had done to the rest of him, though.
“Arran,” she said.
“It’s old.” He got the shirt up. “It’s nothin’ tae look at.”
“Put it down.”
“Alexandra—”
“Put the shirt down and tell me.” There was something new in her voice. “Ye’ve been carryin’ that under yer clothes since ye were a lad and I never kent. I’ve kent ye all me life. How is it I never kent?”
He put the shirt down.
He sat down on the turf because it was easier to say sitting. She sat beside him. He told it looking at the river.
“Ye ken that me own clan was destroyed when I was a lad,” he said. “Ye ken that me mother and me father died in it. What ye dinnae ken is what happened tae me after, because I’ve never told ye, and I’ve never told a soul that didnae live through it with me.”
“I ken that part.”
“There was nae one left tae take me in. So I lived in the streets of the town. I slept in doorways until they moved me on, and then in a byre behind the market, and I was there a long while.” He picked a stone out of the turf and turned it over in his fingers.
“Then I got sick. Nae a cough. The kind that gets intae the skin and stays there. And there was nae healer for a boy sleepin’ in a byre, so it didnae get better.
It got worse and worse, and it kept gettin’ worse, and I want ye tae understand that it was never goin’ tae stop on its own.
I was dyin’ in that byre. That’s the plain word for it, and I’ll nae dress it up for ye… ”
Beside him she had gone completely quiet.
“How long were ye in that byre?”
“I couldnae tell ye how long. A while. I mind the cold better than I mind the days.” He put the stone down. “There was another lad in that byre with me. He was there when I went in and he wasnae there after, and I was too far gone tae ken which day it happened.”
“Arran.”
“And then Aila found me.” His voice changed, because this was the part he liked.
“She wasnae lookin’ for me. She’d nae idea I existed.
She was walkin’ past the back of the byres on her own business and she saw a boy lyin’ in the dirt, and she stopped.
That’s the whole of it. She stopped when nae one else had stopped for months.
” He looked up. “She had two women with her, Sorcha and Taryn, and between the three of them they got me up. And by then there was Christopher and Elsie as well, for the two of them had taken me in as their own when they had nothin’ themselves, so Aila took the three of us together.
She wouldnae leave one behind.” He turned the stone over again.
“She took the three of us home tae Kincaid Keep. She put me in a bed and she got a real healer tae me, and that healer sat up with me for weeks. That’s why I’m here talkin’ tae ye.
Nae because I was strong. Because a woman stopped in a lane when nae one else had. ”
“And Lachlan?”
“Lachlan came intae that room and looked at me a long while, and then he asked me me father’s name.
” Arran’s mouth went crooked. “He kent it before I said it. He’d stood at me christenin’, ye see.
He’s me godfather. Me father was his closest friend in all the world.
” He stopped there. “And me father is the reason our clan was destroyed. Lachlan kent that when he looked at me in that bed, and he took me in anyway, and he has never once put it on me. Nae in all the years since.” He turned his hands over.
“So I’m a Kincaid by blood, whatever else is true of me.
Christopher and Elsie arenae, nae by blood.
They became Kincaids after Lachlan married Aila, and there isnae a soul in that clan that would tell ye they belong tae it any less than I do. ”
She was crying. She had not made a sound about it. She did not wipe her face. Her hand had come up to her throat and stopped there. She was looking at him the way she had looked at him in the river.
“Ye were a child.”
“I was. And I’m here.” He kept his voice light, because this was the whole reason he had told her any of it.
“That’s me point, Alexandra. Death has had two clear runs at me and it didnae take.
Once in that byre and once in a field near yer father’s border with a Campbell blade in the way, and I’m sat on this bank drippin’ wet at ye.
So ye can stop lyin’ awake over it. I’m harder tae kill than I look. ”
She took it without a word, and the fear he had been trying to lift off her came down harder instead.
He saw exactly the moment it went into her and turned into the opposite thing. Her chin came up. Her jaw set. She nodded at him the way people nod when they have decided to say nothing at all, then got up, picked up the practice blades, and handed him his wet shirt.
“We’ll be late,” she said.
He went after her through the willows. The sun came over the hill and put their shadows out long on the path in front of them.
He had told her that story to take the fear off her, yet every word of it had made her more afraid. He had never in his life put a thing so badly.