Page 60 of A Highland Healer Captured
They continued down the long fold of ground home, speaking in pockets and silences. Zander didn’t fill gaps; he let them hold, as if silence could carry a share of the weight when words were tired. Skylar wondered when she’d last been walked beside without being tugged, hauled, or fenced. The thought warmed her, then chilled her because it was foolish to soften when the road ahead was stone.
“What about Cora?” She prompted at last, when the keep’s rooflines showed like teeth over the rise.
“Aye, Cora...” His mouth went hard the way a wound does when weather shifts.
She waited. He took them off the path again, into a stand of birch thin as needles, leaves shivering like secrets. When he spoke,the words came flat, as if he had hammered them into planks to cross a swamp and dared not look down.
“Me faither died,” he said. “Old, as men hope. The house went quiet for a time—grief does that, and relief, both. I took the seat. We kept the gates open the way he had when he remembered his best self, and shut them when he forgot. Folk tested me; that’s the right of folk. I held.”
He plucked a leaf and worried its stem. “Cora came to the keep. Nae at first. Later.After. A lost thing with a straight back. She didnae ask for warmth. I gave it anyway because I thought if I outspent the world’s cruelty, I’d owe it less.”
Skylar said nothing. The birch made its own music, dry as paper.
“Her clan,” he went on, “had rotted from the core—faither cruel, brother worse. I had heard it in whispers for years, done what I could with the law men listen to. It’s a poor law for girls. Ye ken it.”
“Aye,” Skylar said, and her mouth tasted like old iron.
“We were at our peace—nae happy, Skylar, but… steady—when Marcus decided his faither’s teeth werenae big enough. He tested me by testing me house. Came to me gate with a handful of men who called themselves more than they were, caught us thin on the east wall because a storm had pulled stone. He ran like a fox when the yard turned against him. That part, folk ken. The part I didnae say in these halls is what came between his run and his end.”
He stopped moving. She stopped because walking alone felt careless.
“Me wife died that night,” he said. “Nae by his blade. By the fear, the crush, the smoke.” His jaw clenched. “I was nae at her side. I was cutting men off the gate. I chose the yard over the chamber and tell meself still that it was the right choice, that the living needed me more than one lass. It’s a good lie some days. It breaks me teeth on some others.”
Skylar felt the birch leaves’ shiver down in her skin. She imagined a room with smoke under the rafters and a woman—no friend of men’s bodies, but a friend to a man’s house—trying to breathe. “She kent ye’d have saved her if ye could.”
“Aye,” he said roughly. “And if that helps, it’s a penny where a purse was taken.” He crushed the leaf in his fist. The green went dark where his fingers squeezed. “I blamed the man who set it moving. I keep doing it. It doesnae bring breath back to the dead, but it keeps breath in the living.”
He looked up then, and she saw the place behind his eyes that he’d kept shuttered. It wasn’t empty. It was full of things put away so carefully they’d become sharp.
“I chased Marcus,” he said. “Nae like a laird or with any sense of propriety. I hunted him like a hound hunts the hog. And he laughed.Laughedwhen I told him he’d answer for his insult against me clan. And he — he vowed to take me son’s life.”
The birch hush went out. Skylar’s hand closed on the parcel of linen as if it were a charm.
“I couldnae have him live with that vow in the air,” Zander said, very quiet. “Nae for the men behind me, nae for the women in me yard, nae for a wee lad who’d sleep safer if there were one less shadow in the world. I killed him. In a blind rage. I killed him.”
He didn’t look away. He didn’t ask forgiveness. “That’s between me and the Lord, now,” was all he said.
Skylar’s throat worked.
She was healer enough to see the shape of a fever when it raged through a house; she was woman enough to know some fevers take men and leave rage behind like a coat that never dries. “Cora, was Marcus’ sister?” she asked, slowly putting pieces together.
“She’s nae his sin,” Zander said swiftly. “She was his prey. I took her out of that house and put her in mine because I kent she was safer here. She and Marcus shared blood the way a lamb and a fox share a field. She doesnae ken that he led the attack against us. He’s evil, and deserves none of her love, but I’ll nae be the one to taint her idea of him further.”
“I’ll nae say anythin’ about it,” Skylar said, stung that he’d think it.
“Aye,” he said, and some of the whipcord in him eased. “I ken.”
They stood there until the birch’s whisper turned to a hiss under a rising wind. Skylar felt the shape of the tale settle in her, heavy as a winter cloak and needed as one. He had handed her a cut and a needle and told her to make of it what she pleased.
“I daenae ken whether I like the man ye were,” she said, because honesty was a muscle and went weak when neglected.
“Neither do I,” he returned, bare.
She glanced toward the keep, its edges softened by distance. “But I’m working for the man ye are now,” she said. “And for the laddie.”
He exhaled, a long, careful letting go. “That’ll do.”
They started toward the gate again. On the ridge above, a rook scolded them.
