Page 30 of A Highland Healer Captured
But a loosening, like the twists and turns of a sailor’s knot relaxing.
Zander had not come roaring back with chains either.
In the days that followed, the pattern held. When she walked the corridor to the surgery, Mason trailed at a distance, though not at her elbow. When she climbed the stair to her chamber, Cora sometimes walked with her, speaking softly of inventories and keeping up a constant, comforting patter about jars and jars of dried petals. But her bedroom door remained unlocked. Katie visited often throughout her day, but no longer hovered.
Her new relaxed routine was either a courtesy or a miscalculation, she could not say. Though, no matter how her stay was improving day over day, Grayson, however, had not.
Skylar tried gentler steams over warmed rocks, thyme and chamomile rising in fragrant clouds that loosened him for an hour and no more. She layered onion poultices at his chest to draw heat, then swapped them for mustard plasters to stir circulation.
She measured his waking pulse at wrist and throat, frowned at the speed of it, and noted how quickly the color fled his lips after the smallest excitement.
“He needs the outside,” she said to Katie on the second day after the kiss, watching the boy sleep while the light died from the windows. “Air that moves. Light that isnae filtered through smoke. The closed rooms make him worse.”
Katie worried her lower lip. “But last time?—”
“I ken. I was just statin’ facts,” Skylar muttered, and swallowed the argument. She would not risk the storm again. Not yet. Not while she was this uncertain—of the treatment, of the laird, of herself.
Instead, she turned to craft. “Cora,” she said the next morning, beckoning the girl closer in the surgery. “I will need supplies I didnae see on the shelves in the surgery—elecampane root, whole, not powdered; Iceland moss, if ye can find it; wild cherry bark, well dried; and coltsfoot, though fresh is best. Send a runner to every crofter ye trust, and to any chapel-herb garden that keeps a medicine bed.”
Cora’s dark brows rose, pleased. “A bold blend.”
“A stubborn illness needs a stubborn draught.” Skylar managed a smile. “And Grayson’s illness is as stubborn as any I’ve ever seen.”
Cora made her notes neatly, promised to get the list in front of the laird before the sun reached its height, and slipped away with quiet purpose.
By noon, a trickle of offerings began—bundles wrapped in scrap cloth, small pouches of bark, a jar of shriveled lichens that smelled like sea wind and clean stone. Skylar sorted and sifted, rejecting the worst, praising the best, feeling the old craftsman’s pleasure steady her hands.
Seven days into her stay—she realized the count with a start, as if time had been a rope paid out behind her without her noticing—she asked, a touch too casually, where the laird had gone. Katie had a way of answering without realizing she gave anything away, and Skylar had a way of guiding a conversation that had brought stubborn shepherds to the truth of their ailments more times than she could number.
“Where’s the laird been all week, anyway?” Skylar asked as she strained a syrup through linen, the dark thread of wild cherry dripping slow into a jar.
Katie, folding cloths, barely looked up. “The Kirn preparations. Ye’ll hear the pipes before long. Stalls to set, beasts to judge, ale to cask, songs to pick, and every cousin of every crofter wants a say.”
“Ye celebrate Kirn?” Skylar kept her tone light and let the word ring as if she was simply searching memory.
“Aye, of course?” Katie asked, straightening and playfully scowling at Skylar.
“Still the same Harvest thanksgiving or are ye celebrating somethin’ else?”
“Och! Aye, and the fields gave well enough this year, God be thanked, so it’ll be a proper feast. There’ll be games in the yard and a procession with the last sheaf, and the children will have sticky hands, and the old men will argue about whose bull is handsomest.”
“And the laird?”
“Busy,” Katie said, cheerful as ever. “Always outdoes himself, he does. Loves when the clan comes together, it seems. Quite nice.”
Skylar nodded and bent over her jar so the maid could not see the way her expression shifted. A festival meant bodies. Bodies meant noise. Noise meant cover. If she was to run, that would be the time.
It was the first thought that came after Katie’s explanation, and it struck her with shame that Ariella’s face did not come first—pale with fever, eyes sunken, the pen-strokes of her aunt’s desperate letter dense as rain. She had not forgotten her cousin. She had simply… lived, inside this other need, this other child, this maddening laird. Guilt slicked her palms.
She asked sly questions after that, the way she would pull at a thread under a bandage to see if the wound knit clean: What hour did the cattle walk the ring? Where would the musicians gather to tune? Which gate would be opened for the drovers’ carts?
Katie answered everything as if it were the most unremarkable thing to share. Mason, had he been in the room, might have caught the shape hidden under Skylar’s curiosity. Cora, had she been near, might have tilted her head and asked why a healer needed to know which gate went unmanned after dark. But the men were elsewhere, and Cora was away sorting nettle from mint in the stores, and Katie, bless her, liked talking.
In the quiet moments between questions, Skylar pressed her palm to Grayson’s chest and counted. She felt the tight flutter there as if some small, desperate creature beat against a cage. Outside, gulls cried. Within, the boy slept.
When night fell and she retreated to her chamber, she did not blow the candle at once. She spread her journal in her lap and wrote—notes on dosage, on timing, on the ratio of moss to mullein, on the way the draught should be warmed and never boiled—and then she wrote, in a hand that slanted more sharply:Festival. Seven days. West gate? Pipers’ entry? Ask for more linen—excuse to stand by the yard. Must heal Grayson before.
A line later:Ariella.
