Page 62 of A Highland Healer Captured
In silence.
At the solar door, she paused, the dirk’s weight reminding her she could cut herself free of anything she pretended was ribbon. “I’m—” she began, then stopped because thank ye and I’ll stay and I must go all pressed at once, jostling like drunk men at a narrow door.
“Ye’ll do as ye must,” he said, saving her, because sometimes kindness was closing a door for a woman’s jumbled words to rest behind. “When the hour comes, we’ll both ken it.”
She nodded. “And until then?—”
“Until then,” he said, “we’ll make the world small. The lad, a cup, this door, a key.” He touched two fingers to the jamb and not to her. It felt like restraint worn as honor.
She slipped inside to Katie’s hum and Grayson’s soft, stubborn breath. The new dirk a line of cold along her side, but what lingered warmer still was the place he hadn’t touched, the air between them still humming like nectar bird. The imagined key a warm circle in her palm though it did not yet exist.
It was love. It coursed through her. The warmth of it was unmistakable. Horrid and wretched… creeping… accurate. It was love for a child that wasn’t hers, for a life’s work, and for a man who she had no right to want, for a life she could never keep. It moved in her veins like the weather moved across the country. Unrelenting. On a war path, even.
And yet, duty still waited. It always waited. Ariella’s name clung to her like a shadow, whispering louder the closer Skylar drifted toward Zander’s fire.
Four days.
Skyler dragged another breath, rolling her shoulders back stiffly.
She had four days to get Grayson well enough to stand on his own. Four days to catch the hand that had meant to harm him. Four days left to lie in the same air as Zander and pretend that she could walk away whole.
She set her hands to the rest of the day, every motion taut with the battle in her chest. Love clawed at her ribs, and duty at her spine, and neither would let her go.
Four… days.
20
Skylar tied her cloak close at the throat the next morning, and glanced down the passage to be sure Katie had settled with Grayson’s slate and bird book. “An hour,” she’d said. “Nay more. If he stirs, send for the laird. I’ll just be out past the gardens to the market wagons.”
“Aye, I ken,” Katie had answered, eyes kind and sharp in the same breath. “Go get yer bits. I’ll mind the wee hawk.”
Now the yard caught Skylar’s face with cold and color, and Cora fell in at her side as if she’d been waiting there all morning. The lass had a small basket hooked in her elbow and a list pinned under her thumb with the care of a clerk.
“Ye’re nae searchin’ for anything too expensive, are ye?” Cora asked, tone light, eyes measuring. “The laird said ye might want vinegar and lint, but I reckon ye’ll come back with half the hedge.”
“I like hedges,” Skylar said. “They save bairns more than saints do.”
Cora’s mouth ticked.
They crossed beneath the gate arch and onto the lane that ran toward the lower crofts. Two of Mason’s men pretended to be discussing a broken strap thirty paces back; neither of the women pretended not to notice. A milk cart rattled by; the driver lifted fingers from the reins without quite bowing—a courtesy to a stranger under the laird’s wing.
“How is he?” Cora asked, too casually. “I’m barred, like the rest. Feels queer to be shut from the solar when me nettles have lived there all this time.”
Skylar’s throat tightened around the answer she’d rehearsed. Lie, she told herself. Lie for the sake of the game that saves him. “He’s… nae better. Maybe worse,” she muttered, her tongue thick. “Nights are rough. His chest catches.” She shrugged too sharply, a healer’s gesture turned into a lie, and hated herself for how clumsy it felt.
Cora’s eyes slid sideways, quick as a swallow. “Aye?” Her tone said she did not buy goods by the first price offered. “He laughed yesterday when I stood out in the courtyard, under the window and asked Katie for a thread color through the glass. Laughter is a poor companion to dyin’.”
Skylar kept walking. “Laughter has kept more folk alive than any tincture has,” she returned, and left it there. Guilt pricked underher cloak like a twig. She could not tell the lass that the keep was a snare now, baited with cups and honey.
She also couldn’t tell her that the boy was improving faster than ever, because he’s not really ill, but was being poisoned.
They reached the croft strip where market wagons stopped on their way to the village green—half-stalls open to the wind, the smell of yeast and peat smoke, a woman turning oatcakes on a girdle, a boy calling out about onions as if he were selling jewels.
“Vinegar first,” Skylar said, claiming the small practicals before she could be stolen by bigger thoughts. She tested the bite with her nose, chose the sharper cask, and paid with coin. “For burns an’ boasters,” she told Cora, who nodded solemnly at the joke as if it were a law.
A stall of auld herbs came next—witch hazel tied in neat bundles, yarrow dried pale, a ragged heap of Iceland moss that looked like poor men’s lace. Skylar sank her fingers into it, lifted, and let it fall. “It’ll do,” she said. “If ye rinse it thrice.”
“Like gossip,” Cora said.
