Page 64 of A Highland Healer Captured
“Kind enough,” Skylar said carefully but shrugged anyway.
“Oh, aye,” The lass looked up at her, the sharpness back in her gaze. “We’ve what we came for. Let’s be nae on his path when he circles back again.”
“Ye think he’ll circle?”
“Men like that always do,” Cora said matter-of-factly, and started walking as if she could pull the keep toward them by will.
They kept to the hedge shade returning, not running, not dawdling; just two women with a basket and a list and a feeling they did not want to feed. The guards back along the lane lifted their chins and melted from the strap-talk into motion, unseen by everyone who wasn’t meant to see.
At the gate, Cora found speech the way a woman finds a needle dropped in rushes: quick and quiet. “Daenae tell the laird I looked like a rabbit.”
“Ye looked like a cat with a notion,” Skylar said.
“Hmph.” Cora’s chin tilted. “Ye’ll nae tell him?”
Skylar considered how the day had shaped up. All at once, she knew more than she had ever thought she would know about Zander. She was given a dirk to protect herself, and a room to stay in. She’s even just beenaskedto stay Grayson’s pulse under her fingers, the scent of the honey that had come to nothing this time, the stranger’s name stuck like a fishbone.
“I’ll tell him the things that matter to the lad’s breath,” she said. “The rest I’ll think on till it fits.”
Cora seemed to accept that, for good or ill. “I’ll put the vinegar up. The needles, too. Marcus—” She swallowed the name like bad medicine and changed it. “Mason’ll like to ken ye didnae buy cheap.”
“Aye,” Skylar said, smiling because it was easier than showing what rubbed at her. “He’d scold me worse than ye.”
Cora’s mouth softened. “Nobody scolds worse than me.”
“Except me,” Skylar said.
They descended to the surgery, unpacked in purposeful silence. Skylar decanted the vinegar, labeled the jar herself because letters steadied her, set the good needles in a small tin, shook the moss fine and set it to rinse. Work healed most ills—hers too. Still, as she washed her hands, she caught the scent on her skin: honey, vinegar, a hint of something new.
Star anise? Vanilla? Hmm…
“Cora,” she said, because sense and instinct had been friends longer than men had. “If ye ever meet a man twice and the second time feels worse than the first, ye come fetch me. Nae because I’m a laird’s woman. Because I’m a woman that bites.”
Cora’s smile flashed quick and real. “I’ll fetch ye,” she said. “And I like hedges, too.”
“Good,” Skylar said, and went to the solar with her basket feeling heavier than any list could explain.
Grayson slept. Katie hummed. Skylar set the clean tin and the vinegar on the small shelf by the window and breathed once, long. “We’ll do this,” she whispered, to the boy, to the honey, to the man with a borrowed name. “We’ll do it careful.”
Outside, the yard argued cheerfully with bunting again, the keep pretending it hadn’t heard anything at all.
The days tightened their circle until the keep felt like a cupped hand holding one small flame. Zander lived in that circle: the solar, the surgery, the short corridor between, the chair by the bed where a father learned the shape of his patience.
Grayson had grown talkative in his quiet. “Da,” he said, chin propped, “if ravens ken faces, d’ye think they ken mine? Might they like me if I wore a feather?”
“They’ll like ye if ye feed them and they’ll love ye if ye cheat them,” Zander said, dealing the dice into his palm so the click made the boy’s eyes brighten. “But they’ll never trust ye. They’re too like men for that.”
Skylar laughed under her breath at the foot of the bed, where she sorted a neat misery of poultices as if cards in a game only she knew how to win. “He’s nae wrong,” she said. “I’ve seen ravens keep books. Better than some lairds.”
“Watch yerself,” Zander told her, but his mouth couldn’t find sternness with her eyes smiling like that.
They played when Grayson had breath for laughing, read when he had breath for listening, sat quiet when he needed quiet. Skylar moved between them and what might harm him with an ease that made Zander’s chest sore: a cloth turned, a cupchecked, a hand at the boy’s wrist, a word like a feather at the right time.
The stillroom was coming right in the next chamber, and though Zander had wanted to hand her the key that instant, he held it. He’d give it when the smell of lime had gone, and the room would be truly hers.
Kirn was in three days’ time.
Everywhere he looked, men were talking tar and bonfires were alight. Women were threading rope with scraps of color and quarrel. Fiddles were trying their strings in corners. And Grayson heard it all in the hum and thirsted.
