Page 89 of A Highland Healer Captured
“Nay one touches it!” he roared, words scraping raw. “Nay one—nae even when the carrion have had their fill! He will rot at the doorstep of Strathcairn!”
The cry split the yard like thunder. His men bowed heads, some crossing themselves, others spitting for luck. Marcus’s remaining fighters dropped weapons, courage shattered.
Zander stood a moment longer, the taste of iron thick on his tongue, the fury in him still hot as forge-fire. Then he turned, eyes lifting to the solar window where a faint light burned. Skylar would be with the boy, keeping count of every breath.
And Zander swore in the silence that followed,Nay man would ever again set foot in this keep with intent to harm what is mine. Nae while I draw breath.
The great hall reeked of smoke, sweat, and blood.
Skylar’s hands would not still, even though her arms had begun to shake hours ago. She pressed cloth to wounds, tied linen around gashes, poured vinegar where men howled and begged her not to. A woman’s hands, not a soldier’s, but they worked faster than the soldiers’ blades had.
“Hold him,” she snapped to a lad of no more than twelve. “Keep him steady.” She leaned over the man with the arrow still lodged in his thigh. “Breathe, lad, breathe. Ye’ll nae bleed out if ye just breathe.” She snapped the shaft, slid it free, and shoved a poultice hard against the wound. His scream rattled her bones, but his eyes didn’t roll back.
Good. Still alive.
The hall was lined with the fallen—most alive, some not. She refused to count the still ones. Not when the living needed her hands, her voice.
Her mind raced even while her hands moved.Grayson. Katie. Zander.Each name pounded in her head like a drum.
“Water,” she called, and a bucket sloshed into her reach. She dunked her cloth, wrung it out, pressed it against a man’s chest where a cut gaped. She tied, tightened, checked the pulse. It thudded. She moved on.
She moved from pallet to pallet, binding wounds, washing blood, pouring draughts into trembling hands. Skylar took note of the murmur of men too worn to keep their thoughts behind their teeth. Trying to hear anything that would give her a sign that Zander was still alive.
“… put his head on the spike…” one whispered hoarsely, awe in his tone.
“Aye,” another rasped, half-reverent, half-fearful. “Said nay one’s to touch it…nae even when the carrion have their fill. Like the old days. Like his father before him.”
“Our laird. Savage when roused. That’s the Strathcairn way.”
The words rippled low through the wounded, whispers in every corner of the hall. The brutal end. The wild laird. The monster who’d kept his clan alive by showing no mercy. The same manshe had once feared when his shadow had filled her path on the road.
Her hands stilled on the bandage she was tying. The image rose in her mind unbidden. Zander, sword red, eyes black as pitch, his rage made flesh. A man who had spiked a head in his own yard for all to see.
But instead of dread, she felt her chest swell. He had not done it to terrify the weak, but to warn the wicked. Justice, brutal and clean, had been served in full.
Her pulse hammered with urgency. She needed to see him. To look into his face and know the man who had once been only her captor, feared and hated, had become something else entirely. Hers.
Skylar forced her fingers steady, tying the last knot, and rose to her feet. The whispers followed her as she crossed the hall, her skirts brushing the rushes, her heart straining forward.
She would find him. She would stand before him and see the truth of what he was—not a monster, but the shield between his people and the dark.
Where was he?
She wiped her bloody hands on her skirts and strode out into the yard. The fires had dimmed, but the ground was littered with the night’s truth: bodies, weapons, torches guttering out. The spikeat the courtyard’s heart bore its grisly prize. She swallowed hard and kept moving.
“Laird’s down there!” someone shouted.
Skylar’s feet carried her before she thought. Down the slope of the yard, past the well, where a knot of men parted quickly at her approach. And there?—
Zander Harrison. The merciless. The brute. The Unforgiving. The Laird. The Father. The Man. Sat slumped against the wall, one hand pressed to his shoulder, blood seeping dark through his fingers. His chest rose and fell shallow, each breath a growl torn from somewhere deep. His eyes were open, though, burning, fixed on her the moment she broke through the ring of men.
“Skylar,” he said, rough, hoarse.
Her throat tightened. “Saints, look at ye.”
She dropped to her knees, hands already pulling her satchel open, searching for linen, vinegar, needle. “Let me see it.”
“Nay,” he rasped, and before she could argue, his bloody hand shot up and caught her jaw. His grip was firm, hot, unyielding.
