Page 92 of A Highland Healer Captured
The room seemed larger without him and smaller at once. Skylar stepped back to the bed, checked the dressings again, laid her palm on Zander’s chest and counted a hundred steady beats. Shedrew a blanket to his waist; the rest of him she left bare to air the bandages.
“Sleep,” she told him, just above a whisper. “I’ll hold the watch.”
She set her stool near the hearth, but she did not take her eyes off him. When the fire sank she fed it; when the wind jogged the shutter she looked up, knife within reach. Sometimes she spoke—nonsense, plans, the inventory she’d send boys for at dawn. Sometimes she was quiet. Once, near morning, she let her head tip sideways to the bed and her fingers fold around his, and she slept in the space between two of his slow breaths.
When the first pale seam of light found the slit of the shutter and laid a line across the floorboards to the bed, she was awake again, stiff and grimy and oddly calm—the kind of calm a healer grew when the worst thing had been headed off and a dozen merely hard things waited their turn.
“Right,” she told the day, and squeezed Zander’s hand once before she stood. “We’ll see what shape ye wake in, laird. And then we’ll see if I’m strong enough to leave ye.”
His fingers twitched under her palm. Just that. Just enough to give her one more hour of courage.
Zander woke at noon and insisted on walking by evening. He was a terrible patient, which Skylar had suspected and had proof of, and there was no point spending breath she’d need later. She bound him, fed him, and set men at his elbow, and when he shook them off with a look she could not in fairness call gentle,she set another pair two paces behind to pretend they were going her way.
He was everywhere and nowhere at once after that: on the wall-walk conferring with archers; in the yard with the smith, his voice low and clipped; in the hall with Fergus and Tamhas arguing placements for the stalls in the final days of Kirn as if the world were not just now trying to set his keep alight.
Skylar told herself it was natural he would be scarce—wounded pride and wounded shoulder both required occupying—but something in his manner troubled her. He was correct with her; he was grateful; he was careful not to touch her. If she stepped near, he was already stepping away to the next duty.
Her pride saidlet him. Her chest saidfollow.
By late afternoon she chose a path that kept her from both. She moved through the surgery, the hall, the yard with basins, salves, orders, and the kind of clean voice that steadies men more than music. When she passed the spike in the courtyard, its prize swallowed flies and sunlight without comment. She did not look at it more than a heartbeat. She wished it were more; she wished it were less. She wished the laird had left room in his day to be a man with a mouth and not just a sword.
Katie woke fully after sunset and tried to sit bolt upright, which earned her a scolding and broth. “Ye’ll live if ye don’t act daft,” Skylar told her, tears threatening to undo everything she’d tied neatly. “I’ll fetch ye a mirror tomorrow and ye can curse the swelling at leisure.”
“Daenae fetch me a mirror,” Katie mumbled. “Fetch me yer patience.”
“I’ve none left,” Skylar said, and kissed her brow again to prove it wasn’t true.
The calm cracked when a runner found her near the stair. “Lady Skylar,” he said, breathless with the kind of news boys know is bigger than they are, “the MacLennan standard… it’s at the gate.”
For a moment everything inside her fell very quiet.
Then her legs moved of their own accord.
She crossed the yard—past men mending rope, past the place where Marcus was becoming another kind of lesson—and took the inner stair two at a time, straight to Zander’s study.
He was there, of course he was, shoulder bound under clean linen, hair still wet where someone sensible had made him wash the blood off his face. He stood at the table with the map rolled half back, reading something that wasn’t the map at all.
“Ye sent for me faither,” she said without greeting, without grace, and knew as the words left her mouth she had no right to make them a charge.
Zander did not start.
He looked up slowly, as if he had expected her at just that moment. There was nothing cruel in his face. There was nothing soft either.
“I did,” he said.
“Because ye found me letter,” she said, hearing too late the tremor.
“Aye.”
She stepped forward, palms flat on the table between them, and tried to make sense out of the small rawness where her breath had lived all day. “Ye wrote him what?”
“That ye were alive,” he said. “That I took ye. That ye saved me son. That there was a man vowed against us both, and I would put his head on a spike.” His mouth didn’t so much as twitch. “I kept that last bit for meself.”
She should have laughed. She did not. “And now?”
“Now he is at me gate,” Zander said, each word clean as a pinned line on vellum, “and I will open it to him.”
It was the right answer.
