Éire’s Captive Moon (32 page)

He eyed her, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Dared he laugh? At her? She clenched her jaw against a string of particularly colorful oaths that Devlin used to use when thwarted in one matter or another.

After what seemed to her to be half the night, Cowan made a small movement. A beckoning gesture.

“Go to him, slave,” the woman called out with mild derision.

Feeling as if iron weighted her limbs, Charis obeyed. “Yes, my lady,” she said, every word sticking in her mouth like old thistles. She crossed the floor to Cowan’s side and knelt near the bench bed. Without a word, she opened her apron and loosened her pouches.

Conversation around the fire picked up a bit as she began the business of healing. Charis didn’t particularly care, but it let her speak to Cowan. To
Kingson
.

To emphasize her scorn, she spoke in the language of the Northmen. “I heard your wound reopened. If you will remove your trousers, I will clean it for you.”

He flipped back the heavy fur on his lap. “I already did, Eir,” he said, a smile in his voice.

Lifting the edge of his dark green tunic, she tried to focus on the wound. Her craft. Her skills. Not the traitor on whom she practiced them.

Her carefully preserved mint leaves went into a cold water wash, cleansing the opened wound before she turned to boil water over the nearest fire. As the water heated, Charis returned to her patient to remove the remnants of the old stitches. He hissed; she ignored him.

“Charis, lass,” he said eventually, his words tight as he controlled the pain her ministrations had to be causing him. A small shard of sympathy wiggled its way into her heart, but she ignored it and only tugged the last stitch out more vigorously. His hand stopped hers. “Healer. What’s wrong?”

She could not believe he had to ask. “Wrong?” she rasped in their mutual language. “Wrong? You’re sitting here in the land of the barbarians of your own free will and you ask me what’s wrong?” With an abrupt motion, she turned from him to watch over the water. When it boiled, she ladled some into a cup she had prepared with her other herbs and returned to make another cleansing poultice for the wound.

The hot mixture made her patient grit his teeth audibly. Good. “Now I’m going to clean this again and stitch you back up,” she said in the barbarian tongue. “This time, I would suggest you stay off your legs for a full seven days to allow your flesh time to grow back together.”

He grunted. She stitched.

“You do good work, Healer,” he said, drinking down the pain medicine she prepared for him. “I am not the only one who thinks so.”

Charis shot him a look that she hoped would silence him. She saw him smile instead. “Thank you.”

Charis bowed her head, determined to treat him as the Northman he had become, and proceeded to clean up her herbs and surgical tools. Lord Tuirgeis approached.

“So,
kvinn medisin
, will he live?” A jest lingered in the rough depth of the lord’s voice.

“
Ja
, Lord Tuirgeis, if he can keep off his feet for a while and let the flesh take hold,” Charis replied. She had never found resentment in herself for this man, though he had been the one who had led the raid on her homeland. He had not attacked her
rath
though. He had not been the one who had killed her men. And of course he had never touched her . . . unlike some of the men under his command.
Barbarians.

“Good. You are staying here tonight. We have one empty bed, there by the door. My cousin has said you can use it.” Charis nodded her acceptance, and he added, “Unless Geirmundr wishes you to stay with him?” Cowan was visibly startled; Charis saw his leg stiffen with surprise. Lord Tuirgeis chuckled. “I only meant in case you needed more pain medicine in the night.”

Charis did not know what to think, but she was just as happy to be on the empty bed next to the door. “I will have the medicine ready,” she assured the older man.

He left and Charis prepared to do likewise. Her patient stopped her, gripping her dress in determined fingers.

“Charis.”

“Why do you call me that? I’m not Charis. Not here,” she said, glaring at him. “You’re one of them now.”

“It’s not like that,” he whispered under the sounds of the family getting ready to sleep. Children were being tucked into their furs, the last dregs of mead were splashed back into the first hearth, and genial sounds rumbled at the other end of the
langhús
. “I’m only doing what I think is right, lass.”

She tugged herself away impatiently. “Right for you, maybe, but I hope your father dies before I get back to Éire and tell him of his faithless son!”

“Jesu, help me,” Cowan prayed, over and again as the hearth-fires were banked against the night. Charis’s parting shot had hit him in the heart, more powerfully even than whatever weapons had carved notches into him at the last battle. His adoption into Tuirgeis’s family had come as a surprise, yes, but he believed that God Almighty had provided for him. He was free now. And he hoped to be able to help Charis with his freedom, if he could.

If she would even listen to him now. He had not foreseen the naked hostility she threw at him this evening. Not in the least. He knew well that she was determined to escape, but if she could survive the attempt remained in grave doubt, as far as he was concerned.

He heard her preparing for sleep across the floor on the other side of the house. Bundles tucked in, scraping the wooden wall of her bed, the creaking of the bench with the weight of her body, soft muttering in
Gaeilge
. The other members of the family had settled in for the night. The children—both boys too young for duties beyond helping herd the goats—were still sharing their own memories of the impossible lightning that had set Els’s house aflame this night. They shared the bed next to Cowan’s own, and he smiled to hear their sleepy, small-boy chatter. It distracted him from his concerns over feelings far more complicated.

But even little boys fall asleep, and Cowan’s mind returned to his problem.

He felt that God had a reason for his being here. For his continual failure at previous escape attempts. For the compulsion to return to
Nordweg
even though he had been close to home before the snows fell. “Run fast and far,” Tuirgeis had said, in an edged warning.

Yet now, as a free man, did he have to run at all? Could he not leave of his own will and take Charis with him?

Would she even go now?

The night-sounds of the sleeping family settled comfortably around the
langhús
. Except in the bed closest to the door. A soft chanting floated to him almost unobtrusively. He had heard that sound before, on the boat, across the ocean. Night after night, he had heard it. It had tugged at him then, and it did so now; compelling him to get up and—against her orders—bundle the largest fur around himself to cross the room to her. The crossing was slow and each movement sent knife-edged shivers of pain through him. It did not matter at all.

She was rocking back and forth, singing softly to herself. He sank down to the bench next to her.

“Charis,” he whispered, leaning close to her.

She stiffened. “Go away, Northman.”

“
Na, na
,” he murmured soothingly. “I can’t leave you like this.”

With a half-strangled sound, she slumped over and he covered her with his arm. “Go away,” she mumbled again.

He shook his head and ignored the pulling stitches as he hitched himself more comfortably beside her. “No. Now listen, lass, I wanted to try to explain myself.”

She sniffled harshly and sat up. “Explain what?” In the almost total darkness, he had to cover her mouth to keep her from waking up the household. She shook him off, but spoke with only a bare amount of sound. “Explain why you turned your back on your own people?”

“I’m going back to them, Charis. I am. As a free man, not a slave.”

“What, so your pride is more important than the land that bore you?”

That stung. “No. Will you listen to me, woman?”

He could see the red glow of the coals through wisps of her hair as she faced him. “Why should I?”

“I’m a free man. I can help you,” he insisted, grabbing her by the shoulders. God help him, he wanted to shake some sense into her. “That’s one reason I was adopted.”

“Help me? Help me what?”

Frustrated, he did shake her. Once. “I can get you away from Agnarr Halvardson.” He had thought, perhaps, that this would be a relief to her. So when she did not answer right away, he was puzzled and dropped his hands. His leg was burning now, but he pushed the pain down.

“Get me away from him? How? By
buying
me?” He could hear a harsh intake of air. “I am not staying here,
Kingson
,” she reminded him. “I’m going home.”

“Buy you? No, of course not.” But what was he thinking then? Marrying her? She was already wed, in the manner that she accepted and that he acknowledged as binding, for her anyway. His beliefs would not allow him to interfere in that. Much. But he could do something. “I can help you. I promised to help you escape, remember?”

She snorted derisively. “Escape? Cowan, you couldn’t escape from this house with the door standing wide open.”

He was encouraged that she had used his given name and he smiled into the darkness. “Well, I can fight better than some,” he offered.

Her agreement was slow and silent in the long dip of her head. “I just don’t know if I can trust you to come with me. Lord Tuirgeis will offer you much to stay,” she whispered. He felt a little warning race along his senses at her pronouncement. It was close to the truth—closer than she could possibly know for certain. Was she that astute to have guessed so much or was she . . . could she be . . . the witch that the monk claimed?

No, she could not be. No. He put the doubt from his mind.

“You could escape,” he said at length. “I could help you get away.”

“Cowan . . .”

She said nothing further so he found her chin in the shadows to tilt her face toward him. “You think you can make your way from Balestrand to Ragor on your own? Remember what could have happened to you on the trip here?” He pushed her relentlessly, making her see her need of him for protection, if nothing else. “You think you’ll survive a journey alone? You think no man will see you?”

She understood and jerked her chin away in the same spirited defiance that had generally characterized her. “I don’t know if I can trust you, now, do I?”

It was his turn to be insulted, but he remembered to keep his voice quiet enough to go no farther than her bed.

“When have I ever touched you like that?”

“Not like that. No. But can I trust a man who would turn his back on his people?” He opened his mouth to say something, but her hand found his lips and she shut them. “No. Go back to bed, Cowan. I want no promises from you.”

Uncertain, he rose to his feet, stiff with more than the pain of his newly stitched wound. He relaxed only a bit when he heard her commanding whisper: “And stay off your feet.”

At least, he reflected discontentedly, she had spoken in the
Gaeilge
.

Chapter 24

The walls were closing in on her.

Charis had her back to the other occupants of Agnarr’s home as she worriedly sorted her herbs. Again. There were not many to sort this late in the winter. The healer knew—intimately—how much of each herb she had to draw from for the remainder of the season. It was only that this winter was so much longer that caused her concern about the health of those around her.

Most
of those around her, anyway.

“We know, Healer,” Bran said as he sidled up to her. His voice carried his usual snide, ugly undertone.

“Know what?” she asked, glaring at him for daring to interrupt her already limited privacy.

Bran sent a significant glance toward his mistress, Magda. The dark-haired girl was embroidering what Charis would call a
léine
. The monk watched his lady with appreciative eyes. “We know you mean to use those cursed magics of yours to hurt your master,” he murmured at last.

Charis snorted softly, but she brushed one pale finger over the pouch with the designated herb. Dead Man’s Thimbles would be her chosen weapon. What need did she have for iron? But to defuse Bran’s smirk, she met his eyes. “Agnarr knows I do not wish him well. It is no secret.” Agnarr was, at the moment, sharpening his sword. Work on tools and weapons formed the major occupations for men during winter’s enforced inactivity. It had been the same in Charis’s girlhood and during her marriage.