Healer (11 page)

“Faol, no!”

Brenna covered Rory’s head and shoulder with her body before the wolf could reach his neck. With arm raised, she tried to ward off the attack. The move threw the wolf off balance. Faol’s teeth caught on her sleeve, raking the skin beneath, but the momentum of his leap slammed into her.

“Back,” she ordered, as the startled wolf threw itself away and landed, still snarling, head low. “To your rug.
Now!”

The white wolf backed off a bit more, but not to the hearth. Brenna had never seen him so riled. But then no one had ever appeared to Faol to threaten her. He must have heard her gasp and the raised voices….

“Remain absolutely still,” Brenna said softly to Rory. Then, ever so slowly, she crawled away from him, keeping between him and the wolf. Her knees shook as she gained her feet. “Rory meant no harm, pup,” she cooed. “See? I’m not hurt.”

Through the torn sleeve, her arm was red, but he’d not drawn blood. Faol would never hurt her intentionally. Brenna began to sing.
“You’re my own little love ….”

It was a lullaby, one Ealga had sung to Brenna and Brenna to the wolf since it was a pup. And she petted him until his predatory stance relaxed. When he at last took his gaze off Rory and raised his head for more attention, Brenna grasped the loose skin behind his neck and herded him over to the hearth. There she knelt, making him sit on the rug as well.

“Rory was in pain,” she explained, as if the wolf could understand.

“You must be out of your mind to trust that beast,” Rory sang to the tune of the familiar lullaby. He actually had a decent voice.

“I trust him with my life. You must understand, Rory. He thought you were hurting me. If Faol so much as thinks I’m in danger, he … he becomes mad.”

“I will definitely keep that in mind.”

“He likes you, but not when you become so … so hostile.”

It was a good while before Faol was at last satisfied that the aggression had passed. The wolf dropped on all four haunches, his gaze returning to Rory. But when Brenna ventured to rise, her pet started up with her. She pressed him down with her hand, petting him gently.

“Stay,
anmchara
.”

“You call a wild
wolf
your soulmate?”

“Aye, I do, Rory. You may have a fine life beyond the walls of this cavern, but Faol and this cave are all I have.” Leaving Faol at least semicontent, Brenna stirred the stew. “I’m sorry if I offended you, Rory. I only tried to lighten your sour mood and made you the worse for it.”

Brenna waited for a reply, but when she looked, Rory was glaring at the ceiling of the cave, his face a mirror of frustration.

Shame on her. Here was a man used to fending for himself, and no doubt his pride was offended by his dependence on her. Brenna longed to put him at ease and yet was vexed as to just what to say to him.

Instead, she said, “Come along, Faol. Let’s go for a walk and give Rory some time to himself.”

With the white wolf eagerly at her heel, Brenna moved aside the curtain to the outer chamber of the cave and left the silent man inside to his surly dejection.

Chapter Nine

The Leafbud Equinox was nearly at hand, when day and night were equal. The forested hills were glazed with hints of new green. Heather had begun to sprinkle the hillside leading down from the rocky crags of Brenna’s home with its purple hue, but it was the gorse that reigned over the landscape in bright robes of yellow. This year was surely its most glorious. But then, after the dark and dreary days of winter, Brenna thought that every year.

She carefully picked her way down a slope littered with scree, headed for the banks of the silvery spring that wound its way through the hermit’s glen. One misstep could send her sprawling on her backside and all the splendor of early spring would not take the sting away.

“Almost there,” she said to the equally cautious wolf accompanying her.

Upon reaching the spring bed, she spied smoke curling upward from Brother Martin’s hut. The priest was home. She spied him working in his garden near to the stone-roofed abode. Although she knew she should respect his ritual isolation during the Lenten season, the tension growing between her and Rory had become untenable. Faith, she spent more time out of doors than in—hunting, gathering … whatever might spare her Rory’s prickly humor or the multiplying of impulsive thoughts that invaded her mind.

Then had come last night’s dream. A dream like none she’d had before. One that left no doubt as to her future. Worse, she’d awakened in Rory’s arms, just as she’d seen in the dream. Except this morning, it had been in the innocence of sleep. Not so in her dream.

Leaving Faol sniffing the air warily in the cover of the forest, Brenna struck out into the sun-soaked clearing.

As though sensing her approach, the priest stopped his heavy labor with the stick plow and turned, straightening stiffly. “Brenna!”

She smiled. Though she was clad in tunic and breeches, her hair wound up beneath a cap, Martin knew her disguise well.

The voice of her mentor hastened Brenna’s step. Indeed, the priest had watched her grow into the woman she now was. Like a father, he’d taken her dressed as a lad to spring fairs for trading and taught her on academic and religious matters as diligently as Ealga had healing. According to Ealga, the priest from a noble family had been young when he’d first come to the isolated river glen. Now the reddish-gold hair that spilled down to his shoulders from a druidic tonsure was thick with threads of white and his still-broad shoulders were slightly rounded. Nonetheless, his stride was long and powerful as he closed the distance between them, his arms outstretched.

Brenna went into them willingly. “I have missed you over the Long Dark.”

“And I you, my child. But you look hale and hearty.” His wide smile wavered as he studied her expression. “At least on the surface,” he amended. “What is wrong? Has something happened to Faol?”

“Nay”—Brenna chuckled, nervous—“he lurks in the wood, watching us even now.” How was she to tell Martin of Rory? Worse, tell of these feelings her patient evoked in her? Or of her truly ungodly thoughts? Which was why she’d come up with a plan.

“But there is something,” Brother Martin observed. “I know my girl.”

He put his arm about her shoulder and shepherded her over to a crude bench beneath a shaded grove of oak. It was from there the priest spoke the Word to any of the villagers or hill folk who came on the seventh day of the week. Even though Rome had ruled the Sabbath be moved to Sunday two centuries earlier, the Celtic Church stuck to the traditions of its first-century founders, celebrating Easter along with the Passover that Jesus once celebrated.

Sitting next to the bench was a bucket of water. The priest dipped a cup and offered it to her. “Fresh drawn from the spring early this morning.”

“Thank you, no.” She patted a goatskin of water slung over her shoulder. “You didn’t come up for your winter soak. Was the pass closed with snow longer than the first month?”

“No, I’ve been secluded, seeking God’s will regarding a request to build a monastery and school here.” Martin sounded as if he’d been asked to sin against God.

“But you are a wonderful teacher. Ealga said often that your gift was wasted on just one student.”

“I was called to educate you, Brenna, just as I was called to this isolation, that I might become closer with God.” He swung his arm wide, gesturing to his surroundings. “Look at this beauty. It was in the open-air forum of Solomon’s temple that the Hebrews heard the Word of God, you know. Jesus taught in the open air.” He shook his head. “What a shame to defile God’s handiwork with walls and clusters of huts.”

Brother Martin’s home was a special place. A sacred place once used by druids. Like so many Christian holy sites, it had been adopted from the older religion after countless druids of all degrees had heard the Word. Accepting Christ as their Druid, or teacher, they gave up their royal trappings for sackcloth and the humble service of teaching the Word to the common man per His example. Martin’s own grandfather had been a Christian druidic teacher of mathematics and astronomy at the university in Bangor.

Yet while Brenna shared the priest’s affinity for nature and loved Faol dearly, she would give anything to share her life in the wild with someone human.

“Do you mean it’s a shame to defile it or to
share
it?”

Brother Martin snorted in humor. “You were always my challenge, Brenna. Quick-witted as a fox. But you did not come down from the hills to discuss my quandary, which is already settled in the Bishop of Llandalf’s mind. He is sending twelve brothers to start the monastery after the Pascal celebration in Arthur’s court at Strighlagh.”

“Then why are you fretting if the church has solved your quandary for you?” she asked.

A sheepish look claimed the priest’s reddening face. “Always on the mark,” he lamented. “Now I must confess to my student that I am second-guessing God’s decision.”

Brenna seized at the unexpected opportunity to broach the topic that had brought her here. “That is exactly what I’ve been doing.”

“I do not recommend it. In fact, I am praying God will help me to accept His will.” Gone was Martin’s gentle self-deprecation and in its place came steely conviction.

“But what if circumstances change?” She’d accepted the isolation imposed on her by her mother’s prophecy, yet now it would appear that God had sent her someone.

“You’ve met a man.” Martin’s statement of fact was cloaked in dread.

“Aye, a good man.” What would she do if her mentor refused her?

The priest reached over and folded her hand between his callused ones. “Tell me, child, all that is on your heart and mind.”

So Brenna did, just as she’d rehearsed again and again on the way down the mountainside. Throughout the whole story of Rory’s uncommon rescue by Faol and his healing over the weeks that followed, the priest’s face remained inscrutable. But he managed a terse question now and then.

“Did you notice anything about the assailant that might identify him?”

“No … although I managed to put an arrow through his hand. It should leave a scar, were he ever found.”

“You say the stranger rode a speckled horse?”

“Aye, a good three hands taller than our native stock.”

“Did the injured man tell you his name?”

“Rory.” The name rolled off Brenna’s tongue, wrapped in the feeling she could no longer ignore. A feeling she feared and longed for in the same breath
. Is this what love is like?

“And you are certain he is not an O’Byrne.”

Brenna could still hear Rory’s fevered ramblings. Could see the bloodshed though the glass of his soul as she’d held him. All those things too horrid for Ealga to tell her. Things Brenna would keep to herself for now.

“Aye. He was a soldier of fortune on his way to join Arthur when he accepted the O’Byrnes’ hospitality and was attacked. I thought I’d lose him more than one night of fever, but by God’s mercy he is recovering well now.”

Besides, Rory had more than once apologized for his father’s part in her family’s massacre. It was only after she’d convinced him that she held no malice toward him, or even old Tarlach, that he’d truly begun to get better.

“You have your mother’s gift then,” Martin said. “And God’s ear, of course.”

But dare she go on? Martin’s expression was as telling as the pile of stones at the far end of his garden.

“Soldiers of fortune are most often lacking in character, my child. Did you stop to think of your safety in taking this stranger in?”

“Of course,” she replied, as though that were a given. “I have used a concoction daily of barrenwort to tame his beastly nature, just as Ealga taught.”

The priest’s gaze narrowed. “Still, you should have come to me rather than rely on herbal manipulation.”

“The pass was closed,” she reminded him. “And it’s not manipulation. Manipulation is witchcraft. I
protected
myself.”

“Then how do you know if Rory is a man of integrity or merely incapacitated by your
means
of protection?”

Her mentor had a way of getting to the core of things as well. Had she done Rory an injustice … now that she knew him to be a man of honor?

“Rory has become as uncomfortable as I regarding my ministrations, now that he’s grown stronger,” she explained. “In truth, he keeps more and more to himself. Surely that’s a good sign of character.”

“Hmm.”

Brenna scowled at the indistinct reply. “Regardless, I know he’s noble enough to make a good—”

“Good
what?”
Alarm sharpened the priest’s question, breaking the implacable facade of confessor.

“Husband.” There. She’d said it. “And father to my son, if he’s of a mind. I have a plan.”

The priest’s brow shot up. “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, but I am.”

Her reasoning poured forth like a mountain spring. There was no stopping it. Ealga had told her that Faol would bring her someone, and who was to say it wasn’t the stranger? God knew that Brenna was lonely and that Faol could not live forever. Rory was a good man, although given to a life of wandering like his father before him.

Yes, she knew she’d have to let him go as she had all the living things she’d rescued. But if she could convince him to marry her and get her with child, then she’d be guaranteed the companionship she so desperately wanted. Nay,
needed
. Rory could stay or leave as he wished. Her demands were small, and she was certainly capable of caring for a child, even if she had to move to the lowlands in the west. As a healer, she could well support her son.

“The child will be a boy, Brother. I saw him. A beautiful baby boy with the same mark on his left hip as his father, shaped like a pledging hand. And that is why I came to you,” she finished, nearly breathless.

Lost at her mention of
husband
, her mentor had yet to recover his priestly indifference. As she’d rambled on, Brenna had watched incredulity and alarm vie for dominance on the face of a man she knew to love her like a daughter. But now he met her with silence and closed eyes.

What if he refused her?

“How did you see the child?” the priest asked after what seemed an unendurable passage of time.

“In a dream. Eagla said my mother had prophetic dreams.”

“She
was
gifted,” Martin admitted with reluctance. “But how do you know it is not your emotions that put such ideas into your head rather than God?”

“Because I feel no waver of my spirit,” she answered. “I know in my heart that this is right and good.”

“Feelings and heart are temporal, my child, and often fickle. How does it measure with the eternal Word?”

The Word. “I believe this is the answer to my prayers for an end to my loneliness. But I will think on it more,” she answered slowly.

“And pray.”

“And pray,” she agreed. There was no Scripture in her possession save the Beatitudes, artfully painted on a piece of slate … a gift prepared by Brother Martin himself for her sixteenth birthday. What Scripture she had to call upon was from memory, but the Gospels had been well seated there since early childhood, along with several Old Testament works. Ealga and Martin had seen to that.

“Are you equally yoked before God?”

Brenna hesitated. “I … I don’t know for certain.”

Her friend squeezed her hand. “Promise me you will pray on all we’ve spoken of and act on nothing until I’ve had the chance to speak with this man for myself.”

Martin rose from the bench, Brenna with him.

“I was hoping you might come meet him today or tomorrow,” she said. “I do value your opinion, and he seems most depressed—as though sinking into a hole of despair. Nothing I can say seems to improve his humor.”

A hint of humor tugged at one side of Brother Martin’s mouth. “Brenna, there is no guile in you. Your thoughts are written on your face.”

Brenna resisted crossing herself, for she hoped her dearest friend could not read all that had crossed her mind in dream and thought.

“But I will not marry the two of you until I have spoken with him and prayed long over it.”

“Then you’ll come today?” That would be beyond her hope, though she’d have the wedding later, when the time for conception was best.