He took the stairs three at a time. The broth he drank pressed against the back of his tongue. He swallowed convulsively. And he prayed.
“Will!”
Her terrified screams reached him before he found his way, briefly confused by the many rooms along the corridor. “Will, where are you?”
Bursting through the door, he scattered the trio of maids trying to restrain her frightened thrashes. He gently caught her upper arms and slowed her fight.
“Here. Here I am,” he said roughly. He pressed a kiss to the damp skin of her forehead. “Meg, I’m here.”
“Will? Where are we? What happened?”
Tenderly, keeping the bandaged limbs from tangling with one another, he crossed her arms over her abdomen. “Do you remember? At the cabin?”
Her chin quivered. “The fire.”
“Yes.”
“My ears are ringing. The explosion?”
“Yes, was that your doing?”
Folding the skin of her forehead into parallel ripples, she frowned. “The soldiers charged in. I thought to—My book!”
“Easy, my dear.” He smoothed an unsteady hand across her forehead, calming her. “Your book is fine.”
Appearing exhausted after only a few moments of wakefulness, she leaned her head into his palm. “Good.”
But as Meg relaxed, his frustrations boiled. “I saved you from the witch-burning, but that wasn’t danger enough for you, was it? You had to risk yourself for that thing.”
“It is a record of our research—my father’s, mine. Everything. I could not lose it.”
“Meg.” His anger gave way to torturing fears. A quaking sob wracked his shoulders. “God, Meg, I could have lost you.”
“Are you crying?” She reached to find him and grimaced when her linen-wrapped fingers bumped his face. “Wait—what’s the matter with my hands?”
“They were burned.”
Panic marked her features like a jagged stretch of lightning. “I cannot feel you.”
“Calm, Meg, please. These are bandages. Do you feel?”
Ever so softly, he turned her hands and rubbed bound fingers across her face. She ran the length of each forearm along her cheeks, finding the edges of the bandages where they extended past her elbows.
“And will they heal?”
“Of course. Of course they will.”
“Scarlet, you’ve not lied to me in days.”
He had almost forgotten how quickly she could rip away the vulnerable charm to reveal forged steel beneath. “We have to wait.”
“We?” She shifted subtly and turned a keen ear toward the bulk of the room. “Who else is here? Where are we?”
“Loxley Manor.”
“Your uncle’s estate?” She smiled past her fatigue and worry, her dimples toying with his heart. “’Tis the sweetest deed you’ve yet performed.”
“Stop. You embarrass me.” He turned and ushered Marian to join him by the pallet. “Meg, this is Marian. Robin’s wife.”
Her blue eyes lolled toward their hostess. “I’m happy to make your acquaintance, milady. I wish the circumstances were more cheerful.”
Marian stared, her eyebrows raised in question, as if she had not truly believed his description of Meg’s blindness. But her poise quickly stifled any discomfort or surprise.
“Oh, but they are,” Marian said. “I wish you both joy. And I’m glad to provide you shelter and a place to recover.”
Meg nodded, but her head bobbed without finesse. Weariness ebbed around her in a sluggish tide, pulling her back from consciousness. He kissed her forehead and whispered, “Sleep now, love. I’ll be here when you awaken.”
She thrashed to waking. Sweat soaked her brow and dampened the clean kirtle wrapping her torso. Strands of hair, chopped short to remove the singed ends, clung to her neck. Restless legs itched. Panting, listening past her banging pulse and the damage to her hearing, she fought for bearings. The room whispered with quiet night voices. No birds filled the air with song. Will lay beside her on the pallet, his feet tangled with hers.
Loxley Manor, yes. And the manor was still.
But sadness engulfed her, a wringing sense of hopelessness. The nightmares would not relent. Confusions muddled together as she relived the dreams she had experienced during her illness. Except this time, the fire consumed her, hurt her.
She raised her arms and urged her heartbeat to calm. With a precision born of three days’ practice, she touched enshrouded fingertips to her mouth. Bandages imprisoned the ruined skin of her hands. Her lips felt the touch, but beneath the burns, her hands remained numb. Nothing. Not even pain.
Although she wanted to curl into Will’s arms, she lay rigid. Her shoulder nestled alongside his. The passion and understanding they had barely discovered taunted her, lost in the fire. When he touched her, he soothed and held, speaking quietly like a man afraid to wake the dead with an incautious word.
And she could not touch him. She could no more appreciate the textures of his body than she could comb her own blunt hair. Streaks of saltwater trickled down her cheeks, wetting the hair at her temple.
At last, birdsong filtered through the night air. Dawn would arrive soon, but the scope of her day remained the same. She was bored and scared, already missing what she had known only briefly, even though he lay beside her.
“You should be asleep,” he whispered.
She turned her face to his. “I cannot.”
He shifted on the pallet and drew her into his arms. She rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder. For long moments, he held her in silence, stroking her bare upper arm. His heat pressed into her scalp, the skin of her neck.
A manic burst of sound pushed from her mouth.
“That was almost a laugh,” he said. “What about?”
“Us.”
“Oh?”
“Our hands. What a sorry pair. How do yours fare?”
“Marian’s nurse fashioned another splint for my thumb. She’s warned me to keep it immobilized for some weeks. Otherwise, I am better.” The lazy rhythm of his touch and the soft rumble of his words calmed frayed nerves. “I sent missives to Bainbridge and to Monthemer’s estate at Winhearst yesterday. We’ll have word from your sister shortly.”
“Thank you, Will.”
He flexed his arm, muscles bunching at her cheek as he pulled her closer. “You are troubled. Tell me?”
For the briefest moment, she considered a lie. Hiding would be a comfort after so much time spent opened to him. But she doubted her ability to deceive him any longer. And lying to him would disgrace all he had offered.
“Upon the advice of his uncle Adelard, my father studied an alchemist named Al-Rhazi, an Arab man who lived hundreds of years ago and well beyond Christendom. He organized the world alchemy into categories he called bodies: acids, vitriols, salts, stones, and metals. As my father read from the texts, I willed myself to be metal.”
He trembled with a soft chuckle. “I would never mistake your body for iron, Meg.”
“Not my body, but my core,” she said. “Al-Rhazi wrote that metals can be hammered and shaped. They can be sharp or smooth, always malleable. I wanted to be that, something to endure. Now I feel like a stone, something that when hammered—it does not bend, but shatters.”
He rolled from under her and braced an elbow beside her head. He stroked her cheek, rubbing at the salt of her dried tears. “That’s how you see the world, isn’t it? With your ideas and questions?”
“I have no other way.”
“You put objects into categories, expecting the same results time after time. Regularity,” he said. “You look for patterns, even for yourself.”
“It doesn’t work with people, does it?”
“No. You don’t shatter, Meg. You bend and change. I’ve seen it already.” He closed the inches between their mouths and kissed her, a soft caress. “And you of all people are without category.”
Habit stretched her gaze over the manor grounds to the east. Half of her wanted Robin home, home in her arms and able to guide his troubled nephew through dark hours. But the part of her made timid by cowardice wanted her husband safe…but well away. A selfishness borne of three years of loneliness resented these complications. This was not going to be the happy reunion she had long envisioned.
“How fares young Robert?”
She inhaled the bracing air and chastised herself. People she loved dearly needed strength, not selfishness. “He’s already abed. You exhausted him.”
“He’ll do well to see his father returned.”
Throughout the afternoon hours, Marian had watched Will carry her son about the gardens, swinging him and chasing. Their play tensed a fist around her heart. Yes, she took comfort knowing the unlikely cousins, separated by a generation, enjoyed their sport. And smiling, laughing, Will seemed nearly without care, a happier shade of the young man she remembered from distant days.
But the man laughing with her son should have been Robin.
In many ways, from the timber of his voice to the cut of his shoulders, Will resembled Robin. The strength of that likeness fascinated her. Had he changed? Or had she simply come to understand why he once turned her head? She missed her husband with a longing made more brutal by Will’s return, making her realize how much she adored Robin. Only Robin.
“I have a missive for you,” she said at last. “A rider only just delivered it.”
He turned and arched his brows. A bluster of hard cold ruffled his hair. He received the flutter of parchment from her hands and clutched it against the wind. After breaking the seal, he said, “’Tis from Dryden. At last.”
“Read it?”
His eyes flitted over the page. “I was heartened to read of your safe arrival at Loxley Manor. Please know Ada is safe and recovering in my custody. Come for her when you are prepared.”
“Meg will be pleased with that news.”
He nodded, but a black fog shrouded his mood. Beneath the slate October sky, his narrowed eyes shone like chips of an exotic jewel. The wiry tendons of his clean-shaven jaw tensed. He shoved the parchment into his belt and pulled his furred cloak tighter.
Although he wore no armor, he was a man doing battle.
“Will, how does she fare?”
He chafed his face with unsteady hands. “The ruined skin has come away. What lies beneath appears sound, but raw. Her healing will be lengthy.”
“Any fever? Infection?”
“No,” he said. “The book she salvaged contains more than a record of her family’s research. It also served as a pharmacopoeia. Alice complains about heathen potions, but the medicines from that book are staving off infection.”
“Has feeling returned?”
He shook his head. Glancing at his bandaged wrists, he said, “These remedies are not kind, Marian. Trust that I know. But she has yet to flinch. Alice and I can change the dressings and apply the salve while she sleeps. I can make no sense of it.”
“And her humor?”
His head twitched, a wounded dog snapping at a kind touch. Green eyes shuttered.
“I beg pardon, Will,” she said. “You know my enthusiasm to offer aid can make me discourteous.”
He grinned tightly. “I used to hate when you stepped between Robin and me.”
She blushed and turned her face to the wind, unused to feeling chastised. “I meant well.”
“Yes, you did,” he said. “Far be it for a headstrong boy like me to recognize that.”
“But I have no right to ask these questions. Forgive me.”
“This is your home, Marian. You have no cause to ask my forgiveness. I value your concern, truly.”
“Then what troubles you?”
“I’m losing her,” he said, words like a plea. His pain was a palpable pressure against her skin. “She hardly speaks to me. When she does, melancholy is consuming her strength.”
Head bowed, she curled a fist to her mouth. His new wife impressed her with a sense of strength, even while injured, but she could not adjust to Meg’s ambling eyes, how they skittered and rested on nothing. Her reserve, her rigid demeanor—she would not be an easy woman to know. Marian hoped for time and familiarity enough to overcome her wariness, because Will had discovered a woman worth loving.
She caught sight of the white linen at his wrists and the splint bracing his thumb, the visible proof of his devotion. “Why did you marry her?”
He scowled. “What?”
“I only wonder about the suddenness of your wedding. Do you love her?”
“Yes.”
“Does she love you?”
He skewered her with a stare hard enough to unnerve a battle-hardened knight. But Marian found the strength to return his glare, keeping her eyes level. She knew him almost as well as she knew Robin, no matter the years since his departure. And like Robin, Will was a very stubborn man.
He forced a pale breath into the cold. “I cannot be sure.”
“What did you hope from such a hasty thing?”
“I thought my affection would bridge the distance between us.”
“Or her gratitude would.”
He pinched the top of his nose. “I wanted to do what was right.”
“Because that’s what Robin would do? Because your father forsook your mother?”
“Saints be, Marian. Enough!”
“No, not by half. You forget what I know of you.”
He turned troubled eyes to the horizon. “You think I wanted a reward for…for…”
“Giving up everything for her? Yes, I suspect you did.”
“I made the mature choice.”
“No, your heart made the choice. And hearts are notoriously selfish.” She shook her head, shivering when the autumn wind twisted her cloak and skirts at her ankles. “But this is about
her
now, what she needs to be well again.”
“Which is what? I would fight anyone to keep her safe, but this—I don’t know how to reach her.”
“Keep with her, Will. Fight her if you have to, and don’t play fairly.” She stepped between his hard eyes and the horizon he watched. Her hands around his, she tapped the splint and offered a smile. “You’re unaccustomed to helplessness, I know.”
“So is she.”
“Wretches, the both of you. But give her time.”
He exhaled again, visibly shrugging from beneath his anger. He softly kissed her cheek. “Thank you, Marian.”
“You’re welcome.”
With a quick spin, he twirled her to face the east, setting her eyes toward rolling glades made dull by the first frost. Galloping into the afternoon sun, six riders bearing the Loxley coat of arms topped a knoll. “Now go attend your husband.”