Wild Wood (3 page)

“What a day you’re having.” The other girl reaches out a hand.

Sobbing a breath, Jesse takes it. But she can’t control her face, and she can’t stand.

“Up you come.” Alicia, this surprising girl, helps Jesse to her feet. Alicia’s touch is gentle but her arms are strong. “I think you need to rest for a while.”

“I couldn’t, really. I have to—that is . . .”

There’s a door marked
STAFF ONLY
, and it’s easily opened. Beyond is a room filled with mismatched furniture, but there’s a couch. Alicia fluffs a cushion, places it invitingly. “It’s quite comfortable. Why not sleep for a little while?”

Jesse stutters, “N-no. That is, I do need to go. You’ve been so kind and . . .” But she sits anyway. She can’t fall down again. Three times in one morning? Too much.

“Put your feet up.” Alicia tucks an old picnic rug around Jesse’s legs.

Jesse wants to reply, wants to say thank you, but the rug does it. She just can’t speak.

Pressing a box of tissues into the girl’s hand, Alicia opens the door soundlessly as she leaves.

Jesse’s alone. She cries until her eyes swell shut, head ringing like a bell.

Jesse shifts in her sleep, twitches and sighs. Her eyes open. She struggles to sit up. Pain bites her shoulder like a dog. She screams out, “Christ!” Shaking, she tries to look at the watch on her right wrist. Past one o’clock!

Jesse fumbles the rug off. She stands. Too fast. Feeling sick, she grasps at a table as Alicia opens the door.

“Got it.” The waitress catches the lamp before it hits the floor. Somewhere, through the open door, people sing Gregorian plainchant. Calm as a distant sea.

Jesse mutters, “What are you, patron saint of people who fall over?” She’s trying to keep it light.

“That would be the social worker. Comes Mondays and Wednesdays.” Alicia picks up the rug and shakes it out, folds it in three. And again. A neat shape. “I heard you stir.”

Where “stirring” is blasphemy. In a church.
“Sorry to have been a nuisance.” Jesse picks up her jacket as she tries to flex her shoulder. Gasps.

“Sore?”

Sweating, Jesse sort of nods. Her head doesn’t want to help. It’s blazing in there; red, black, white—pain of many colors given form.

“Um, a friend of mine sings in the choir here.” Alicia gestures through the door. “They practice at lunchtime. He’s a doctor at Barts and . . .”

“Please don’t think me rude, Alicia, but I do really have to go. I feel much better. Honestly.” Jesse tries not to flinch as she picks up her bag. “Must do this again sometime.” She makes it to the door. Forgetting, she pushes it open. Her right hand.

Did someone just remove a hunk of bone? Pain explodes and Jesse cannons into the doorjamb, slides to the floor. Four, today. A record.

“Alicia?” A man’s voice. Legs in the doorway, knees level with Jesse’s nose. A startled pause. “Hello. No. Stay put. Don’t try to get up.”

She knows she can’t move, not now, but Jesse seems to see the voice that comes out of the man’s face as it looms closer to hers. The sound distorts, slows down, as her eyes drift closed because she’s very, very tired.

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know.”

A rustle. Jesse hears breathing close by. A large hand covers her forehead completely. Feels cool.

“Can you tell me your name?” The male voice, speaking each word really, really slowly.

She manages, “Jesse.” It’s thick-sounding. What’s her mouth doing?

“I think you might be concussed, Jesse.”

She winches her eyes open—who knew eyelids weighed so much?—and murmurs, “Okay.”

He’s smiling at her. Faint, but genuine. So’s Alicia.

Jesse tries to sit up. That doesn’t go well.

“We need to get you to the hospital.” He’s kneeling beside her. Quite close. Red hair. No. Chestnut. Pale eyes—water-green, water-blue. That English skin. Looks good, even on a man.

A deep breath. If she talks on the
out
, the pain isn’t as bad. “Don’t have insurance.” She’d shrug if she could. Her eyelids droop.

Jesse hears two voices. Him. Her. Him again. Then another rustle as Alicia squats down.

Jesse knows Alicia’s smell now. Soap from a morning bath—wouldn’t be a shower—and clean hair.

“Jesse, you don’t have to pay.”

Then him. “You’ll be admitted into emergency. I think you need to be.”

Magic words,
You don’t have to pay.

Jesse surrenders to the dark.

2

THE SCOTTISH BORDERLANDS, JUNE 1321

M
AUGRIS GAVE
me the signal, a hand swept across the throat.
Death.

I turned in the saddle, repeated my brother’s gesture. Rauf nodded, passed the message to Tamas and John and the others massed behind.

It was the dark of the moon before dawn, and there was nothing to show that we lay so close to our enemies. Maugris, my brother, was a careful leader; he had ordered mud rubbed on each cuirass, so that no surface shone.

Our family knew the worth of fighting men and always had. These past weeks had been blood-soaked as we did what was asked of us, but Rauf and the others understood we would not waste even a single life—not theirs and not ours. The core of our band had survived three years in the service of our overlords, the Percys, and their overlord, Edward, the king in London. But Scotland was a flint-hard country then, and while Robert Bruce had beaten Edward Plantagenet seven years ago at Bannockburn, the Scots were foolish to think us crushed. Their contempt was our best weapon.

Snorting, a horse flung up its head. Maugris glared at the rider. Sound travels at night.

I kneed Helios close to my brother’s roan and pointed at the breach in the high wall. It was hard to see, but it was there—I had found it scouting ahead of the others. The earth ramparts of the fort were not well maintained. Perhaps that spoke of few men and fewer supplies, or poor leaders; perhaps it spoke of arrogance. This place lay far inside Scottish lands. And if the brigands there thought themselves safe, that only friends would approach these walls, they were wrong.

Maugris nodded. Helios had the strength to charge the slope and jump the gap in the wall. The others? We would find out. But we had cut our way into such places before and would not linger. The reivers of the Scots borders used this fort as a base for raids into our English lands. We would destroy it, and them, and run.

I beckoned Rauf, a veteran of the wars of the East March, and the man nudged his horse forward. I made the sign of a bow being drawn and held up two fingers. He nodded and scanned the men. Tamas and John, one young, one old, both steady, had bows slung across their chests; Rauf waved them close. Two to ride, two to cover.

I trusted our lieutenant. Rauf was good with a sword, better with a dirk. And pitiless.

Maugris offered his sword to me and I touched it with my own, blade to blade;
Dame Fortune be our friend
. All soldiers are superstitious. We were no different.

Do not think.

I pulled the reins short, spurred Helios, and set him running at the breach. I heard Rauf behind, only a pace away, and I could not falter or his horse would run us down.

It was the day of the solstice, and yet the air was bitter; it numbed my face as the stallion sprang the gap. But Fortune kept us safe. Mist had settled inside the walls, a covering as we ran for the gate.

At full gallop, a heavy horse will shake the earth. Perhaps this
woke the sentry to his death. The man startled awake as Rauf’s knife slashed a mouth in his throat; he made no sound as he dropped. I flung from the stallion’s back and we heaved aside the bar that held the gate.

And so it began.

Arrows skinned the air, and Maugris, howling, our men behind him, charged the shelters of heather and stone that hid the raiders. Half naked, half armed, they boiled from the doorways, still warm from their last mortal sleep. Faces, open mouths, and women in the shadows, screaming as blood flew from the swords that bit and sliced; we had the force of surprise and would soon be gone.

“Burn the huts!” Slashing forward, cutting down, I slung the words away. A misplaced slice and a man’s hand fountained through the air—it still held a sword—as I booted Helios through the heaving, howling melee to Rauf’s side; at its center, he cut as neatly as a tailor, eyes no brighter than his blade.

A panicked woman screamed; she had a baby in her arms. I saw a man run to the girl. He stood above her, and his blade dealt death in a red and silver wheel. He fought well for her life, for the child; some men’s faces, in battle, are not easily forgotten.

“None to live!” My brother had a voice that was always heard. He scythed men like barley as flame bloomed and jumped from thatch to thatch and light flared across bodies, piled in heaps.

Flank beside flank, Rauf and I slashed on, pushing the few defenders away from the open gate, away from freedom. Our horses were scarlet to the hocks, but we, and they, were used to that.

A bellow from Maugris—“Fall back. Back!”—and the band, man by man, obeyed.

I was the last away. Inside the ring fort, there was no movement, and the only sound was the spit and crack of fire. The man and the girl and the child were nowhere I could see.

“Bayard!” Rauf lingered by the gate to see I was safe away.

And then we fled to the east, toward the rising light.

Fog moved over the face of the Pentland Hills, a shawl of rags flung across bracken and moor; it slowed us as we rode. But if it hid the track, there was this advantage: sound is trapped by mist. And snow. Though that was yet to come.

I nudged Helios to a trot and rode up beside Maugris. “Nothing moved as we left.”

My brother grunted. It was my role to search for survivors and dispatch them.

This raid had always been a gamble—a foray to stanch a running wound. Yet Maugris led us and we followed, for his orders came from Henry Percy. And if they were never easy commands and some of the Scots raiders in the fort had lived to pursue us, what was different in that? The Scots believed they had won their country back from the English, yet these small wars still swung across the border, out of England into Scotland, and back again. Territory was bought by death, theirs and ours, as it had always been.

And our own troop? They were accustomed to this work, but their hearts had likely shriveled since the morning. Some will deny it, but to kill a child stays with you. Women also. Those faces, those fragile bodies, were too much like their own babies, their own wives.

It was dangerous to think too much. I hunched deeper in my riding cloak and allowed Helios to fall back until I was in my proper place at the rear of the column.

For some time we rode at a league-eating amble until, ahead, Maugris threw up an arm and stopped. “Rauf!”

Our lieutenant cantered up the line, and I, along with the others, watched as the two conferred. We all respected my brother’s instincts.

Rauf touched a hand to his helmet. We saw him ride into the
mist behind us, saw it swallow him whole. Soon, there was nothing to hear, not even his horse, though the track was wet.