‘If you stay still, it will help.’
The message in her words was plain. Move and the agony will be greater. Like a challenge thrown down into the heart of mercy.
He wished he had a piece of leather to bite upon, but she did not offer it and he would not ask.
‘You are experienced in the art of healing?’
At this question both the men behind her began to laugh.
‘The art of killing more like,’ one of them muttered.
He saw her grasp tighten on the blade, an infinitely small movement that suggested wrath a hundred times its size. He trusted it also signalled care or humanity or just simple expertise. At the moment it was the best he could hope for. Marc was surprised when she spoke again and at length.
‘From experience I find healers are women with little mind for the ordinary. My opinion of them is tempered by their need to eke out some existence in a world that might otherwise be lost to madness.’
This train of thought was to his liking. ‘So you are not of that ilk?’
‘Witches and fairy folk are born into the lines that whelp them.’
As Isobel raised her blade into the light the dancing flames were reflected in silver.
‘But your line was different?’ Suddenly he wanted to know something of her. With her mind distracted by his pain and hurt, she might be persuaded to answer him.
But she remained silent, her lips firm as she cut into his flesh, the roiling nausea that had been with him since the rescue at the beach rising up into his throat as bile.
‘Lord Almighty.’
‘You are a religious man, then?’
‘If I said that I was would it help my cause?’
‘With your God or with me?’ she countered, turning the knife into live tissue and watching as blood filled the wound.
He swallowed.
‘There is sand and grit in the furrow and it must be removed.’
‘Grain by grain?’ He visibly flinched and she stopped for a second to watch him, a measured challenge in the tilt of her head and so close he could feel the warmth of her breath.
He shook and hated himself for it, but even as he held his hand to anchor the elbow to his side he could not stop it.
Shock, he thought; a malady that men might perish of as easily as they did the cold. On an afterthought he glanced over to the boatman on the blanket and saw that he had stopped breathing.
‘He left us as I poured the whisky across your arm.’ Isobel Dalceann’s words held no whisper of sorrow even though she had tended him. ‘Tomorrow would have been too hard for him to manage, so our Lord in his wisdom has seen him walk along another path.’
Two things hit him simultaneously as she uttered this. She was a spiritual woman and she was also a practical one. For some obscure reason both were comforting.
The pain, however, was starting to war with the numbness of whisky and he stayed quiet. Counting.
By the time he had got to a hundred and she placed her knife back on the hook across the fire he knew he was going to be sick.
She turned away and did not watch him throw up even though she had promised herself that she would. But this man with his bruised green eyes and gilded surcoat was … beguiling. No other damn word for it.
As long as he did not look as though he might fall over and mark the wound with the earth she would wait; patience had always been her one great virtue, after all.
‘Are you finished?’ She wished she might have inflected some empathy into the query, but the others were watching her and they would not expect it.
Nodding, he straightened. He still shook, though not with the fervour that he had done before.
‘The poultice I have prepared will numb any pain you have.’ God in Heaven, now why had she said that?
A slight smile lifted his lips. ‘Do I dare hope that the Angel of Agony has a dint in her armour?’
‘The needle that I will sew your hide up with is not my finest.’
‘Where is your finest?’
‘Lost in the skin of a patient who had no time to sit longer.’
‘A pity, that. Not for him, but for me.’
Unexpectedly she laughed out loud, as though everything in her world was right.
Ian stood and sidled closer. ‘Have ye drunk more of the whisky than ye used on him, Izzy?’ he asked and picked up the cask. Snatching it from him, she placed it on the ground and plucked an earthenware container from her bag. Sticks of fragrant summer heal and dried valerian were caught in twists of paper, but it was the rolled and cleaned gut of a lamb that she sought.
Taking the long sinew between her fingers, she wished the stranger might simply faint away and leave her to the job of what had to happen next, for no amount of alcohol would dull this pain.
With the needle balanced across the flame, she dunked the gut in boiling garlic water before threading it, feeling the sting of heat on her skin. A gypsy she had met once from Dundee had shown her the finer points of medical management and she had never forgotten the rules. Heat everything until boiling point and touch as little as you needed to. Alisdair had bought her silver forceps from Edinburgh after they had been married, but they had been lost in the chaos of protecting Ceann Gronna. Just as he had been! She wished she might have had the small instrument now with its sharp clasp and easy handling.
Her patient’s arm glistened in the firelight, the pure strength and hard muscle, defined by the flame, tensing as she came closer.
‘If you stiffen, it will hurt more.’
He smiled and his teeth were white and even. Isobel wished he had been ugly or old.
‘Hard to be relaxed when your needle looks as if it might better serve a shoemaker.’
‘The skins of all animals have much the same properties.’ Pulling the flap of skin forwards, she dug in deep. The first puncture made a definite pop in the silence, but he did not move. Not even an inch. She had never known a patient to sit so still before and she kent from experience just how much it must hurt.
She made a line of stitches along the wound. Blood welled against the intrusion and his other hand came forwards to wipe it away. She stopped him.
‘It is better to let it weep until the poultice is applied.’ She did not wish to tell him again of her need for cleanliness.
He nodded, his breath faster now. On his top lip sweat beaded, the growth of a one-day beard easily seen, though he turned from her when he perceived that she watched him.
‘The woman has the way of a witch. I do not know if we should trust her.’ His friend spoke in French, caution in his words, but the green-eyed one only laughed.
‘Witch or not, Simon, I doubt that the physic at court could have made a better job.’
Court? Did he mean in Edinburgh or Paris?
Flexing his arm as she finished, he frowned when the stitches caught.
‘It would be better to keep still.’ She did not want her handiwork marred by use.
‘For how long?’
Shrugging, she took the powders up from their twists of paper and mixed them on the palm of her hand with spit. A day or a week? She had seen some men lift a sword the next evening and others fail to be