Fifteen
CHASE TIGHTENED HIShold on Christiana, berating himself for all his mistakes. Just about everything he could imagine doing wrong, he had done wrong, like some new recruit on his first mission out. He knew better than to be jostling an accident victim cross-country on horseback. Not that he had much choice. He could hardly call for an evac here.
Still, he’d failed his training on the most basic level. He hadn’t checked for a spinal injury or broken bones before hefting her into his lap and heading out at a trot, bouncing every bone in both their bodies. Hell, he hadn’t even checked for concussion.
You couldn’t get much sloppier than that.
Okay. Fine. He’d dropped the ball. But she was still breathing and he would make the best of the situation. He knew for a fact she was in pain, and her ankle had swelled to twice its normal size.
Not that he’d spent an inordinate amount of time studying her ankles, pre-accident. Maybe his eyes had strayed there a few times, but what he saw now was sure as hell no normal ankle.
If the accident had done that to her foot when she hit the ground, there was no telling what it could have done to her head. And since he hadn’t had the good sense to verify it one way or another, his smartest move was to go on the assumption that there was a problem and make sure she didn’t drift off to sleep before they reached the wise woman’s home.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“How am I...I’m no holding anything.” She shifted in his arms, groaning in the process.
He tightened his grip on her. “Just relax. I’ve got you.” Though somehow the Magic allowed him to speak the same language as everyone in this time, “same language” didn’t always have the same meaning. “I only wanted to know how you’re feeling.”
“Ah.” Again she shifted, eliciting another groan. “My foot pains me still.”
Little wonder, considering how those barrels had wedged against her ankle.
When he felt her relax against his chest, he was tempted to allow her to escape the pain through dozing off, but that would be as careless as his having neglected to check her injuries in the first place.
“We’re a long way from Tordenet. How is it you found this wise woman of yours way out here in the first place?”
“I had no need to find Orabilis. She brought me to Rowan Cottage herself many times. She lived in this place long before my family arrived. In theyears before my father grew ill and infirm, she and I would travel here to spend time tending her gardens.”
“So she used to live at the castle with you, and now she’s back out here all by herself. Why would she choose to do that? Seems to me like Tordenet would be a much safer place for an elderly woman.” Especially in this day and age.
“Things are not always as they seem.”
“Fair point.” He of all people knew that to be truth. “So, you’re saying that she is safer out here on her own. Is that because people like Ulfr accuse her of being a witch?”
“People like Ulfr are little more than an annoyance to Orabilis. Tordenet’s danger lies more in people like my brother. People who’d gladly see her dead.”
And why would a powerful laird like Torquil want to harm an old woman? He was about to ask when Christiana spoke again.
“We’re close now,” she said. “See the small trail there into the trees? Down that way just a piece and we’ll be there.”
He did see the trail, now that she’d pointed it out. But had she not been with him, or had she been unable to direct him, he could easily have missed the cutoff.
The trail, perhaps—but not the signs that someone lived around here. He sniffed the air, ripe with the acrid scent of burning peat. He should have picked up on those clues some time ago. Instead,he’d been captivated by Christiana, completely ignoring his surroundings.
What was it about this woman that so put him off his game?
“Through those trees there.”
As they cleared the stand of trees, the location of the cottage became evident, though without the smoke curling from one end of the roof he might have missed it, set behind a rise in the land as it was. A ring of trees surrounded the house, spaced far enough apart that there was no mistaking a human hand in their placement. Ten minutes ago he would have sworn that landscaping for the sake of pleasing the eye didn’t exist in this day and age. The cottage and trees he approached now told him a very different story.
“She’s there!”
The words escaped Christiana’s lips on a breath, as if without her conscious thought.
An old woman stopped midway between the door of the cottage and a large earthen mound, her arms piled high with squares of peat.
“Christiana?” she called, as if she doubted her own eyes. “Christiana! Oh, by the gods!” She dropped her load to lift her skirts, enabling her to run in their direction.