Lady with the Devil's Scar

Her hand ran across the injured leg and she felt the bruise rise up against her palm, the heat of infection surprising her. Last night this man had shown no sign of any injury save that of the ocean-cold in his bones and she cursed beneath her breath as she recognised her oversight. She should have tended to him hours ago when the fingers of badness might have been expunged more easily and the shaking had not overtaken all sense of ease. With a quick slash of her blade she opened the torn material in his hose from groin to knee. The swollen flesh on his upper thigh had been crushed and she knew instantly that there was nothing more that she could do. Bending to his chest, she listened for the pulse of blood.

‘Can you help him?’ There was a tone in James’s voice she had not heard before.

‘Help comes in many forms.’ Isobel was careful to take the emotion she felt away from her answer as she dribbled water through cracked and shaking lips, waiting for a moment while he swallowed to give him the chance to savour the wetness. Already she could feel the rattle of death in his chest, reverberating against her arm, a soft portent of an ending that was near. ‘My father used to say help was always only fiscal, but my husband insisted it was otherwise. He was a man inclined to the spiritual, you understand, before he died. Your friend here, though, needs another gift entirely and any aid given to another in reaching the afterlife easily has a reward all of its own.’

She saw the quick flicker of rebellion in his leaf-green eyes before he had a chance to hide it, loss entwined amongst anger. Biting down on her own grief, she laid her hand across the dying stranger’s throat, feeling the beat, weaker now and more erratic in the last emptying of blood.

He would still hear, she knew, still make sense of a world fading into quiet and she wanted him to understand the music inherent in a land his dust would be for ever a part of.

‘The smell of the sea is always close in Fife. We’re used to that here, used to living with the wind coming up the Firth funnelled into briskness and calling. The birds call, too, the curlews and the linnets, their song in the birch and the beech and the pine, and further west Benarty guards the heavens and gathers the clouds.’

Her land, its boundaries drawn in blood and fought for in a passion that was endless. The earth here would guard Simon, fold him into her warmth and hold him close. These were the old laws of dying, the rules that had been forgotten in the new kingdom of Scotland because men looked forwards now and never back.

She should be numbed to death, immune to its loss, but she was not and even a stranger who had walked with her for less than a day was mourned.

She had been married once? The thought made him stiffen as he watched her speak of the streams and the mountains and the flowers in springtime. Like a song of the living to the ears of the dying, he was to think later, and a prayer for transport somewhere easier and without pain. Her eyes remained dry.

A gift she had said, and indeed it was that, devoid of angst or panic or alarm. Simon simply slipped off and never moved again as she invoked a pathway to Heaven and talked of a good man that she wanted him to find there named Alisdair.

When death began to cool his flesh she stood, a little off balance. He would have liked to offer her his help, but he was uncertain as to whether she would accept it or not. As they looked at each other, the distance of a few feet felt like the world.

‘What was he to you, this Simon?’

‘A friend.’

‘And the other man, the one you held safe in the sea?’

‘Guy. My cousin.’

‘Then you are blessed with the love of others.’

The love of others! If only she knew. He stayed silent as Isobel turned Simon towards the ocean.

‘Spirits look eastwards for their home.’

‘I have not read that in any Bible.’ He tried to keep his voice even.

‘Some things are not written. They are simply known.’ Clearing a path to the sea, she uprooted bracken and small plants to leave an easy access.

He waited till she had finished before reaching forwards to take one of her hands. When he looked down he saw her fingernails were all bitten to the quick and that there was a wedding band on her marriage finger.

‘Thank you.’

She did not pull away, but stood still, her eyes this close ringed with a pure and clear gold. He tried not to glance down at the scar she wore so indifferently.

‘How long have you been married?’

She broke the contact between them with a single hard jerk. Lord, was nothing ever simple with her? Her hair had escaped the confines of a leather band and the lad’s hose had dropped to the line of her hips, and where the short tunic had hitched upwards the gap showed a good expanse of skin.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-three.’

‘You look younger.’

‘Do I?’ For the first time since meeting Isobel Dalceann, he detected feminine uncertainty and a strange feeling twisted around his heart.

She had rescued him from a raging sea and sewn his arm up without flinching, yet here when he gave her a compliment she blushed like a young girl. The contradictions in her were astonishing.

‘We will wrap your friend in a blanket and leave him undisturbed until help arrives.’

‘Help?’

‘Angus will bring others.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Perhaps.’ Gathering a handful of sticks from the beach, she placed them in a pile. The scar on her hand in the fall of the eve was easily seen and he wondered again who had hurt her so very badly.

‘The keep you mention, is it your family’s?’

‘Aye, it is that and by virtue of long possession. The Dalceann have ruled the land around Ceann Gronna for centuries.’

‘ So you hold tenure direct from the Crown?’

Suspicion sparked across her face, changing eyes to deep brown. ‘Where exactly did you say you were from?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘But not from Edinburgh?’ The brittle anger in her words was palpable.

‘No. Burgundy.’

The tinder was set in the small fire and he flinted it, blowing at the flame until it took. Soon there was a blazing roar.

Isobel plucked the birds and threaded them through a stick she had sharpened with her knife. They were held in place by two piles of stones across the flames, more embers than fire now. She had added other berries he did not recognise, their red skins splitting in the heat. Everything she did showed prowess, competency and a knowledge of the bounty of this land.

‘What did you do there in France?’

‘Many things.’

‘Was soldiering one of them?’

He stayed silent. With no idea of the leanings of the Dalceann cause save the knowledge of an ancient patriarchal title, he needed to be careful. The unrest in Scotland had filtered into France, after all, and David’s hold on the country had always been tenuous. Edward the Third of England had his champion in the factions of Edward Balliol and the vagaries of clan law had never existed under simple allegiances.

Besides, his head swam in a way that was alarming and the prickling heat from the flames made him move back into the cool. If he had been stronger, he could have walked away into the night and tracked west along the Firth, but the shaking that had plagued Simon was beginning to plague him, too. Grinding his teeth together, he swallowed and closed his eyes to find balance.

He rarely answered a question, she noticed.

She also noticed the sweat on his brow and the way his cheeks had flushed with heat. It was his wound, no doubt, the badness settling in. She should unwind the cloth and wash the injury over and over with water that was too hot to touch, infused with the garlic she had so carefully stored at Ceann Gronna.

But here in the open, with nothing save that which she had already used, she wondered if it would not be better to leave it till the morrow when they reached the keep.

If she was a proper healer she might have been able to make the call, but warfare had taken up all the years of her life and it was true when Ian had said that she was more skilled in the art of killing.

Still she did have valerian and the special medicine from England to stop him thrashing about and hurting himself. He would be thirsty and the powders were tasteless. Her fingers felt the paper twists in the pocket of her tunic and she held them safe in her palm. James was large so the dose would be high. Not so high as to kill him though, she amended.

She smiled as she saw his gaze upon her.

‘I will fetch cold water from the stream before we eat.’

The rain sounded far away. He felt it on his face when he tipped his head, but the sky that it fell from was blurred and hollow, no true sense in any of it.

Isobel Dalceann sat watching him, the meat between them blackening on the stick, overcooked and forgotten. He should have moved forwards and taken it from the flame, but his hand felt odd and heavy, too much weight to bother with.

Closing his eyes, he opened them again, widening the lids in a way that allowed more light.

‘How do you feel?’

Her words were flat.

‘How should I feel?’

‘Tired?’

Understanding dawned. ‘You put something in the water?’ He made to rise, but his knees buckled under his weight and he fell to the side heavily. She did not blink as she watched him struggle.

‘Why?’ It was all he could manage, the numbness around his lips making it hard to speak. His tongue felt too big in his mouth.

‘Because you are a stranger,’ she answered, ‘and because everything is dangerous.’

He conserved his breath and closed his eyes. Was the concoction lethal? Already his heart was speeding up and sweat garnered in the cold. He should have been more on guard, he thought and swore at his own stupidity.

‘You won’t die,’ she said flatly, the firelight falling in rough shadows across her eyes. ‘It is an opiate of valerian and gentle unless you fight it.’

Such a quiet warning. He almost spoke, but the dark was claiming him, his world spinning into all the corners of quiet.

She cushioned a blanket beneath his cheek and another across his shoulders. Her fingers she passed beneath his nose, glad when she felt the gentle passage of air. She had not killed him and, unconscious, her prisoner would be so very much easier to protect.

Already she could hear them coming through the trees, the light that she had noticed reflected in the hills above a good few hours ago giving her knowledge of their presence.

Angus would be leading them and he would be looking for vengeance. Please God, that James had told the truth about leaving Ian alive, for if he had not …

She shook her head, repositioning her knife on the inside of her kirtle’s sleeve. These days she trusted no one, for David’s edict calling on the forfeiture of Dalceann land made everything tenuous. Troublesome vassals needed replacement with more amenable ones, after all, and there were many lining up for the rich largesse that was Ceann Gronna.

Even this one, perhaps? Her eyes went to James’s face.

He looked so much softer in sleep than in wakefulness. His nose had been broken somewhere in the past, the fine white line on the ridge leaving a bump to one side. His clothes still worried her, for the velvet surcoat was finely stitched, every seam doubled into dark green ribbon and his bliaud was of fashionable cotton. For the first time she saw a scar just above the fleshy cushion of his palm, dangerously close to the blue lines of blood at his wrist.

No small wound that. She imagined how it must have bled out and the effort it would have taken to quell such a flow. It looked deliberately done, too. Like the mark of a sacrifice.

But there were voices now, only a few hundred yards away. Positioning herself before him, she watched the track from where her clansmen would come, on the other side of the clearing.

Andrew came first, followed by Angus. Both looked for Ian.

‘Your brother is back in the glade where I left you, Angus,’ she said.

‘He hurt him. The one from the sea. He kicked out with his hands tied and brought him down. If he has killed him …’

‘He says he did not.’

As his glance flicked across to James, Angus pushed forward, intent written in every line of his face.

‘No.’ Isobel held the knife where he could see it and he stopped.

‘I am a Dalceann …’

‘And he is asleep.’

‘Drugged?’ Andrew spoke, his voice imbued with the quiet knowledge of something being not quite as it ought.

‘Aye. The wound ails him. I stitched it and cleaned it, but it still bleeds.’

‘And the other?’

‘He died a few hours back. The cold of the sea sat inside him like ice.’

A dozen Ceann Gronna soldiers shuffled into the clearing as they spoke and Isobel tipped her head at their coming, their full-length mantles folded against the chill.

‘I want this stranger unhurt. We will send him by boat to Edinburgh with the ferrymen from the landing-place and he will be no further nuisance.’

‘Nae.’ Angus paced across the other side of the fire. ‘He is not one of us. I say kill him here and now and be rid of any menace.’

In response Isobel kneeled beside James. Pushing back her sleeve, she made a cut in her palm and another across the thickened skin below the strange mark on his wrist. Pressing them together, she smelt the rusty tang of blood.

Hecate, Cerridwen, Dark Mother Take Us In

Hecate, Cerridwen, Let Us Be Reborn.

The oath of loyalty and attachment echoed around the clearing.

‘You would protect him for ever?’ Andrew asked the question.

She shook her head, knowing he was her enemy. ‘Nae. But I swear by all the gods of this place that I will protect him for now.’

Chapter Four

He was naked.

He knew that as easily as he knew he was safe.

Isobel Dalceann was there in the shadow just beyond the candlelight, watching him with her dark eyes and stillness.

‘Water.’ He could barely get the word out.

She moved forwards and he saw that one eye was swollen, the deep bruise on her cheek below grazed into redness.

‘Who hurt you?’ His whisper was barely audible as she leaned forwards to hear.

‘I fell.’

He did not believe it, nor did he understand the shift of caution in her eyes or the gentle way she took a cloth and ran it across his chest.

‘It feels good.’ All the skin on his arms was raised with pleasure, leaning into the cool, and he saw she had a band of cloth wrapped around her palm. Another hurt. He tried to reach up and touch it, but she stopped him.

‘You must rest. Your arm has festered and only strength can save you now.’

His arm? Sliced in the sea. He remembered the boat bound for Edinburgh. He remembered the wave as it had caught them broadside, turning the vessel into the cold and green, the ropes tethering him and the sailcloth, people calling from everywhere.

He had cut free as many as he could with his knife and released them. Simon. Guy. Etienne and Raoul. Then the wooden splint had come down from the mast, broken by force of wind and wave above, turning sharp.

Aching now. Right down to his fingers in a cramping stiffness. A band circled his arm, white linen soaked in something that smelt like overripe onion and herbs strangely mixed. He could not move a muscle.

‘My sword hand?’

‘Ian says cloth sellers should have no need for such a weapon,’ she returned.

‘You found him, then, in the glade?’

‘Worse for wear with the knots you fashioned. It would have been a slow death had we come too late.’

‘Like this one is?’

Her pupils dilated. Always a sign of high emotion. Marc shut his eyes. She thought that he would die soon. Tonight even, he amended, looking at the ornate golden cross above his bed.

Other words came close. An ancient chant in the firelight! Isobel Dalceann lifting his palm against her own and cutting it open, blood mixed in an oath of protection. Was he going mad as well?

The glow from the candle hurt even though his eyelids burnt in fever.

‘Where am I?’

‘Ceann Gronna. My keep on the high sea cliffs above Elie.’

The sea was close, the moon seen through the space between skin and stone at the window. No longer full.

‘How long?’

‘Three days.’

He breathed out, nausea roiling his stomach. Even in Burgundy when the arrow had pierced his armour and gone deep into his back he had not been as ill.

‘You have tended me, then?’

Sickness. The room was full of its grasp. Basins, cloths and vials of medicine lined up on the table. His clothes were neatly washed and folded on the seat of a white ash wooden chair decorated with bands of vermilion paint. He wished he might have stood and taken charge, but not one muscle in his body would obey a command.

Helpless. The very word stung with shock.

‘You have spoken in your sleep in French of battles and of death. It is just as well that none here understand you.’

He turned then, away from her eyes, because there was a question in them that he had no answer for.

Are you an enemy?

Once I was, he wanted to say, but now? The bruising on her cheek was dark.

He should have kept silent, should have held his tongue even in the grasp of delirium. So many damn secrets inside him.

‘When you are better, you will be sent by boat across to Edinburgh.’

‘Better?’ The word surprised him. She thought he would survive this, then, this malady. Relief had him reaching out and taking her fingers into his own. Just gratitude in it. The cool of her skin made him realise how hot he was.

Isobel stood still, the nighttime noises of a sleeping keep far from this room. Her room. His fingers were strong like his body, the skin on the pads toughened by work. She felt them relax as he fell into sleep again, but she did not put his hand down as she should have, did not move from her position at his side, watching him in the midnight.

Marc. He had said his name was that when she had called him James, shrugging off the other name with agitation. He had said other things as well in his delusion that had made her glad she was alone, his green eyes glassy with the fever that raged through him, taking sense.

A warrior. She understood that now by all the other marks on his body, sliced into history. Neither an easy life nor a safe one, for fire and shadow sculptured the hardness in him lying on her bed.

He had spoken of some things that she had no knowledge of and of other things that she did.

Things such as the sovereignty accorded to David of the Scots and the ambitions of Philip of France. A king’s man, then? If Ian or Andrew had heard the words he would be long gone by now, breathless in the raging seas off the end of the Ceann Gronna battlements, only memory.

Why did she protect him?

Her eyes travelled over his body, masculine and beautiful, and with real regret she covered the shape with a thin linen cloth. Wiping back her hair with the sudden heat, she felt the raised ridge of scar and frowned.

Broken apart. By trust. It would never happen again.

With a ripe expletive she turned from the sleeping stranger and walked to the window to watch the water silver in the Scottish moonlight.

The knock on the door a few moments later pulled her from her thoughts. Andrew stood there, a pewter mug of ale in one hand and the remains of a crust of bread in the other. He walked over to Marc and laid a finger against his throat, before coming back to the doorway.

‘He is still out, I see. Ye’ll be needing help I’m thinking, lass. This captive is a way from healthy and the rings beneath your eyes are dark.’

Shaking off his concern, she faced him. ‘He is making progress, none the less. A day or two and he will be fit to travel.’

‘To Edinburgh, then. Is that wise?’

‘He has not seen the keep or the structures within it. Nor will he be given knowledge of the tunnels or of the entrance from the sea. He knows only this room,’ she added. ‘We will blindfold him when he leaves so that nothing is seen.’

‘Something is always seen, Isobel, and he looks like no cloth merchant I have ever encountered.’ The frown on his brow was deep. Concern for the security of the Ceann Gronna Castle, Isobel supposed, and those within it. A just concern, too, and yet …

‘If we kill him in cold blood we are as bad as those who come to oust us.’

Andrew laughed. ‘When David sends the next baron this summer to try his hand at the sacking of the keep, you might think differently.’

‘So you would have him as dead as Ian wants him?’

‘Not dead, but gone. The day after tomorrow even if he is no better. Do ye promise me that?’

The cut on her palm stung when she shook his hand and her right cheek ached from where Angus had hit out in the clearing after she had invoked the protections.

Probably warranted, she thought. She didn’t recognise herself in the action, either, as for so many years any stranger trespassing on the Dalceann lands had been sent away without exception.

Why not him?

Why not bundle him right now into a blanket and dispatch him west? He could take his chances of survival just as the others had taken theirs, and if God saw fit to let him live then who was she to invite danger to her hearth?

The Ceann Gronna hearth. She remembered when as a little girl her father had remodelled the fireplace in the solar, burying iron beneath the stones for preservation.

Lord, and then her father’s actions had inveigled them all into this mess when he had stood against the king in Edinburgh and demanded that the lands around this place would be for ever Dalceann. He had taken no notice of any arguments Alisdair had put forward, but had forged on into a position which he was caught in. The armies that had followed him home had been undermanned and he had easily rebuffed them, but by then they were outlawed. Surrender would undoubtedly mean death to them all and Isobel had long been one to whom strategy had come easily.

At twenty she had planned the defence of the next attack and the one after that. Now, they stood on the edge of the cliff with the world at a distance and no other great vassal of the king had ventured forth to try his hand at possession. Not for two whole summers.

So far the magic in the hearth had held. Except for Alisdair. But even his bones lay here in the earth of the bailey, defended by high walls of stone.

The unassailable Ceann Gronna Castle of the Dalceann clan.

‘We cannae hold on for ever, ye ken, Isobel. The new governance has its supporters.’

She nodded because truth was an unavoidable thing. When the time was right some of the Dalceanns would leave the keep by sea. Already the ground to the south was prepared. A different ruse and one bought with the golden trinkets and jewellery found in the French boat that had sunk a good two years before. There was still some left in case of trouble, hidden in the walls of her chamber. Alisdair’s idea.

‘If this stranger is as inclined to violence as Ian believes him to be, it would make sense to bind him in the dungeon under lock and key.’

‘You speak as if I could not subdue him, Andrew, should he become restless.’

‘Could not or would not, Isobel? There is a difference.’

His voice held a note of question and it saddened her. He had always been the father her own had not been—a man of strong morals and good sense.

A moan behind had her turning.

‘I will think on your words, Andrew, I promise.’

She was glad when he merely nodded and moved off, leaving her alone to tend to the green-eyed stranger.

She had said something of sea tunnels, Marc thought, and of an entrance from the water, but with Isobel beside him again, her hand across his brow, cooling fever, he filed the information away to remember at a later time.