“So ye be certain he is blind?”
“Certain, aye.” He had opened his eyes—pale gray-blue they were, wild with pain and desperation. With appeal. But he had seen nothing.
Aye well, she could supply him the aid he so clearly needed. Out of common decency, she could. She could seek to mend his torn flesh and even hold his hand.
Moira nodded. “Do your best, sister.” She smiled briefly. “Your best is verra good.”
“Aye.” Rhian would call upon all the healing she possessed and do her best for—Leith. Aye, out on the field he’d told her his name was Leith. The one thing she could not do was forget that, even stripped of his tartan, he remained a MacLeod, and her enemy.
Chapter Seven
Rhian had otherwounded to visit and her own clansmen to tend. It was afternoon by the time she’d seen the last of them, and she ached with weariness. She gave much more than simple care and bandages while healing. She gave a measure of herself to each patient, and it drained her in ways she did not completely understand.
She longed to retreat to her bedchamber, to be alone for a time. Change her soiled clothing and wash down properly. Sit beside the fire, perhaps with a restorative brew.
There was a magic, or so she’d discovered, in a hearth fire. Her mother had been a peaceable sort of woman who had tended their hearth with calm serenity. Her fire had been the center of their home, their family and the greater family that occupied their part of Glen Bronach.
A quiet strength, it had been, and aye, an almost magical presence in their lives.
Rhian could not comprehend the loss when Ma passed. The very heart of them all passed with her. She remembered quite clearly the morning after Ma’s death when she’d come down to find the hearth in the small chamber where they’d always gathered as a family cold.
The shock of it had reverberated through her and she could barely breathe for panic. For an instant, she’d faced a darkness too powerful to overcome.
She’d gathered up the makings for a fire, laid it carefully in the hearth, and struck the spark. As the fire took hold and grew, it beat back the darkness just enough.
No one seemed to notice that she took over the duty from that morning on. When they greeted a new day, or ended one, when they faced their duties, they gathered still around a fire.
Her fire.
Someone had to step into that place. Yet her life had changed immeasurably on that morning she performed her ma’s duty. She was not the young woman she’d been. She used to have hope for a future of her own. She’d lost that along with the laughter that once brightened her days.
She rarely laughed anymore.
Sitting beside a fire still restored her, though. That and the man lying back in the cowshed were all she could think about.
She would not go to him. She would not, though the fact that he lay blind and alone haunted her. She must take it on faith that she had done her best for him. He would live or die, and she was removed from it. There came a time when the fate of a patient rested in hands other than her own.
Still, she did not want him to die.
She was on her way to her quarters when she met Saerla. The younger of her two sisters had found time to change out of her leathers, but she looked nearly as weary as Rhian felt.
“Sister, please come.”
“Why? And where? I am for my chamber and a spell o’ time on my own.”
“But ye maun come!” Saerla’s misty blue gaze met Rhian’s. Rhian sometimes thought Saerla did not focus completely on anything in their world. A part of her always peered into some other, more mystical realm. She now appeared rational, though, and troubled.
“They are besetting Moira. Threatening to strip from her the title o’ chief.”
“Who is doing this?”
“Ewan, and some other members o’ the council.”
Aye well, it had to come. Moira seizing the place of chief had been a dubious proposition at best. She was loved for her own sake as well as Da’s, respected as a warrior who took the field. But as soon as she’d taken up with Farlan MacLeod, support for her had begun to erode. When he’d defected and returned to MacBeith, and when it became known she spent her nights with him and meant to wed him, a faction of clan members withdrew their support completely.
They were led by a man called Ewan, who’d been close to Da. No doubt the pain of grief drove some of his actions now.
God knew, it drove them all.
