To Ardahl’s surprise, he smiled. “Ye be like my mam—one who cares for others. She is the finest woman I know.”
Her gaze clung to his. She tipped her head to one side. “Ye will be missing her.”
Ardahl had to clench himself tight against that thought. “I bade ye no’ to worry for me.”
“Nay. I should not. But—they are your own friends who battered ye on the training field.”
“They are Conall’s friends.”
“I see.”
Did she? Could she glimpse how he was feeling? Far more battered in spirit than in body. Sick with missing Conall. With missing his mam. His own fire, his own bed. The ease he used to know. The ability to hold his head up, having proved his worth.
All of that, gone. And those who had been his lifelong companions turned on him.
“I wish,” he said suddenly, speaking to her because there was no one else, “I could have him back even if for just a few moments, that I might ask him why. Why he raised a weapon to me. He, with whom I had scarcely so much as quarreled.”
Again Liadan’s gaze met his, this time with a hint of surprise. Her lips parted as if she would speak.
Instead she got to her feet, turned away. Ardahl felt the loss of her nearness like a cold wind.
“Eat your supper,” she told him, a faint quiver in her voice. “You may sleep there by the fire tonight.”
“My place is beside the door.”
“Aye, so it is. But not this night.”
They sat there, one of them on either side of the hearth, while he ate, listening to the rain crashing down. Liadan took nothing for herself, nor did she speak to him, but he could feel her in an odd way, as if the faint stirrings of the connection forged between them while she tended him still clung to their spirits.
Not a sound came from outside, besides the rain. It felt oddly isolating, as if, with the grieving woman asleep, they two were alone in the world.
It took Ardahl a long while to speak. In truth, he finished picking at his meal before he did.
“Mistress, I have no right to ask ye for anything more. But if ye would grant an act o’ charity—not for me, but for another who I know must be hurting—”
She started when he spoke, as if he’d interrupted some private reverie. Of grief, no doubt. Through the leaping flames she looked at him.
“Your mam?”
“Aye. I care naught for myself.” He could not allow that. Dornach was right—he must accept his fate however the gods bestowed it, and go on. “She will be desperate in her grief. If yecould find it in your heart to stop by her hut on the morrow. Make sure she is all right. She has no one now.”
He stopped abruptly. This woman who hated him would not care for his mother’s heart, would she?
Yet she had offered him care.
Roughly he said, “I have no right to ask it of ye.”
She did not speak. There was no sound but the rain pelting ever harder and the crackling of the flames. Despair touched Ardahl’s heart.
At last, Liadan sighed. “’Tis no’ easy for me to get away. To leave Mam.”
“To be sure.”
“Wi’ Flanna gone, I have no one to mind her.”
“I understand.”
“If I can—” She left it hanging, a mere whisper in the air between them.
