“Love?” She froze an instant there in his grip. “So do ye call me?”
“Aye, for surely that is what ye are.”
“Until the day I die.”
She moved off silently and Wen went with her, which made Adair feel only slightly better. If trouble caught them, what use would he be to her, his sword arm so sorely hampered?
He stretched out on the blanket and listened to Alba breathing all around him. The sigh of it through the trees. The song, aye, of the water rushing nearby. He was half asleep when Bradana returned to kneel down next to him and tip the flask to his lips—cold, sweet water to sustain him.
“Thank ye, Bradana.”
“We have nay food,” she said starkly. “None for us or Wen.”
“No matter.”
“I will take the ponies to water and return.”
He was far more than half asleep when she came and lay beside him, wound her arms around him, tucking up the side of the blanket about them both. Wen lay down on Adair’s other side, a bulwark of protection.
There in the arms of his lover, on Alba’s breast, he slept.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The hound musthave left them and gone hunting during the night, for when Adair and Bradana awakened, he had a dead rabbit laid across his paws and looked immensely proud of himself.
Bradana exclaimed and accepted the gift with much praise for her hound. She moved off to the stream to skin and clean her prize, and Adair sat up. He took stock of himself.
He felt better, though far from what he could call well. The pain in his shoulder was considerable, but to his great relief, the feeling in both his arm and fingers had returned.
He rose. He and Wen followed Bradana to the stream, a rill that tumbled, chuckling, down from the slope above.
“Where are we?”
She glanced up at him, her hair in a tangle escaped from the fancy arrangement it had been given yesterday, and her eyes shadowed. “I ha’ no idea.”
“Are we still on Kendrick’s land?”
“Likely not. We traveled far yesterday.”
He looked at the rabbit and his stomach rumbled. “Do we dare have a fire?” He would much rather eat his food cooked but would take it any way he might.
She glanced around them. They still could not see down into the glen below, for mist had tumbled from the mountain above and filled it.
“I think so.” She looked stricken. “I did no’ bring a flint. I usually carry one, but I am no’ in my regular clothing, only this.” She indicated the blue gown she wore with disdain. Wedding finery.
“Do not fret. I ha’ one in my pocket. My da always said, do not be caught without a flint or a knife.”
“Aye, so.” She looked relieved.
He went off and began gathering deadfall for a fire, feeling better rather than worse for the movement. A few days away, he thought, to give tempers in the settlement time to calm, give Mican a chance to leave as Bradana had said, and they would go back. He would face what he had done. A man had to accept his consequences.
He laid the fire and then found he could not use the flint with only one good hand. He passed it to Bradana when she returned and watched her set the game to roast.
“While that is cooking, let me look again at your shoulder.”
He sat stoic and quiet while she peeled away the bloodied bandages, went to the stream and washed them, cleaned the wound as best she could, and covered it once more. Neither of them spoke, but he could see the worry in her eyes.
“Bradana,” he said at last, “I will be all right. I have taken wounds in the past.”
