When he took a step forward, she tried to block his path. “Papa, what did ye do to him?”
Instead of waiting for him to answer, she stepped around him and raced above stairs.
When she reached her brother’s door, she didn’t hesitate and pushed it open.
Her gaze raced over the sitting room. Empty. A sound, faint enough to almost miss it, settled across her ears. She ran for his bedroom and found him in his bed, unattended. His face was swollen and lumpy. One eye was swollen shut.
“Roderick!” she screamed and ran to him. When he whispered, she inclined her ear to him.
“Ye… ye told him, Ellie.…Look what ye did.”
“I didna tell him anything,” she swore.
“Elspeth,” her father scolded, “Come away from there now.”
“Father, do ye know what yer firstborn has done?” she asked, then continued without waiting for an answer. “He has endured beatings on my behalf in one way or another and has never been cruel to me because of it. He doesna treat me like something delicate, because an enemy wouldna. He has promised to teach me to protect myself instead of wasting my days away learning how to sew pretty flowers on kerchiefs. I insist ye quit believing every rumor creeping through the walls.”
“Well then, my precious Elspeth. I must punish ye, as I would punish him.”
She swallowed. What had she done?
“Bring her to the cleanest cell. Tell Gilchrist to give her twenty lashes.”
Roddy tried to sit up and failed.
Elspeth would not plead or beg. If her father thought doing this was best for her, she would not argue. Besides, Gilchrist would never hurt her.
She went. Her brother’s low growls and outbursts of emotions broke through her shield and she almost collapsed backward.
She didn’t but stubbornly marched toward the stairs.
Her father appeared at her side. “My Elspeth, ye know I would never have ye flogged. Tell me ye werena afraid of me.”
“Ye are imposing, Father.”
He smiled, liking the compliment. “Go to yer chambers, daughter. I will fix all this.”
He kept his word. When she returned to her brother’s side later, he finally opened his eye long enough to smile when he saw her.
“Ellie, when did ye get so brave?”
After that, they hardly argued. He kept his word and taught her archery and how to fight at close range, the way she might fight a man who grabbed her. But Elspeth’s heart was not in her practice. Her greatest desire was to help others, so he taught her how to help a person heal with physical tasks. He also brought her to the village healer, who taught her everything he knew about herbs, roots, and leaves.
Her father never stopped her endeavors. She was his favorite and he gave in to her every request—which was always for someone else’s gain and not her own.
Her brother loved her kind heart, and though he was sometimes rough in his speech when teaching her something, he had never been crass or deliberately hurtful.
Elspeth opened her eyes, remembering the Roddy before the tragedy, the Roddy who knew how to fashion a shelter in the middle of nowhere. He’d been making them since the age of six.
She looked up at the branches tied together to create a roof and then felt the leaves and other bound branches below her. He’d laid four large rocks beneath the makeshift bed to keep it higher off the ground to protect them from slithering things. She was grateful for it.
She smelled meat roasting and sat up. Her brother was busy tending to a hare on the spit.
Belly rumbling, Elspeth left the shelter and went to sit beside him.
“I dreamed of ye,” she told him, watching him.
“Then why are ye smiling?”
