By the time he offered her a carved wooden ladle filled with water, she felt too guilty to even question how dirty the implement might have been. He had dipped it in the boiling water, after all, so maybe that had killed the majority of whatever nasties might have lived on it.
She blew across the surface of the liquid, concentrating on the little ripples that formed before she tested her first sip. Warmth filled her mouth and trickled down her throat, and for the first time in hours, she began to feel almost normal.
Malcolm sat cross-legged across from her, eating quietly, his gaze fixed on her face.
“What?”
He shrugged, a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. “Thinking about the fine work on the jewel you wear, my mind runs to fancy, I must confess, contemplating the differences in yer world and the wealth of knowledge you likely possess, coming from the future as you have.”
“So you believe it, now?” She wasn’t at all sure he had before.
“The Elf said—”
“Faerie,” she corrected. “Elesyria said that she’s a Faerie, not an Elf. She seemed pretty emphatic about it, too.” And more than a little bit irritated as well, but Dani didn’t add that.
“Faerie,” he conceded. “She said it was so and I’ve no longer any reason to doubt her word.”
Apparently their day’s adventure had precipitated quite a shift in his thinking. Only this morning he’d insisted she join him on this godforsaken quest precisely because hedidn’tbelieve Elesyria. Though why he’d need to verify the word of someone who lived in his home made almost as little sense as his quick switch in attitude.
And the fact that neither Malcolm nor his brother seemed very enamored with magical beings, period, regardless of what name they called them, made Dani even more curious.
“From the sound of it, you don’t seem to think too highly of Faeries. So how is it you have a Faerie living with you, anyway?”
“No by my choice, I can tell you that.” Malcolm’s brows knit together in a frown, a fleeting expression that he quickly wiped away. “Elesyria is mother to the woman I married. I have no right to turn her away, no matter what I may think about what she is.”
A small lump formed somewhere in Dani’s chest, a hard blockage around which she suddenly found herself struggling to breathe normally.
The woman I married.
A wife? Malcolm had a wife? No one had ever said anything about a wife.
“I didn’t realize you were married.” There were likely many, many things she didn’t know about this man, so why that one tiny piece of information should bother her so much made absolutely no sense at all.
But bother her it did.
“My . . .” He paused, like a man unwilling—or unable—to speak the next word. “Isabella is dead.”
His statement sounded bitter, final, as if he wished to end the discussion.
It absolutely was not relief she felt at his declaration. It was more along the lines of some detached sense of sympathy, skewed by her physical discomfort. That had to be it. No other emotional response was even close to reasonable.
Dani inhaled, slowly, deeply, attempting to clear her confused emotions, nodding in what she intended to be a show of real sympathy.
He didn’t sound as if he wanted to discuss it anymore. And she meant to drop the subject right there. Aunt Jean had always told her you didn’t go picking at the scabs of someone’s emotional wounds. Truly, she didn’t want to make him deal with a painful past.
Only, try to let it go as she might, his story just didn’t quite jell, and curiosity drove her to continue.
“Your wife must have been young. Really young.” Like maybe twelve or thirteen, if even that. Because Elesyria didn’t look to be much older than Dani, and if she’d had a child when she was barely a teen, that still wouldn’t make her child more than, well, twelve or thirteen at the oldest.
And even if this was the Middle Ages, the idea that a man clearly in his twenties would marry someone that young added a whole new “ick” factor to their conversation.
His head cocked to one side and his brow furrowed as if she’d just commented on painting his face purple. “No, I dinna believe that to be the case. In fact, I’d reason Isabella to have been older than you. What would make you think otherwise?”
“Because you said Elesyria was her mother. And Elesyria can’t be much older than me right now.” If even.
That brought the smile back. Along with a laugh. “Are you daft, lass? ThatFaerie,” he emphasized the word with a raised eyebrow, “is well advanced beyond yer years. You’ve only to look at her to ken that. Her hair is grayed; her face is wrinkled. Though she may not yet be a crone, her days as a maiden are long gone.
Was he blind? Or was there some mental defect there she’d just totally missed?
