The second camp had been quiet for hours, though quiet in a forest filled with frightened, displaced people was a relative thing, made up mostly of softer noises rather than silence. Somewhere beyond the shelter, a baby whimpered in its sleep before being hushed against a mother’s breast, men murmured as they changed the watch, branches shifted overhead whenever the wind moved through the trees, and the goat rattled its tether against a tree while making a determined attempt to eat the corner of someone’s wool blanket.
Inside, the low fire had burned down to red coals, and the air smelled of smoke, damp wool, sweat, and the sharp green bitterness of the herbs Eadgyth had steeping in a clay cup.
The healer sat on the other side of Gilda’s pallet, her gray hair covered by a linen veil and her broad, capable hands moving with the unhurried certainty of someone who had spent most of her life healing. She’d arrived before sunset from another cluster of refugees farther north, summoned by Hild, who apparently knew everyone in Sussex and most of their privatebusiness, and within an hour Eadgyth had inspected Gilda’s wound, complained about the first bandage, approved of the honey, changed the herbs, and informed me that hovering didn’t improve anyone’s chances.
Gilda lay beneath two blankets upon a pallet of bracken and straw, her round face flushed with fever while sweat darkened the hair at her temples. The woman who had spent the past week arguing with everyone within reach, including a child who had brought her the wrong cup, had gone frighteningly quiet, and the silence was worse than any complaint.
Eadgyth peeled back the dressing.
I looked away for the space of one breath before making myself look again. The sword cut had been cleaned, but the flesh around it was swollen and angry, and the red streak I had noticed earlier had crept farther toward Gilda’s shoulder.
My stomach dropped. I wasn’t a doctor. I wasn’t a nurse, a paramedic, or anyone who should have been making medical decisions beyond first aid and the sort of emergency care firefighters learned because sometimes you reached people before the ambulance did. I still knew that was bad. I also knew exactly what I wanted, and the thought of it was so painfully ordinary that I almost laughed.
Ibuprofen. A boring little blister pack of tablets from Boots, the sort I had bought without thought and tossed into handbags, station lockers, bathroom drawers, and the glove compartment of my car. Antibiotics. Sterile gauze wrapped in plastic. A thermometer with actual numbers instead of one woman’s hand pressed to another woman’s forehead. Fluids in a clear bag hanging from a metal pole. Someone in clean scrubs telling me what was happening and what came next. An actual hospital.
Instead, we had willow bark, honey, boiled linen, herbs whose names I kept forgetting, and a time that didn’t know what bacteria was.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
Eadgyth glanced at me without lifting her head.
“The fever is strong.”
I rubbed both hands over my face, feeling soot and exhaustion drag beneath my palms.
I liked the healer, I also wanted to shake her until antibiotics fell out of her ears.
She dipped a cloth into cool water, wrung it with surprisingly strong fingers, and laid it across Gilda’s forehead before looking at me again.
“Sit.”
“I am sitting.”
“You are crouching like a cat waiting to pounce on a rat.”
Excellent. Another terrifying elderly woman. Apparently 1066 was full of them.
“Darcy.”
I turned.
Wulfric stood in the entrance of the lean to, his broad shoulders nearly filling the opening. His fair hair was still damp from washing away the worst of the battle, and someone had found him another cloak, dark brown and badly patched, though he wore it as if it belonged in a great hall rather than on the back of a man sleeping in a forest with half his possessions gone.
One good thing? All of my modern clothing would have burned when the Normans set everything on fire.
“What?”
“You have not eaten.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I did.”
“When?”
I considered lying, but his expression suggested I should save the effort.
“Earlier.”
Eadgyth made a disapproving sound. “The girl has not eaten all day.”
