Page 14 of The Shape of Silence

She slept wrapped in the plaid blanket she’d found on the dead horse, finding it gloriously warm and weighty, and toward morning she woke again to the sound of movement and found him struggling half upright, one hand braced hard against the floorboards while the other clutched weakly at his side.

She sat up quickly, dropping the blanket off her shoulders.

His hair hung forward across his face. Sweat gleamed across his bare shoulders and chest in the firelight. The muscles along his arm and stomach tightened visibly with the effort of holding himself upright despite the injury before his strength failed almost all at once.

She moved without thinking, catching him awkwardly beneath one arm before he would have sagged sideways into the fire. The full weight of him nearly took her down with him.

He made a low sound of pain and frustration together, his head briefly dropping against her shoulder before he managed to steady himself enough to remain half sitting.

Up close like this, she became painfully aware of him as a man in a way she had not allowed herself to think about before. The heat of his skin seeped through the thin fabric of her sleeve. His breath brushed warm and uneven against her throat. One massive hand flexed weakly against the floor beside her knee, scarred and rough enough to make her think absurdly of bark stripped from trees.

She held her breath and waited for sleep or the fever to claim him again.

Instead, he turned his face up to hers, his eyes barely slitted open.

“Where...?” he muttered hoarsely, the word rough with confusion and fever alike.

“My house,” she answered quietly. She thought to add something she’d want to know, if their circumstances were reversed. “Safe.”

He frowned harder at that, as though even unconsciousness could not fully dull suspicion, and then the little strength holding him upright vanished altogether.

His weight settled heavily against her before sliding slowly back onto the furs beside the fire.

She remained sitting there afterward for several minutes, one hand still caught awkwardly against his shoulder where she had tried to steady him.

Charlie lifted his head from near the wall and watched her silently.

After a long moment, she pulled her hand away.

Chapter Four

He woke to quiet and to pain.

The two arrived together, the first thing known. The ache in his ribs was sharp, a tight, insistent reminder that breathing wasn’t going to come easy right away, but the pain in his thigh announced itself a moment later with a deeper, heavier throb that made him lie still and take stock before he tried to move. He didn’t feel well, didn’t feel whole.

But then, he wasn’t dead and decided that should count for something.

The air was cool, faintly smoky, and close. When he opened his eyes, he found himself staring at a low, dark ceiling of soot-stained timber and thatch. The only noise aside from his own labored breathing was a slow and steady dripping sound, but a quick glance around the ceiling didn’t reveal the location of the source of the drip, only advised that it must have rained sometime overnight.

He turned his head carefully and took in the rest of the dwelling in stages. It was a single space, not much larger than a wealthy knight’s tent. The walls were stone up to a man’s knee and raw timber above, darkened with years of smoke. Shelves ran along one side, holding clay jars, a few bundles tied with cord, a scattering of small, practical things set where a hand could find them without looking.

Memory flooded him, the debacle of a fight, the sloppy and desperate retreat, the mac Ruaidhrí scattering to the wind. He’d been unseated from his wounded horse, had been discovered half-dead in the forest by a lass, and not the enemy. Other snippets returned: the litter she’d brought, the way her speech had startled him, the piercing blue of her eyes....

At present, while he assumed the hovel belonged to the blue-eyed lass, he was alone inside, the lass gone.

He lay near the fire in the center of the hut, upon a fur laid over hard-packed ground that was cool but not cold, and he wondered if he’d been purposefully and generously given the space close to the hearth or if she’d dragged him only as far as she could inside the door.

His gaze shifted to the far side of the room, and there he found the signs of her.

A narrow bed, raised on four short legs, sat against the wall, with furs folded at one end instead of left in a heap. They were worn but clean, patched in more than one place, and set out with care. At the head of the small bed sat a pillow that did not match anything else in the vicinity, a bulky, awkward thing wrapped in faded cloth. The fabric was unlike any he had seen before—smooth, too tightly woven for wool or linen—and though the color had been dulled by smoke and use, it still held the ghost of something brighter, a washed-out pink that looked like it didn’t belong to this place.

He studied it for a moment, then let his gaze move on, taking in the rest of the room. Air and sound moved faintly near the door. Something stirred somewhere outside and then went quiet again.

Along one wall, partly hidden beneath a stack of baskets and a coil of rope, he caught the edge of leather—tooled, darkened with use. A saddle, or most of one, from what he could see. The shape was familiar enough that he frowned at it, and then frowned harder, because the curve of it and the wear along the edge looked strikingly like his own.

There was no sign that she shared the bothy with another—no second pallet, the raised bed too narrow to hold two persons, only a few garments hanging on pegs to the left of the door, no extra set of footwear, no bow or sword to suggest a man occupied this space with her.

More sound arrived at the closed door, and he recalled that she’d been accompanied by a gangly hound, hearing now a faint huff of breath and the sound of a nose working impatiently at the crack beneath the door. Morggán heard no footsteps accompanying the dog, but in the next moment the door was pushed open and the young woman entered, a bucket in one hand, the light from outside catching in her hair as she crossed the threshold. She looked much as he remembered her—slight, watchful, as if she were never entirely at rest—and he realized at that moment that he’d almost wondered if he’d only dreamed her.