Page 55 of Sins of the Highlander

“Just a wee dram more,” the woman said, holding the cup to Elspeth’s mouth and massaging her throat to help her swallow. “Good! Now we wait a bit.”

The room took a decided tilt, and Elspeth clutched the edges of the table.

“Oh.” She put a hand to her head, her movement slow and deliberate, lest she miss her temple and keep going. “I’m dizzy of a sudden. I need to lie flat.”

Rob eased her down on the table.

Overhead, the thatch teemed with bright green wiggling things, squirming through the gray dried grasses. Then she blinked hard, and when she looked again, they were gone.

Angus was speaking slowly. She knew because his lips were moving. She watched his words float across the room, lumbering yellowish blobs, but she couldn’t hear them.

“I hurt for ye,” Fingal told her from the place Hepzibah had assigned the deerhound on the hearth rug. His voice sounded oddly like Rob’s. Then the dog stood upright on his hind feet as if he were a man and leaned on the mantel, hooking one ankle over the other.

The red shawl on the witch’s shoulders hummed a disjointed tune, and the raven in the corner woke and fixed a one-eyed stare on Elspeth. She knew without the bird saying a word that it didn’t like her a bit. But she was sure it could speak if it felt she deserved the effort.

Rob squeezed her hand, and warmth flooded her chest and upper body. She couldn’t feel her legs. Either of them. His lips moved, but the blue of his plaid started a high-pitched whine that drowned out his words. He reached over her and tied her to the table. It should have alarmed her, but she was too entranced by the sparks of color trailing his hands to care.

She smelled bread. Hot and yeasty and comforting, it filled her nostrils and made her mouth water.

The wisewoman propped Elspeth’s knee up. Rob grasped her ankle. Hepzibah tied a rope around her upper thigh so tight, Elspeth knew it should hurt, but instead she fought the urge to giggle. Then she stopped fighting. Her laughter danced through the air in flashes of light, borne up on grains of dust, sparkling in the sun.

Why had she never noticed how miraculous the world was? How filled with the fire of God? Everything swirled into everything else, all connected, all the same, all different, ever changing, and never changing. She could See back to the beginning and forward to the future at the selfsame time. And all the millions of moments, from deep in the past to those yet to come, stretching forever into the mist of tomorrow, converged in a single beat of her heart.

Angus clamped his beefy paws on either side of her head…to keep it from floating away, she supposed.

“Forgive me, leannán,” someone said. It might have been Rob. Or maybe it was the dog again.

And suddenly she was cast into hell.

***

Rob stumbled out of Hepzibah Black’s house and down to the loch. Blood was smeared all over his chest and arms. Who knew she still had so much in her? If he didn’t wash it off, he feared he’d go mad, finally and completely.

If Elspeth died, he was sure he would.

By rights, that bolt should have found him in the dark. Instead, it had ripped through Elspeth’s sweet flesh. He’d have given his mortal soul, and gladly, for the chance to trade places with her.

Why did God make others pay for his sins?

He knelt by the loch and washed himself, praying after a fashion as he did so. God knew he was not the contemplative sort by nature, so he didn’t try to dress up his requests with religious-sounding words.

Christ, they say ye be merciful. If ye would prove it, let her wake.

Elspeth Stewart was not a screamer. She’d faced a wolf pack with grim silence, but she had screeched like she was being murdered while he and Hepzibah worked as quickly as they could to push the bolt on through her thigh. Rob had thought it a kindness when she slipped into oblivion. Now that her wound was packed with healing herbs and dressed with bandages soaked in the last of Angus’s execrable wine, his gut was all jumbled up because her eyes remained closed.

Let her walk again.

Hepzibah assured him the damage would have been greater had they drawn the bolt out, but it seemed to him that now both sides of her leg were equally offended by the cold iron. Elspeth was young. She should be dancing and skipping, not leaning on a cane like a crone. Or worse.

Let her live.

He could bear anything if that prayer was answered. But she was so pale, her skin practically translucent.

He looked down at his wavering reflection in the water. There was one more request swirling in his brain, but he hesitated to lift it to God. It almost seemed like too much to ask.

Let her forgive me.

He rose and trudged back to the cottage. Only Elspeth Stewart could answer that last prayer.