Lady with the Devil's Scar

‘Nae.’ Angus paced across the other side of the fire. ‘He is not one of us. I say kill him here and now and be rid of any menace.’

In response Isobel kneeled beside James. Pushing back her sleeve, she made a cut in her palm and another across the thickened skin below the strange mark on his wrist. Pressing them together, she smelt the rusty tang of blood.

Hecate, Cerridwen, Dark Mother Take Us In

Hecate, Cerridwen, Let Us Be Reborn.

The oath of loyalty and attachment echoed around the clearing.

‘You would protect him for ever?’ Andrew asked the question.

She shook her head, knowing he was her enemy. ‘Nae. But I swear by all the gods of this place that I will protect him for now.’

Chapter Four

He was naked.

He knew that as easily as he knew he was safe.

Isobel Dalceann was there in the shadow just beyond the candlelight, watching him with her dark eyes and stillness.

‘Water.’ He could barely get the word out.

She moved forwards and he saw that one eye was swollen, the deep bruise on her cheek below grazed into redness.

‘Who hurt you?’ His whisper was barely audible as she leaned forwards to hear.

‘I fell.’

He did not believe it, nor did he understand the shift of caution in her eyes or the gentle way she took a cloth and ran it across his chest.

‘It feels good.’ All the skin on his arms was raised with pleasure, leaning into the cool, and he saw she had a band of cloth wrapped around her palm. Another hurt. He tried to reach up and touch it, but she stopped him.

‘You must rest. Your arm has festered and only strength can save you now.’

His arm? Sliced in the sea. He remembered the boat bound for Edinburgh. He remembered the wave as it had caught them broadside, turning the vessel into the cold and green, the ropes tethering him and the sailcloth, people calling from everywhere.

He had cut free as many as he could with his knife and released them. Simon. Guy. Etienne and Raoul. Then the wooden splint had come down from the mast, broken by force of wind and wave above, turning sharp.

Aching now. Right down to his fingers in a cramping stiffness. A band circled his arm, white linen soaked in something that smelt like overripe onion and herbs strangely mixed. He could not move a muscle.

‘My sword hand?’

‘Ian says cloth sellers should have no need for such a weapon,’ she returned.

‘You found him, then, in the glade?’

‘Worse for wear with the knots you fashioned. It would have been a slow death had we come too late.’

‘Like this one is?’

Her pupils dilated. Always a sign of high emotion. Marc shut his eyes. She thought that he would die soon. Tonight even, he amended, looking at the ornate golden cross above his bed.

Other words came close. An ancient chant in the firelight! Isobel Dalceann lifting his palm against her own and cutting it open, blood mixed in an oath of protection. Was he going mad as well?

The glow from the candle hurt even though his eyelids burnt in fever.

‘Where am I?’

‘Ceann Gronna. My keep on the high sea cliffs above Elie.’

The sea was close, the moon seen through the space between skin and stone at the window. No longer full.

‘How long?’

‘Three days.’

He breathed out, nausea roiling his stomach. Even in Burgundy when the arrow had pierced his armour and gone deep into his back he had not been as ill.

‘You have tended me, then?’

Sickness. The room was full of its grasp. Basins, cloths and vials of medicine lined up on the table. His clothes were neatly washed and folded on the seat of a white ash wooden chair decorated with bands of vermilion paint. He wished he might have stood and taken charge, but not one muscle in his body would obey a command.

Helpless. The very word stung with shock.

‘You have spoken in your sleep in French of battles and of death. It is just as well that none here understand you.’

He turned then, away from her eyes, because there was a question in them that he had no answer for.

Are you an enemy?

Once I was, he wanted to say, but now? The bruising on her cheek was dark.

He should have kept silent, should have held his tongue even in the grasp of delirium. So many damn secrets inside him.

‘When you are better, you will be sent by boat across to Edinburgh.’

‘Better?’ The word surprised him. She thought he would survive this, then, this malady. Relief had him reaching out and taking her fingers into his own. Just gratitude in it. The cool of her skin made him realise how hot he was.

Isobel stood still, the nighttime noises of a sleeping keep far from this room. Her room. His fingers were strong like his body, the skin on the pads toughened by work. She felt them relax as he fell into sleep again, but she did not put his hand down as she should have, did not move from her position at his side, watching him in the midnight.

Marc. He had said his name was that when she had called him James, shrugging off the other name with agitation. He had said other things as well in his delusion that had made her glad she was alone, his green eyes glassy with the fever that raged through him, taking sense.

A warrior. She understood that now by all the other marks on his body, sliced into history. Neither an easy life nor a safe one, for fire and shadow sculptured the hardness in him lying on her bed.

He had spoken of some things that she had no knowledge of and of other things that she did.

Things such as the sovereignty accorded to David of the Scots and the ambitions of Philip of France. A king’s man, then? If Ian or Andrew had heard the words he would be long gone by now, breathless in the raging seas off the end of the Ceann Gronna battlements, only memory.