Page 77 of The Shape of Silence

Even though she’d yet to think of a legitimate reason why she couldn’t or shouldn’t help, she shook her head.

Across the distance she saw his mouth tighten into a hard line, and something dark flashed across his face. Even from twenty yards away, she could feel the force of his displeasure.

She didn't care. She wasn't one of his soldiers to be summoned with a word and expected to obey without question. Just as she’d insisted he owed her nothing when first they’d met, she knew she owed him nothing now.

“Avery, now,” he called out sharply.

There were sensible reasons to refuse. She knew nothing of tending battlefield injuries, had no experience with shattered bones, crushed limbs, or the terrible injuries swords and axes could inflict. She wasn't a surgeon, or a nurse, or even particularly brave, and if she did the wrong thing....

But then, simple human kindness overrode her resistance, and she realized she could offer something—she wasn’t petty enough or angry enough with either him or her own personal, possibly real time-travel predicament to refuse it.

“I can stitch smaller wounds,” she called across the space. “Send them to me, inside.” And with that, she turned and continued around the corner.

***

The remainder of the afternoon passed in a blur of bloody wounds, poultices, stitches, and weary endurance.

The skirmish had cost them more dearly than Morggán had first believed. None of the wounds alone would cripple the company, yet there were simply too many of them. Sword cuts that needed sewing, spear thrusts that demanded careful cleaning before they festered, broken fingers and cracked ribs from men thrown from their horses, bruises already darkening across shoulders and backs where shields had failed to absorb the full force of a blow. Muir scarcely paused long enough to wipe his hands before another injured man was brought before him.

After Avery’s infuriating reluctant offer, Morggán had sent Alasdair to the house first. The cut across his hand was clean and deep enough to require stitches, yet not so urgent that Muir needed to waste precious time upon it while men with heavier injuries waited. Before long another was sent, then another after him, until word got around that those whose wounds threatened life remained with Muir, and those whose injuries were less dangerous found their way to Avery's door.

And yet, irritation with Avery lingered with surprising persistence, surfacing whenever the work about him grew momentarily quiet. More than once, he caught himself remembering the sight of Eòin emerging beside her from the forest, her hand resting in his. He had seen nothing more than that and told himself he should be grateful for the lad’s watchfulness over her, and yet it refused to leave him. Had it stood alone, he might have dismissed it as nothing. There had been no slyness in the lad's manner, no guilty haste when he finally released her hand. And yet, when coupled with Avery’s initial refusal to help, it was difficult to reason away either thing.

When at last he could step away, dusk had settled over the camp. He and Lucas Thain had just spent the better part of an hour dissecting the day's engagement, agreeing that the English had anticipated their usual tactics and had lain in wait rather than trying to outrun the harassment, as they’d done on every other occasion. Before another raid, they would have to devise a different approach.

Only then did Morggán make his way toward Avery's house.

If his annoyance with Avery had dulled over the last few hours, it returned with every step through the gathering twilight. He found himself replaying the moment she had stood across the clearing and refused him, then the sight of Eòin beside her, and before that, the previous evening when she had withdrawn from his embrace. None of it sat comfortably with him, and together it left him with a bitterness he could neither dismiss nor fully explain.

The door stood open. He slowed as he reached it, listening to the quiet within, before seeing that she was alone.

The last of the wounded had long since returned to the camp, yet she had left the door unlatched and wide, as though any man still in need might simply walk inside without knocking. That at least, he admitted grudgingly, he appreciated.

She stood with her back partly toward him, restoring folded lengths of clean linen to the shelf above the table. A wooden bucket sat near the doorway, heaped with bloodied cloths awaiting the stream. The house held the scents of fresh herbs, clean water, and iron-rich blood, while two bone needles lay drying upon a square of linen on her short table.

She looked weary. Loose strands had escaped the braid that had been neat and tight when last he saw her, softening the line of her neck and temples. Her cheeks had lost their usual warmth, leaving her pale with fatigue, and there was a heaviness to her movements that he’d not ever noticed before. Even so, she remained distractingly beautiful, and Morggán found that realization no less irritating than the rest of his thoughts.

Perhaps she sensed him in the doorway, or perhaps the silence itself announced his presence. She turned before he would have announced himself. For a heartbeat they simply looked at one another.

She didn’t lower her blue eyes, so that he imagined that whatever anger she had carried through the afternoon had not entirely left her either. After a moment, her gaze traveled over him with quiet efficiency, lingering briefly on the dried blood darkening one sleeve before returning to his face.

“Do you need stitches?” she asked.

The question was delivered with such cool indifference that it annoyed him further—as though there could be no other reason for him to stand upon her threshold.

“ʼTis nae my bluid,” he answered, stepping inside.

She made to turn away, to return to her practical little chore, replacing the linen on the shelf.

Before she could, Morggán closed the door behind him and demanded to know, “Avery, what the bluidy hell was that about earlier?”

Her eyes widened, but only briefly, before they narrowed at him. “It was about me having no business helping these men, since I’m not trained to do so.”

“Ye stitched me and saw me through a fever—” he countered hotly, moving around the fire, closing in on her.

The little house afforded precious little room, but she stood her ground with her back pressed to the counter and shelves behind her.

“That was necessary—there was no one else, and I did believe you would have died if I didn’t do something,” she countered. “Today, I was afraid I would cause someone more trouble than their actual wound did. And also,” she announced smartly, thumping her hands onto her hips, “there was no one shouting at me—ordering me to do something as if I’m a servant.”