Page 25 of Shaw

“Quit being uber polite. It’s not you, and it’s good manners to call someone or something by its name, assuming it has one.” She tilted her head. “Your eyes are growing darker. That means it’s looking at me, right?”

“’Tis seeing you through my eyes. I yet look upon you.” He didn’t know if she would understand the difference.

“I know you’re two separate things. Beings. Whatever.” Her expression softened. “It’s okay, Chief. We’ll give it some time and I’ll be nice to it. I think it needs to get to know me, too.”

As he walked back to the stronghold with her, Shaw waited for the beast to knot and snarl inside him, as it always did after awakening. Yet for the first time since the ritual, it only lay inside him like a sleepy cat napping before a hearth.

Could she somehow tame the beast, and persuade it to leave him on its own?

“Wait, my lady,” he said as she went toward the stairs leading to her bed chamber. “I’ve an idea.”

Serving the MacMar Clan as their healer caused no end of troubles for Duncan, whose mortal weakness caused him for a time to suffer the same symptoms as any wounded or ill mortal he touched. He told himself it made him understand his patients better than an ordinary healer could, and perhaps it did. Yet after centuries of living each day as if perpetually sick or injured, he sometimes wondered if his weakness had been deliberately inflicted on him as an eternal punishment for some great wrong he’d done in an earlier life.

Today he had only Briga and Gilla Tarney, a pair of elderly spinster sisters, to attend. For close to ninety years both enjoyed the same remarkable good health as the other mortals on Caladh, but their great age had finally brought a range of daily miseries to them. Their bodies, gnarled and frail now, plagued them with swollen joints, the constant ache of whirl bone, and wounds that took too long to heal.

“They’ve both the catalepsy now, my lord,” their housemaid Cora reported when she came to the infirmary to summon him. “Neither will eat nor wake more than a few moments. If such goes on I fear they’ll starve.”

Now Duncan crouched down in front of Briga, who had a head of thick white hair and a face so wrinkled she seemed to be wearing a crumpled mask. Her body smelled warm and clean, but her breath had a strange, almost mossy odor to it. “Mistress Tarney, do you ken me?”

Her eyes narrowed as she studied him, but moved as if she could not focus. “Handsome lad. You’re my swain.”

“Aye, always.” He took hold of her hand, gritting his teeth as a wave of aching pain and nausea swept over him. He instantly became dizzy as well. “What plagues you now, my sweet Briga?”

Her gaze darted for an instant at the housemaid before she yawned and groaned. “Naught, if you shall take me to bed.”

Duncan forced a laugh as he stood. “You tempt me unbearably, my lady.” To the maid he said, “Fetch some fresh water for me.” He waited until Cora left before he asked Briga, “What did she, then?”

The old woman reached into her bodice and pulled out a kerchief tied around something. “I saw her steep this with our evening brew. I spat the stuff out in the privy, but ’tis kept Gilla asleep all night and the morn.”

He went over to check the other sister’s pulse, which barely beat at her wrist, and then quickly unknotted the kerchief, revealing a dried root of a plant he recognized, with a strong mossy odor like that coming from her breath.

“’Tisnae poison,” he murmured to Briga as the younger woman returned with a brimming bucket. “Cora, tell me of what you’re using as medicine for the ladies.”

The housemaid set down the water and then knelt before him, her whole body shaking. “Please, my lord, I meant no harm. The all-heal, ’twas to help calm them and end their pain.”

“You gave them too much, lass,” Duncan told her. “The root, ’tis too powerful for elders like these ladies. Such not only put them asleep, it near stopped their hearts from beating.”

Cora looked horrified. “My mam said ’twould only do them good.”

He thought for a moment, recalling the broad, scowling face of Cora’s màthair, Angalan, who sold her mostly harmless herbal remedies to the more superstitious villagers. She had never liked her daughter working at the stronghold, which was why Duncan had sent the maid to live with the Tarney sisters. She also distrusted him for reasons he did not know but suspected had to do with his Fae sire. Whenever he crossed Angalan’s path, she spat on the ground and made a protective gesture over herself.

“Dinnae give Briga or Gilla any remedy I’ve no’ first seen,” he told Cora. “Else you end them instead of aid.”

From the sisters’ cottage he walked across the village to a large, well-kept house outside which several mortals waited. They quickly scattered as he approached, making Duncan wonder what gossip his mortal rival had of late been spreading about him. He knocked once on the door and stepped inside, where the stink of burning rosemary made him grimace.

“You need wait outside until I call for the next.” The short, plump figure of Angalan appeared in the passage ahead of him. She stopped and glowered when their gazes met. “What want you, son of Mar?”

“You used your daughter so you might treat the Tarney sisters with valerian root,” he said. “They’re too old for such a strong dose. Do you wish them dead?”

“Oh, aye, ’tis why I’ve spent my life as a healer, so I might slay at will,” Angalan told him, planting her hands on her hips. “The root, ’twillnae harm those old hags.”

Sometimes Duncan wondered why he tried so hard to co-exist with the surly herbalist. “Drugging them asleep may prove fatal. Their hearts, they’re too fragile at this age.”

The herbalist made a contemptuous sound. “As if you might see what abides beneath their sagging chebs.” She made a shooing gesture. “Begone with you.”

“Angalan.” When she looked at him he saw the depth of her anger. “I dinnae mean cross you, nor question your methods. ’Tis but truth I offer.”

“Truth then.” She marched up to him, tilting her head back to hold his gaze. “You may come and use your Fae magic so you may heal whomever you desire, but where hide you when the elders come begging for relief in the night? Cora wept as she told me of the Tarneys spending every evening moaning abed. They’re so crippled by the whirl bone now naught may bring on their slumber but valerian root.”