Thief (23 page)

“Then—” she stammered as his warmth seeped through the initial cool of his wrung-dry tunic and her chest molded against his harder one—“then you must still be fighting.” Though Aelwyn once confided that men never seemed to chill like women, which made them the perfect hand- and foot-warmers.

“Sleep,” he told her, his breath hot against the top of her rain-plastered hair. “I’ll keep you warm as I can.”

It wasn’t long before their combined body heat warmed the damp cloaks that insulated them against the frosty fall air outside the covered craft. Not overly so, for to move away from Caden was to invite the cold. Not that Sorcha wanted to. For the first time in a long time, she felt safe and protected. Like a child in her father’s arms, but different. In Wulfram’s embrace, she drifted off to sleep with her heart beating a sweet lullaby. Here it played a more primal tune, as if answering the call of the faint rhythm in the chest beneath her head. Regardless, it seemed right. Enough that even it could not hold exhaustion at bay any longer.

Chapter Twenty-three

Sunlight struck Caden’s face like a sword’s blow, startling him into battle-readiness as the tarp overhead was abruptly tugged away. At the appearance of a man’s head silhouetted against a brilliant sky, Caden’s hand was already closed about the hilt of the sword hidden under the pile of cloaks.

“What do you want?” he demanded, coming up so sudden that the man backed away. Robbed of his arm for a pillow, Sorcha’s head struck the bottom boards.

“Hey!” she protested.

But Caden’s eye was on the stranger.

“Nothing, sir,” the man averred, calm despite fierce blue eyes fixed on the glint of Caden’s blade emerging from the bedding. “I swear it.”

A fisherman by the look of his patched tunic and cowled cloak. A big one at that. At least Caden’s height.

“I came to check my traps, saw the boat, and decided to have a look, that’s all,” he said in flawless Cymric. “’Twas a terrible storm last night to weather.”

The boat wobbled as Caden came to his feet. Sorcha moaned, covering her eyes with her arm. “S’cold!”

Indeed frost made the scrub of the heathland spread beyond them glitter like a fairy world. Caden took in the angle of the sun. They’d slept past daybreak, but not by much. “Is the fishing that good in Saxon waters that a Cymri should ply them?”

“Eels fetch a fine price … and Saxons like them as well as Cymri.”

“If you say so.” Caden couldn’t detect an accent in the man’s speech to suggest his origins. But his build was more that of a warrior than a waterman, and his hair, tied at his neck with a leather cord, was so gold it was almost white. Like a Saxon. “So where are the eels?”

“I saw the boat before collecting them.”

Caden stepped out onto the spongy bank. “Go on then.
Collect
.”

Sorcha dragged herself up, pulling the cloaks around her as the waterman strode past the beached coble, giving her a nod.

“Who’s he?” she asked sleepily. Her copper hair was matted by the dried salt water around her face, which was flushed pink. Uncommonly so.

Caden scowled. She’d been restless during the night, shivering. But he’d attributed it to their circumstances. He called after the fisherman as he waded into the marsh grass beyond where they’d landed. “Have you a name, eel catcher?”

“Owain.”

“And where are you from, Owain?” Aside from the knife at his waist, Owain had no other weapons on him.

“Hahlton, upwater.”

Caden reached down to help Sorcha to her feet, but she screamed and fell back into the boat. Owain turned and bolted back to the boat, but Caden stopped him with a raised sword.

“My wrist.” Tears sprang to Sorcha’s eyes. She curled into a possessive ball over it.

“Sorry, milady,” Caden averred. He should have taken more care, but a nursemaid he wasn’t. Not when a man Owain’s size posed possible threat. Caden jerked the sword toward the sun-grazed water. “The traps,
Owain
.”

Owain hesitated. “The lady looks ill. I’ve a cottage up on yon hill with a warm fire and liniments.”

“Have you the means to patch this boat?” Caden asked. A quick scan of the hill showed an affirming trail of gray smoke climbing toward the sky.

“Better,” Owain replied. “I’ve a sound curragh.”

An Irish boat, light and sound, as the man said. Caden’s mind raced. Only a fool—or a villain with an accomplice hid along the way—would announce such a prize in view of their circumstances.

“A warm f-fire,” Sorcha sighed through chattering teeth. “I’m so cold and wet, sure I’ll never dry again.”

Wary, Caden alternated his gaze between a worn narrow path leading toward the higher land and Owain, as he waded into the marsh grass upriver where poles had been set. Had Caden and Sorcha progressed any farther last night, they’d have become entangled in the underwater traps.

Seizing a line hidden by the water and grass, Owain pulled until a tapered wicker trap the length of his long legs came out of the water. In it was a fine catch of common eels, big ones.

“The adults are on their way downriver to spawn in the ocean,” Owain called over his shoulder as yet another emerged. It wasn’t as full as the first. “Satisfied, soldier?”

So he wasn’t the only one sizing up the other. Caden nodded.

“I’ve more traps to check, but I’m thinking the lady would rather go straightaway to the fire.” Owain glanced at Sorcha for affirmation and smiled.

Concern or something else? It made Caden uncomfortable, whatever it was.

Sorcha used her good hand to shove herself to her feet and swayed so that Caden hastened to steady her with his free hand. The overbright green of her pleading gaze tore the indecision from his mind. As long as he had a sword and a knife, the odds were with him.

“Aye, we’ll stay,” he conceded. “But just till we dry out and fix the boat.”

Owain’s shack was that of a fisherman. His wicker-and-hide curragh—big enough to carry four men and, unlike the coble, light enough to carry overland—lay upside down at the back. Draped on the sides of the shelter were fishing nets, well mended. The inside was tended well too. On the entrance wall was a partially woven fish trap, numerous hooks, and fish spears. The stranger put on a kettle for tea, found dry clothing for each of them from a chest beneath a tidy cot—his brother’s, he claimed—and left them to make themselves at home while he checked his other traps.

By the time Caden had hung his and Sorcha’s clothing outside on poles used to mend nets, Sorcha had already succumbed to the comfort of the bed next to the hearth where a peat fire glowed. The oatcakes Owain had put out by the fire for them lay untouched.

“I need to see to your wrist, milady.”

Sorcha groaned and burrowed deeper in the pallet of moss and bracken topping the bed, but he managed to coax the injured hand out. His first look belly-punched him. The wrist was fevered and swollen near twice its usual size. Spreading from the broken skin was an inflamed area that raged from the color of raw liver to a flaming pink fringe. Caden said nothing, but he’d seen flesh like it before, wounded flesh that had turned to poison itself. Not many survived such a wound.

“What happened?” Owain’s voice behind him gave Caden a start.

The man moved like a spirit. Caden hadn’t even heard the door of the shack creak to admit him. “Finished already, are you?”

“I was attacked with a belaying pin,” Sorcha said flatly, not bothering to open her eyes. “Caden saved me.”

“Humph,” Owain grunted. “Another reason I like living alone. There is no low mankind will not sink to.”

“You seem well spoken for a common fisherman,” Caden observed.

“I’m not common.” The man gave him a mysterious smile, then turned away. “And it’s your good fortune that I’m not.” He opened a crudely made cupboard to reveal a selection of jars filled with dried herbs, powdered substances, and flagons containing various liquids.

“You’re an apothecary?” Caden asked in surprise.

“A scholar educated in many things.”

“From Ireland then?”

“My boat is,” he evaded smoothly. “Ah, there we are.”

Owain took out a pottery jar containing what looked to be salt. Another contained a black powder like Caden’s sister-in-law had used to treat his father’s poisoning in what seemed another lifetime. Caden watched carefully as the
scholar
sprinkled some of the two on a bandage and poured water from a vial over it to make a paste.

The scent of the
water
whetted Caden’s memory. “Aqua vitae?” he asked. “Won’t it burn?” The first and last time he’d ever tasted the vile Scandinavian liquor, it had burned from his lips till it hit the bottom of his belly. The Northman who’d shared it with him had called him a baby and offered to buy him milk instead. Caden offered him a split lip.

“It’s diluted with distilled water.” To the poultice Owain added a clear gel that had no particular odor. “And this will soothe it.”

“What is it?” Caden asked.

“A plant derivative.”

“And that?” Caden wrinkled his nose as Owain opened a last jar, which emitted a foul odor akin to a rotten egg.

“Something to fight infection.” Owain mashed it into the paste with a pestle, before nodding in satisfaction over his effort.

“Fight foul with foul, eh,” Caden observed, uncertain.

“If you don’t mind, sir, lift her arm so that I can wrap this about the wrist.”

Since his knowledge of battlefield medicine—cauterize or pack with mud—hardly compared to what Owain had just put together, Caden yielded. This was out of his hands. But then his entire world had spun out of his hands since he took on this mission to bring Sorcha home to her mother.

Sorcha’s eyelids fluttered open as Owain gently wrapped the poultice around her wrist and forearm. “What a pretty man you are,” she murmured.

Caden’s jaw clenched. As men went, the fisherman, or whatever he was, did have a comely face with smooth, fair skin like Caden’s brother Alyn—not a scar or pock mark on it. Owain had been spared a hard life … unlike the life of a fisherman who weathered the elements. So who was he, really?

“I’m going to make you some tea,” Owain told Sorcha. “It’s important that you drink it all, no matter how it smells or tastes.”

“Honey will help.” Fatigue slurred Sorcha’s words, but she answered the smile he gave her with childlike trust in her pale green gaze. Pale, not the untamed green of the woods that spoke to Caden’s own wild nature, he noticed, before she closed her eyes and meekly submitted to the stranger’s ministrations.

Once Owain tied the last of the knots to hold the bandage in place, Caden eased Sorcha’s arm back under the covers. He could almost feel its heat through them.

“How long has she been feverish?” Owain asked.

Caden moved to the place the man abandoned. “You found out when I did. ’Twas only hours ago that she got the wound.” He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. Hot.

“And who are you running from?”

Caden glanced over his shoulder sharply. “Who says we are?”

Again the man brandished that annoying, knowing smile of his. “Navigating the river in the pitch dark during a storm says so. Unless you’re both fools,” he added. “And I see no sign that you are.”

Caden thought before replying. To date, Owain had been truthful with them. But finding such a man here in the middle of the moor did not make sense. He hid something, despite the open hospitality and care he extended them.

Just as Caden decided on a convincing story—that he was escorting the lady to her mother, who desperately needed her—Sorcha replied.

“We’re running from a powerful and vindictive man who wants to kill me for refusing to marry him.”

Caden winced. He’d thought she’d drifted off to sleep.

“The lady chose to go to her mother’s aid instead of marriage,” Caden improvised. “The man’s a villain with no allegiance to anyone, including the bretwalda, and didn’t take her decision well.” Waking wearing nothing but chains wouldn’t improve Tunwulf’s humor either.

“I see.” Accepting Caden’s elaboration without further question, Owain took more of the foul powder and made tea in a cup with hot water from the kettle. “Then the more of this concoction we can get into her, my friend,” he said, reaching for a jar of what turned out to be honey, “the quicker you can be on your way.”

Caden latched on those last words, the same as he clung to a trust that this man was indeed as learned as he appeared. Desperation gave him little choice. “How soon?”

“Likely three days. Then I’ll take you upriver as far as Hahlton.”

In three days Tunwulf, maybe Hussa himself, would be at Trebold, waiting for them. But Sorcha couldn’t travel like this.

“From there,” Owain continued, “it’s no more than a day’s travel afoot to the Tweed.”

Caden locked gazes with the man. “Who said we were bound for the Tweed?”

“’Tis the fastest way out of Saxon-held land without crossing the forested hills or using the main roads north. How does roasted eel sound for supper?”

An answer for every question. “Three days?” Caden repeated. Because the healing Owain promised and what Caden had seen in the past did not agree.

“Christ rose in three days,” Owain reminded him. “She has only an infected arm.”

So, Owain was a Christian. Stranger still. British clergy, as a rule, would rather burn themselves than reach out to the hordes who plundered their churches and massacred their brothers and sisters in unspeakable ways. That would make him Irish, whether he had the accent or nay.

Caden lifted Sorcha up gently and worked his way under her till he cradled her in his arms. “I pray to God you are right,
scholar
,” he said. “Now hand me that tea.”