The Kindling (6 page)

“Did he tell the reason?”

“He said only that the man is restless.”

Sir Abel gave a derisive huff. “He has cause to be.”

Helene looked around. “You do not like him.” Then she ventured further yet, though she was not sure she wanted an answer. “Is it because ’twas he and not you who killed Sir Robert?”

Ire lit his eyes, but then it was gone. “Nay, for that I am grateful—and more.”

It was a better answer than expected. “Then?”

He shrugged. “‘Tis simply past time the Wulfriths and Lavonnes saw the last of him.”

She frowned. “That does not sound grateful.”

“Indeed, but gratitude need not be boundless to serve.”

Helene did not believe she was overly moved to curiosity, but whatever he did not say niggled, and she wondered more than before what kind of man Sir Durand was. Hopefully, he would be at table this eve.

She lightly wrung out the cloth and lowered to her knees beside Sir Abel’s left leg. However, as she reached to him, he said, “If, in all the time you kept me waiting to break my fast, you were not becoming acquainted with Sir Durand, with what did you occupy yourself?”

She was tempted to smile, for she was fairly certain he asked only that he might keep her from her ministrations. Looking up at where he looked down at her, she said, “Lord D’Arci acquainted me with the men-at-arms who have been slow to recover.”

“Soldiers. I warrant they did not receive you well.”

Recalling the tension exuded by her new patients when the lord of Castle Soaring had escorted her among them, their sharply drawn breaths and rigid discomfort when she had examined their injuries, she said, “Better than you, though ‘tis obvious they also prefer a physician to a healer.” And with that, she reached forward.

He tensed ahead of her touch, flinched when she raised the hem of his tunic, jerked when she eased aside the leg of his braies to expose fully the wound.

Bending her head, she looked upon it. “’Tis testament to Lord D’Arci’s skill that your leg was saved. And though ‘tis unsightly now, if infection can be kept from it, methinks time will be kind to its appearance.” She looked up and was not surprised by the offense in his eyes. “’Twill be the same for your face. You will ever be marked, but not as severely as you may think.”

“I shall keep that in mind when next I have cause to have a mirror to hand,” he growled.

Helene sat back on her heels. “Ah, you have not yet looked upon your face.”

He stared at her.

“One more thing I must needs remedy,” she said.

“Why?” His question was rife with challenge.

“Ignorance does not wear well upon you, Sir Abel. At least, it does not wear well upon the man who twice risked his life to free me from my captors.”

She waited, half expecting a morose, self-pitying reminder that he was much changed from that man. Instead, he stretched his legs farther out and slowly moved his gaze down the left one.

Had he not previously looked upon it as well?

“What matters,” he said, “is that my leg not impede or betray the rest of my body—that it function well. But that is not likely, is it?”

It would impede him but, given the reputation the Wulfriths had for turning mischievous, runny-nosed boys into fearsome knights, she had to believe his brothers would aid him in finding a way to compensate for his loss of speed and agility.

“The better it heals,” she said, “the better it will serve you.” Gently, she began to cleanse the knit-together flesh.

To his credit, he did not further press her, and she was allowed to do her work that included the application of two different salves, one of which Lord D’Arci had approvingly noted was similar to what he had used to treat Sir Abel’s wounds.

“And now your side.” She stood and wet a clean cloth. Determining her knees need suffer no further abuse, she bent over him and raised his tunic higher. As seen earlier when he had angrily exposed the wound, it crossed the lower portion of a much older scar.

“For you to survive such an injury not once but twice…” She shook her head in wonder. “God must wish you to remain among us, Abel Wulfrith.”

“God!” The force of his breath stirred the hair at her crown. “Why does He leave those whom it would be best to take and take those whom it would be best to leave?”

She looked up and blinked at how near their faces were—and tried not to grimace over the odor wafting from his body. “I do not know, though in tending the ill, I have many times asked it myself. And God has had cause not to answer me.”

She returned to the work of her hands, but the silence that fell between them was not long lived.

“My mother believes I have been given a second—” He gave a sharp laugh. “Nay, a third chance at life.”

Helene once more considered the old scar that ran from his hip to his ribs. How had he come by it?

“She thinks I have not yet accomplished my purpose, whatever that may be.”

“Mayhap she is right,” Helene submitted, “in which case, all you can do is aspire to be worthy of the extra time with which you have been gifted.” She dropped the cloth on the tray and retrieved the smallest pot of salve. As she rubbed the ointment into his skin, she felt him watching her.

“There.” She lowered his tunic. “Now your face.” She wet a third cloth and reached to his lower jaw.

“She also believes,” he said, “as does my sister, that I ought to be kind to you.”

Helene smiled. “Then I like your mother and sister even more.”

Sir Abel looked to her mouth and became so still it was as if he no longer breathed. Then his hand rose toward her face as if to touch her as she had touched him while he dreamed. However, in the next instant he wrenched it down. It had been his right hand, she realized, the one that could not hold as it had once held.

Dropping his head back, he closed his eyes and said in a weary voice, “Do it and be done.”

Helene wondered if his heart beat as hers did—with something beyond desire.

Nay, desire only,
she told herself.
He has been too long without a woman.
And even if it was not that…
 

She set her teeth and, shortly, straightened. “Lastly, if you lean forward, I believe I can reach your—”

“Nay.”

She met the eyes he once more opened to her. “I was told you took a mace to the back, Sir Abel.”

“Aye, ‘tis how the cowards took me down, but it is well enough healed that it requires no attention.”

Doubtless, he had endured enough of her presence, but though she knew she ought to be pleased with how near he had allowed her to tend him, she said, “Be it so, I should examine it.”

“Nay.” The glint in his eyes warned that this was no argument. He might be unable to send her from Castle Soaring, perhaps not even from his chamber, but his person was another matter.

“Then I am done here.” She arranged the tray’s contents to ensure they remained upright during the passage to the kitchen and paused over the goblet that held honeyed milk that she would have specified had Lord D’Arci not already ordered it. No drop had yet found its way onto Sir Abel’s tongue.

She extended the goblet. “You must needs drink this.”

He ignored it. “Pity.”

“What?”

“That you agree with my brother-in-law that the drink of babes is of greater benefit to a grown man than wine and ale.”

“In your condition, aye. Of course, once you are able to move about at length, above
and
belowstairs, I am sure you will remedy the situation yourself.” It was a challenge that she hoped he would accept. “Now, should I hold the goblet to your lips, or can you do it?”

She heard his intake of breath and saw his right hand rise. However, if it had been his intent to knock the goblet aside, in the moment it took him to defer to his left hand, he overcame the impulse and, instead, clamped his fingers around the goblet’s bowl.

“Go, Helene of Tippet.”

She carried the tray across the chamber. At the door she had left open, she hesitated, then determined it was better that she leave it ajar than risk upending the tray for the sake of Sir Abel’s privacy. Too, if he thought it important enough, he could close it himself.

Abel stared at the open doorway that offended nearly as much as the woman who had intended it to offend. Unless a servant soon passed by, he would be forced to leave the chair in which he had thought to spend a good part of the day.

He lowered his gaze to the milk he had been tempted to cast across the rushes, then the hand upon his thigh that still thought to dominate whether by the simple act of holding a goblet or the more complex act of touching a woman as he had wanted to touch Helene.

“More the fool I am,” he muttered. He did not want the healer. Though, for a short time…

He turned his palm up and looked to the wound that denied him the ability to close his hand, then the calloused pads at the base of his fingers that bore the faintest trace of where Helene had used her teeth upon him when he had seized her in the wood. It had been a bad first meeting, but in the days afterward, he had often considered the broken flesh that had reminded him of his failure to return John’s mother to him. However, he had righted that wrong when he and Baron Lavonne had located the last camp abandoned by Sir Robert and the healer’s cries had led them to a nearby cave.

Abel closed his eyes and saw her again where she had stood at the foot of a pile of furs and blankets that allowed but a glimpse of the old man who lay beneath them. Despite Helene’s slight figure, she had looked fierce with her dark red hair loose about her face, large deeply blue eyes, chest rising and falling from spent breath, hands curled into fists at her sides.

He had reached her ahead of Baron Lavonne, but not before she sank to the ground and began to weep. As he had lowered beside her, the chain that ran from beneath her skirts to the pallet had come to his notice, and he had seen she was secured to Aldous Lavonne such that her own death would have been more painful and prolonged had they not found her.

He had not meant to take her in his arms, but he had done it, holding her as he had not held a woman in a long time while Baron Lavonne discovered that his father yet lived.

Afterwards, when Abel had carried Helene before him on his saddle and before Durand had intercepted them and turned them toward Castle Soaring where Sir Robert worked his revenge, Abel had thought, perhaps…

He shook his head. He had not been thinking right—had allowed the guilt of Helene’s plight and his protective instincts for her son to make him forget that his was not a life to be shared. Once had been nearly too much for him to bend to a woman’s will, and he would not do so again. And that he was no longer the man who had righted his wrong against Helene was further proof that he had made the right decision. Thus, though he longed to know how John fared, he would not ask after the boy, for he was not such a knave that he would give Helene false hope that he felt anything near what he was fairly certain she felt for him. She would have to look elsewhere for a father for her son.

He drank down the milk that the passage of time had made even less appealing, slammed the goblet on the table, and pressed his hands to the chair arms to raise himself. As he swayed where he placed his greater weight on the right leg, he heard again the words Helene had spoken regarding his failed seduction attempt that had been intended to send her running back to Tippet.

…until you are once more a man in full, Sir Abel, you would do well to keep your hands and arms to yourself.

He had feigned nonchalance, but it had affected him deeply and sent his thoughts to the Wulfrith dagger he had thrust to the bottom of the chest when he had earlier rummaged through it in search of clean tunic and braies.

It hardly seemed possible that he would ever again be a man in full, but until then—if
then
came—he would not don the dagger that represented something he no longer did.

Drawing a deep breath, he shifted some of his weight to the left leg. Then came the task of traversing the chamber that had no right to be so daunting.

Chapter Six

No Sir Durand, though she knew it only because the knight with whom she shared a trencher had yet to point him out as she had asked him to do.

Helene sighed, hating that Sir Abel’s attitude toward the other man should so rouse her curiosity. Of course, it also had to do with him being the one who had killed Sir Robert. Too, though Lord D’Arci told that Sir Durand was sufficiently healed and required little tending, the knight had been given into her care.

She glanced around the great hall and was again unsettled to find herself seated at the high table a half dozen places removed from Lord D’Arci and his wife. It was hardly in keeping with her rank to be so honored, but Lady Beatrix had herself led Helene to this bench and waved away the healer’s protests before joining her husband.

Hoping the lingering over meal to which she was unaccustomed would soon find its end, Helene sat back, yielding the contents of the trencher to the one with whom she shared it.

The knight looked questioningly at her.

“I am quite finished,” she assured him, then asked, “Is it usual for Sir Durand to forgo the evening meal?”

The man paused in scooping up another mouthful of a stew so thick with chunks of veal that Helene had felt even more privileged. “Now that I think on it,” he said, “I have seen less and less of him at table.”

Just as Lord D’Arci had told that Sir Durand increasingly absented himself from the castle during the day. What made the knight separate himself from others such that he did not even sit down to meal? And what cause did he have to be restless as told by Sir Abel who wished to see the man’s back perhaps more than he wished to see hers?

Telling herself it did not matter, Helene resisted the impulse to put an elbow to the table and cup her chin in a hand as she was wont to do when held captive by others’ whims. Instead, as befitting a guest at high table, she clasped her hands in her lap and tried not to dwell on time better spent elsewhere. Tried, but failed.

If not for propriety’s sake, she would leave the hall and return abovestairs to check on Sir Abel who had not even looked up from a parchment he had been reading when she had delivered his supper tray. She could reapply her salves to his injuries and mix a sleeping draught to aid his rest. Indeed, she could even seek out Sir Durand that she might make herself known to him and confirm he healed well.