Page 26 of A Highland Healer Captured
The days began to blur together. Each morning Katie brought hot water and a tray of breakfast, and then brought her to Grayson’s bedside where she sat with her satchel open, herbs and tinctures scattered like a healer’s battlefield.
Cora brought in more supplies. Helpful as ever.
And each night before letting sleep take her, she wrote in her journal.
Day Three. Tried willow bark infusion. It eased the ache in his head but not the tightness in his chest. His cough remains shallow but persistent.
Day Four. Warm compresses laced with thyme. Helped him breathe easier for a short while, but the effect faded before supper. Grayson is frustrated and says he feels like a bird trapped in a cage. I cannot disagree.
Day Five. Mixed mullein and honey. He drank it obediently, sweet boy, but his lungs rattle still. His spirit outpaces his body. It is cruel to watch.
Skylar closed the book with a sigh, and tossed it onto her bed. The candle guttered beside it, wax dripping steadily down its holder, as though mocking her own dwindling patience.
She scrubbed at her eyes with her palms. What sort of healer was she if her satchel of remedies yielded nothing lasting? The boy’s breaths came quick and shallow still, though he smiled through it, though he tried to sit taller and pretend he wasn’t tired after merely listening to a story.
It gnawed at her—the slow betrayal of a child’s body. But what gnawed worse was the way she was had instantly started to care, truly care, for him. She had sworn to herself the first day that she’d help the lad because it was her calling as a healer, not because he was Zander Harrison’s son. But Grayson was undoing that vow thread by thread with every word, every smile, every scrap of stubborn determination.
He liked to talk about birds. Saints, he could speak of them for hours, his small hands flapping as he mimicked wings, his voice growing bright despite the rasp in his lungs.
“That one there, Skylar, that’s a swift. See how it darts? And the rooks, they’ve more sense than some men,” Grayson started to say one day in the solar, his small finger pointing and following the creature across the sky.
She had teased, “Do ye mean yer da?”
Grayson had laughed, a weak but genuine sound. “Nay. Uncle Mason. He pretends he doesnae like birds, but I’ve seen him feed the ravens crusts when nay one’s watching.”
Skylar had caught Katie grinning at that.
It wasn’t only birds. He told her how Zander lifted him onto his shoulders when he was smaller, how he’d once promised to build a perch so Grayson could see as high as the hawks.
“See, just there… foot holds,” the small lad said and gestured out of the window toward the tall tree. Skylar stood from his bed and walked toward the glass, and just there—along the shadowed edge of the tree—she saw small notches carved into the bark. Purposeful. Working their way up the tree.
He also told her once how Mason taught him to play dice—a brilliant set of emerald colored dice rested on his bedside table, but they hadn’t played yet, and right as Skylar thought about asking him, he shrugged and told her “though Da scolded him when I won too much… so I daenae play too much anymore. Because I daenae want to upset him.”
“Well, we need to fix that. Right?” Skylar said playfully, which elicited a wide, bright smile from the lad.
Grayson loved sweetmeats but hated onions. He wanted to be strong enough to spar, but knew the weight of a wooden sword would knock him flat.
A small world, bound by walls and courtyards, but bursting with dreams. And now he was caged by his own breath.
The words he had whispered last night clung to her even now.“I feel like a bird, Skylar. But me wings are broken.”
She pressed her hand to her heart, blinking against the sting in her eyes.
Something had to change. If not his body, then his spirit.
Skylar leaned her head back against the cool stone of the solar wall, letting the boy’s laughter echo in her mind. These weren’t just scraps of conversation, they were pieces of him she was gathering, carefully, almost unwillingly, as if each memory stitched itself into her whether she liked it or not.
Grayson was slipping into the quiet places of her heart where she had no defenses. And she feared what it would cost her when the time came to let him go.
The next morning, after another failed attempt to ease his chest with warm compresses, Skylar looked at him curled against the pillows, his lips pale but his eyes still bright. “Would ye like to go outside, Grayson?”
Katie straightened sharply. “The laird said?—”
“I ken what the laird said,” Skylar cut in, her voice firm. “But I say the bairn needs air and sun. A day of freedom willnae harm him as much as this endless caging.”
Grayson’s eyes widened, then filled with such joy that it knocked the breath from her chest. “Truly? We’ll see the sky?”
“Aye, lad,” Skylar said, tucking the blanket around his narrow shoulders. “And ye’ll teach me every bird that flies overhead.”
