Page 50 of A Highland Healer Captured
Her mind ran its fast paths.Nae a simple fever, though, he’d sweat. Nae only a lung’s rage. These were all wrong. Nae a spirit. Spirits didn’t leave pupils.
The bowl thumped onto the table. The clatter of a spoon and the grind of salt rang out through the silence.
Katie returned with shaking hands and a small pile of blackened bread that smelled of apology. Skylar grabbed a cloth, soaked it, pressed it cool to the boy’s forehead, then lifted and sniffed the cup by the bed. Honeyed water.
A trace of something sweet and wrong under it. It was sweet, like old fruit, like a cupboard that had gone bad. She dipped a finger, touched it to her tongue, winced at the bitterness that crawled up and played tricks at the back of her throat.
“Skylar—” Zander again, quieter. He had bent to the level of the child’s face, speaking into his ear even as his eyes stayed on her. “I’m here, Gray. Breathe, lad. Breathe.” He didn’t get in her way. He didn’t ask stupid questions. He held his son’s arm in exactly the right place to keep it from banging the bed.
“It’s nae just the lungs.”
Katie made a sound like a bird hitting glass. “What?”
“It’s...” Skylar’s hands moved while her mind named. “Steady, little one. There.” The spasm peaked and loosened. She rolled him to his side in case of sick, checked his mouth, cleared what little threat there was with two fingers. “Something drying, not dampening. Pupils wide; skin hot and dry; pulse fast and foolish.”
“Nae now… nae here,” Skylar snapped, because rage helped no one inside a child’s body.
This is belladonna’s game, or henbane’s…
“But that’s nae—” she started to say, then lifted the cup to her nose again, grimaced.
A berry steeped too strong, a drop too much. A well-meaning fool can dose worse than an enemy with a knife.
“Fix it,” he said. Not an order. A plea built like an order because it was the only language he had.
“I’m tryin’, Zander. It’s just— I cannae…” she looked up and his face was right next to hers.
“Please give me some room,” She murmured softly as she continued to mix salt and a spoon of mustard into the hot water until it clouded, then let it cool with impatient blows between her teeth. “If it’s been long, this might help a little. If it’s recent?—”
She didn’t finish. She slid an arm under Grayson’s shoulders, propped him, coaxed the rim of the cup to his lips. “Small, Gray. Small sips, little hawk.”
He choked, swallowed by reflex, coughed, swallowed again. The body wanted to hold its poisons like secrets; she coaxed it to tell. When she had given enough, she laid him back and waited, rubbing his back slow as she would for a colicky babe. Zander’s hand hovered above the boy’s shoulder like a benediction he didn’t dare land.
“Char—” Skylar caught herself; there was no neat jar labeledcharcoalwithin reach. But there was burnt bread. She crushed it with the heel of her hand between cloths, turned it to a rough powder, stirred it into milk Katie had brought without being told, and made that into a slurry a child might tolerate. “This will bind what it can,” she told Zander because telling the father a plan steadied the healer as much as him. “Vinegar cloths—cool him, but no plunges.”
Katie obeyed in terrified silence. Zander did too. Saints, she could have wept with gratitude for that.
It came all at once: a shudder; a gag; the body’s surrendered secret.
Katie turned away, but Zander did not.
Skylar kept her face neutral and her hands efficient. The mess said what she needed. Skins, dark and slick. Two small, unmistakable seeds, black like polished beads.
Skylar’s vision went sharp-edged. “Good lad,” she whispered, because ye thanked a body for giving up its wreckage. She wrapped the beads in a cloth and tucked them away in her pocket before she wiped him up, rinsed his mouth, set another cool cloth, and fed him the blackened milk a spoon at a time. “There. There, me brave little hawk. Rest.”
The worst of the convulsions ebbed. His pulse, still headlong, slowed by degrees that she could feel under her fingers. His eyes returned to show too much white and then, mercifully, the dark settled, and the lids came down. Not all the way. But enough.
Skylar didn’t breathe until the room shifted from crisis back to ordinary danger. Only then did she look up. Zander had a hand over his mouth, and his eyes were not on the boy. They were fixed on her.
“What is it?” he asked.
She kept her voice low so the boy’s sleep would not hear the fear in it. “I ken only that it’s been more than once this has happened. The cough, the faint spells, the way his body tired in ways that didnae match his lungs—that’s nae acting like any illness I’ve ever kent.”
Skylar looked at the black smear on the cloth and then met Zander’s eyes again.
“Come,” he said with finality, as if sensing what she was about to tell him. “We’ll speak outside.” His tone deadly and low.
Katie’s chin trembled. “I’ll stay just here?”
