Page 42 of Beyond Dreams

“He’ll come,” Duncan assured her, making no effort to remove his shirt so that she could inspect his wound. “I’ll have it tended at the keep,” he said and then turned his head over his shoulder, attempting to glance down at the back of his thigh. “That one as well.”

Holly gaped again, and rushed around him, finding a clean and wide slit in the back of his pants, where more blood oozed, covering the fabric.

“Wearing clothes so dark that they hide seeping and creeping blood is not a good idea, Duncan,” she complained mindlessly, skittering around him, not sure which wound to attack first. “We have to stop the bleeding, don’t we?” She asked, when he only stood there, staring at the hill from which she’d come, from where his horse would come if he returned. “Without wasting too much time,” she said next, “let’s consider that the horse might not return, and these wounds need to be tended here and now.” He nodded slightly and Holly pressed on, “At the very least you probably shouldn’t ride and lose more blood.”

It was then that she noticed how pale he was. His skin looked sallow, and he was blinking often but slowly.

“Duncan? Are there other wounds?” She began to circle him again, looking over his broad back and both his arms and legs, thankfully finding nothing.

Duncan’s knees buckled then.

Holly rushed to support him but knew that she could not stop him from going down. She did, however, with her hands under his arms, keep him from crashing to the ground, was able to lower him slowly, despite the excruciating pain in her wrist which was trapped between his arm and chest. More tears welled in her eyes for the stabbing pain that shot away from her wrist.

Duncan mumbled something in that other language he spoke and fell a bit to the side, onto his butt. When he seemed steady, Holly was finally able to remove her hands from him. Forgetting her own pain, she gasped again, seeing now a welt and broken skin on the crown of his head, his thick, short hair matted with blood. This one was not bleeding so bad, but the welt was large and likely the cause of his sudden wooziness.

Desperately, Holly glanced toward the hill as well. “Where is that stupid horse?”

There was no sound to say he might be approaching even now, no noise at all in the field of wildflowers except her own voice and panting breaths. She dropped to her knees before Duncan, taking hold of his hand in his lap.

“Let’s just assume the horse is not coming back. You’re only going to get weaker, maybe even pass out, and we don’t want that. I don’t know what to do except to stop the bleeding.”

“Dinna fret, lass. Graeme will come,” he said now, just as the sky, which had threatened rain all morning, opened up now, sending down a slow but steady stream of big, fat raindrops.

Holly rolled her eyes, at both his insistence that there was no need to panic and at the disagreeable turn of the weather. “Fine. Whatever. But right now, you need to stand up and we need to at least get out of the rain and out of the open. C’mon,” she urged, getting to her feet, tugging at his good arm with her good arm. He complied, but slowly, and with motions that suggested he was drunk and not only injured. She could not pull him to his feet, he being so much larger than her and her with only one good hand. But she guided him upward, eventually to his feet, and walked him to the south side, where they could find shelter under the trees without having to climb a hill. There, she forced him to skirt around several taller pines and birch trees until they’d gone deep enough to not be noticed. Under a fir tree whose lowest limbs were about five feet off the ground, Holly deposited a further weakened Duncan against the dry trunk.

“My sword, lass,” he murmured. “Retrieve my sword.”

“I’ll get it,” she said, though she didn’t know what good it would do them.

Pausing only to make sure he would remain sitting up and not slump over, Holly then retraced her steps, out into the now heavy rain, where she found his sword where they’d stood, where he’d dropped it. It took all her might to ignore the grisly close-up view of four dead bodies strewn about the once-beautiful meadow. She collected his sword and while racing back into the woods, caught sight of a dagger—Duncan’s or someone else’s—laying on the ground, and snatched that up as well.

When she returned to Duncan’s side, his eyes were closed.

“Duncan?” She cried, panicked anew for how still and motionless he was.

“Aye,” he said weakly.

Holly laid down his sword and the dagger at his side and knelt down next to him. “I think it would be better if we take your shirt off and not trust me to cut it off,” she said. And she reached for his belt, which would have to be undone first to take the shirt off. Duncan surprised her by grabbing her wrist, thankfully of her good hand, since his grip was firm.

“But I can trust you, can I nae...wife?”

Holly was nearly offended. “I would say so, Duncan,” she said curtly. “If I had any evil designs, I would have left you where you fell in the flowers. And if you insult me again by asking another stupid question, you will be in danger—that you can trust. Lift your arms,” she instructed. It wasn’t easy to pull the long shirt over his head. He was sitting on the back hem of it, her left hand was only so useful, and he leaned so heavily against the tree. What should have been a simple operation took more than a minute before she was able to pull the linen over his head. “Getting the pants off should be fun,” she mumbled to herself.

His naked chest was still fascinating, so solid and strong, and now covered in a fine sheen of perspiration, but Holly managed to behave appropriately, not wasting too many seconds ogling him.

Duncan was awake, she knew, for his changing expressions, for his slight grimaces and then for how he bared his teeth with pain when forced to lift his arm at all. But his eyes were closed now and remained that way, which was probably a good thing, that he didn’t see the horrified expression on Holly’s face when she was finally able to inspect the slash across his upper arm fully. She’d never been good with blood and guts and gagged twice now just looking at the deep gash. She was pretty sure she saw tissue or muscle or something inside there, sliced as well, it seemed.

It still oozed blood, and quite a bit, though she was no judge about the amount since she’d avoided seeing such things throughout her life as best she could. Reaching for his shirt that she’d tossed aside, she searched the different parts of it, looking for any clean area that she could tear and use as a bandage. She found none. Either mud or dirt covered too much of it; there was even a wide blood splatter across the front, suggesting he wore someone’s blood. She certainly wasn’t about to press that against his skin. Tossing the shirt aside, she stood and lifted her skirts. The outer gown was filthy as well from her fall earlier and then kneeling now several times. But the one underneath that, the lighter linen shift, was mostly clean. She wasn’t about to strip out of both of them to get to the shift and so reached for the dagger she’d found and with the blue wool gathered under her chin, she began to slice away at the underskirt. When she’d made a good slit, she dropped the dagger and tried to rip the fabric around the middle, having briefly forgotten about her wrist, likely sprained. The reminder of her own injury came with white-hot pain. She stopped what she was doing and threw back her head, biting back a howl of pain.

When she lowered her face again and gasped out the breath she’d been holding, she found Duncan’s eyes open and on her, though his lids were heavy. He was not looking at her face but at her legs, which were bare essentially from mid-thigh downward, since she had both skirts lifted up and away.

He said something but the noise of the rain and his low voice prevented her from hearing it, and then he closed his eyes again. And Holly moved again, using the dagger again to slice the fabric and not her hands to rend it. She was out of breath and annoyed by the time she finally managed to separate the entire bottom half from the top, and then had to cut more of it, to divide the linen into strips.

She worked then to wrap one of the strips around his arm, pleased that the wound was low enough that she didn’t need to involve his shoulder in the dressing. When she was done, she paused and listened, thinking she’d heard something out there in the field. After a moment, deciding it was only the rain. She was not willing to rush out there, exposing herself, just in case the one man who’d ridden away had come back, seeking revenge or wanting to finish what his disreputable friends had started.

“You can take our fourteenth-century unprovoked violence and you can have it,” she grumbled, mostly to herself, since Duncan’s eyes were still closed. Gently, she rose up on her knees and carefully tilted Duncan’s head toward her, to assess the gash there once more. It was as before, not bleeding so much as it appeared to be throbbing. Recalling her mother’s old adage about better out than in, she had no choice but to hope this proved true now, that since he did have a good size goose egg that maybe there was no damage internally.

Still, she was briefly panicked, his fogginess alarming. She held Duncan’s face in her hands and forced him to open his eyes.

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