Page 37 of The Good Daughter

“Thank you.” They were the first words that bubbled out of Devon’s labored breathing since I’d cauterized his wound.

“I’ll dress the wound.”

I applied the medicated leaves again, and then ripped up a sheet to make bandages which I wound carefully around his torso. He lay still while I did so, recovering some composure and marshaling the pain he still felt, but his eyes never left me, following my every move.

“You didn’t have to do this,” he breathed.

“No.”

I held the water flask to his lips, and he swallowed down a couple of gulps. For a few minutes I let him rest, until his breathing was back to something approaching normal.

“What happened to you?”

“I got shot,” replied Devon, unhelpfully. “With an arrow.”

“Why? By whom?”

“I didn’t stop to ask,” Devon said, still evasive. “A gamekeeper perhaps. I must have strayed onto someone’s land and they thought I was poaching. Which I suppose I was.”

“There are no land owners in the wilderness.”

“Farmers then. They might not own the land, but they think of it as their own and they certainly defend it from hunters.”

Everything he said was right, and yet I didn’t believe a word of it. “You did well to get back here,” I pointed out. “You must have gone some distance or the ‘farmer’ would have followed.”

“I used all my strength to get back,” Devon nodded. “I don’t know what I thought would happen when I did.”

“Maybe you guessed I’d know what to do,” I suggested.

“I’m not surprised you know how to tend a wound,” Devon agreed. “But I had no right to expect you to tend mine.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Tentatively, wincing as he did so, he sat up.

“Careful,” I urged.

“It doesn’t feel too bad now.”

“That’s just because it hurt so much before that normal pain feels like relief. Plus, the herbs are numbing some of it. It’s fooling you. But you’re still hurt.”

“Maybe,” Devon shrugged. “But I’ve always healed quickly. Plus, I am, as you know, very lucky.”

“Verylucky,” I agreed.

There was a moment of silence between us, that seemed all the deeper in the blackness of night.

“You could have run away.” Devon finally said what we had both been thinking. “Even with Uther slowing you down, I don’t think I could have caught you.”

“You couldn’t have,” I corrected.

“You’d be surprised what I can do when I put my mind to it.”

“You still couldn’t have.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “But again; you didn’t run away.”

“I still can.” That was the other as yet unsaid thing; I was still his prisoner in some regard and yet if I chose to leave now, there was probably not a lot he could do to stop me, although he did seem better already than I would have expected. The arrow must have missed anything vital within. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

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