Blood Moon (3 page)

“You didn’t, did you?” Enid responded
tartly. “I offered. Besides, I figure one good turn deserves
another. Anyway, I can see you’ve a good heart.”

Aslyn might have argued further, but
she was distracted by the sounds of approaching riders. Enid looked
up, as well, rose slowly to look down the road. “Soldiers,” she
gasped, her eyes widening. “The king’s men by their banner. Should
we hide, do you think?”

Aslyn moved a little closer to the
woman. “Too late,” she murmured. The riders were already bearing
down upon them and had almost certainly spotted them. They couldn’t
outrun mounted horsemen in deep snow anyway, no matter how fleet of
foot, and, in any case, Enid was burdened by her child. Aslyn would
have little chance, Enid none at all. As strong as the urge to flee
was, Aslyn found she simply could not run off and abandon the
woman.

The man leading the group was not
dressed as a soldier but rather wore the garb of huntsman. Long and
leanly muscular, his build seemed to bear up the image of hunter.
She had no difficulty imagining such a man moving invisibly through
the forest.

His face, she saw as he came closer,
was long and lean, as well, his strong jaw clean shaven, but she
could see that the long hair fluttering about his face was dark as
sin. He was a man of good birth, no commoner, regardless of his
garb. Or, perhaps, he claimed bastardy. She didn’t believe it. His
bearing alone proclaimed pride and self-confidence, traits no
bastard would possess. This man had secrets … and eyes that would
not miss the secrets others might wish to guard. He bore the
unmistakable look of a predator.

Chapter Two

Enid cried out quite suddenly. “Jim?
What’s happened?”

Aslyn glanced quickly at Enid then
transferred her gaze to the oncoming riders once more. It was only
then that she realized one of the horses was mounted
double.

“Now, don’t start yer wailing, love.
It’s scarce more’n a scratch. Tripped over a bleeding root and
caught meself in the leg with me own arrow, fool that I am,” Jim
reassured her as the riders drew abreast of them.

Enid, apparently, wasn’t convinced.
Shoving the baby at Aslyn, she rushed over even before the horses
had been drawn to a complete standstill, grasping at his leg
worriedly, as if she could lift him from the horse.

Aslyn remained as she was, frozen to
the spot, her gaze held captive by the huntsman’s golden eyed
stare. He nodded slightly, but his hard mouth did not so much as
twitch on the verge of a smile as he released her at last from
captivity, turning his attention to the soldiers milling around
him. “You men--dismount and see if you can get their cart
righted.”

Without a word, the men dismounted
almost in unison. The one who had been riding with Jim on his
horse’s rump helped Jim down before dismounting himself. The youth
among them, who looked to be a squire, gathered the reins of all
the horses and led them far enough off the road to secure them,
then returned to help his five fellows. After a moment, the
huntsman dismounted, as well, and went to help Enid, who was
struggling under her husband’s weight … as well she might, for
Enid’s Jim was a bear of a man.

Shaking herself from her stupor at
last, Aslyn followed them, knowing her services would be needed.
Jim groaned as he was helped to sit with his back against a tree.
At a glance, Aslyn could see that he’d lost a great deal of blood.
The leg of his breeches was soaked with it.

Her heart thudded dully in her chest.
She had to fight her reluctance to approach him. She should not
have been so squeamish about blood, all things considered, but the
fact was her own experiences had made her more repelled by the
sight, not less so.

“Who be ye?” he said in a growling
voice that matched his size as she knelt beside him.

Aslyn met his suspicious gaze with a
cool look of her own. She was accustomed to it, but she hated the
suspicions always cast in her direction.

“This is Aslyn, love. She’s a healer.
She came to help when she heard me crying about Bess.” She turned a
beseeching gaze upon Aslyn. “You can help him, can’t
you?”

“Phsaw! I’ve no need of a healer, an’
especially not one so young as she. Find something to wrap me up,
love ... and bring me a bit of the good stuff, just to warm me
bones.”

“You will bleed to death if the wound
isn’t closed.”

Enid looked as if she might faint at
Aslyn’s words. Her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp. The man
glared at her. “If ye think frightening the wits out of me woman is
the way to convince me to let ye have a go at me, yer dead
wrong.”

“Don’t be more of a fool than you need
be,” the huntsman said coldly. “Allow the woman to attend your
wound.”

To Aslyn’s amazement, Jim looked cowed.
They were much of a height, but Jim was easily twice the bulk of
the huntsman. She would not have thought he could be so easily
intimidated by a man of the huntsman’s stature. Or, perhaps it was
not that at all. Perhaps it was the ingrained subservience of the
lowborn toward those of higher birth and Jim sensed that in the
huntsman even as Aslyn had?

Beyond that, there was something about
the huntsman that unnerved her. Undoubtedly it was not merely her
imagination, for Jim sensed it too.

Without another word, she stood to hand
the baby to Enid and knelt beside the woman’s fallen husband.
Taking her knife from her pack, she slit the leg of his breeches
from knee to hip so that she could get a better look at the
wound.

“Here now! These are me good breeches!”
Jim objected.

Aslyn allowed her gaze to meet his.
“And your good wife can sew them up for you again.”

“But they’ll be patched,” he
muttered.

“They would be patched anyway, you
great lummox! You’ve torn them already,” Enid snapped. “Stop being
so difficult!”

He yelped as Aslyn probed the wound.
Aslyn gave him a look. “I’ll be as gentle as I can, but it needs to
be cleaned. If you’ve anything trapped inside the wound it could
putrefy.”

He studied her uneasily for several
moments and finally nodded.

Aslyn pinched his leg, forcing the
wound to gape. Blood welled to the surface. Jim groaned, gripped
the ground on either side of him, but gritted his teeth.

Aslyn frowned in concentration as she
peered into the gash. It was always difficult to tell whether
foreign matter had been forced into a wound or not because of the
blood. Torn tissue looked very little different than bloodied
cloth, but Aslyn thought she saw a fragment of cloth from his
breeches. Releasing him, she took her pouch of medicines from her
belt and laid it out, selecting a long needle. Jim eyed the sharp
needle with obvious misgivings. In the next moment, however, he had
squeezed his eyes shut and uttered another growl of pain as Aslyn
dug around in the wound, removing a fairly large piece of fabric
and a number of splinters from the arrow. Finally satisfied, she
laid the needle aside and began scooping up snow. Jim let out a
yelp the moment she placed the packed ice on his leg.

“What’re you doin’ now, woman? Tryin’
to freeze me ballocks off?” he demanded irritably.

“You’ll have no need for them if you’re
dead,” Aslyn said coolly, continuing until she’d packed ice all
around his leg. “This will slow the bleeding.”

She rose when she was done, took her
needle, moved to the tin of boiling water and dropped it in.
Removing the tin from the fire, she moved back to the tree where
Jim sat and set the tin on the ground next to him.

“What’d you do that for?” Jim asked
suspiciously.

“To clean the needle.”

“Ye didn’t clean it before you poked me
with it.”

“I always clean it. It’s not been
touched since the last time I used it … and cleaned it.”

After a few minutes, she began removing
the snow. The wound was still bleeding sluggishly, but she was
satisfied that no large vein could have been ruptured, else it
would have continued to bleed profusely. She reached into the tin
and grasped the needle.

When she turned to thread it, she saw
that both Enid and Jim were gaping at her, their faces pictures of
fright. “Are you a witch, then?” Enid asked
breathlessly.

“No.”

“Then how’d ye do that?” Jim demanded.
“Your fingers aren’t burned. I can see that.”

“The snow,” Aslyn said with determined
patience. “My skin was too cold from handling the snow for the
water to burn. Try it yourself, if you doubt me.”

He didn’t looked convinced, nor as if
he had any desire to test her words. In any case, he forgot all
about the incident when he saw that she was threading the needle.
“Here now. I’ll not be needing that! Look, it’s stopped bleeding.
All I need is a rag tied about it.”

“If it’s not closed, it will continue
to bleed and it will be too easy for something to enter the wound.
It’ll be best if it’s closed.”

Aslyn’s nerves were on edge by the time
she’d sewn the flesh together. It was an unpleasant task at the
best of times, and Jim made no bones about trying to be manful
about the thing, yelping each time the needle was plunged into his
skin, growling, groaning with pain as the thread was pulled taut.
Aslyn was forced to conclude that he hadn’t been brave about his
wound so much as he was fearful of having it treated. Men were such
infants about their hurts.

When she’d finished, she took a clean
strip of cloth, sprinkled herbs on it to ward off putrefaction, and
bound it snugly around his wound.

It was only when she turned to retrieve
the tin that she discovered the huntsman stood nearby, watching her
every movement. She wondered if he’d been observing her the whole
time she attended Jim.

What had he expected? That she would
prove herself totally incompetent? Or that she would deliberately
harm the man?

With an effort, she pretended she
hadn’t noticed his rapt attention and took the tin, moving back to
the fire.

To her consternation, he followed her.
He knelt on the opposite side of the fire as she scooped up fresh
snow and set it to boil so that she could clean her needle again.
“I am called Kale,” he said, lifting his gaze from her hands to her
face and studying her with a piercing, unnerving stare that Aslyn
could feel even without looking at him.

She allowed her gaze to flicker to his
face when he spoke. Up close, she saw that her observations as he’d
arrived had not done him justice. She’d had the perception that he
was well favored, but assumed, as is quite often the case, that
distance had lent him more comeliness than he actually possessed.
At a distance, one could not observe the little flaws that could
make a world of difference in whether or not one actually was
pleasing to the eye.

She saw now that, although his face was
harshly angular, he was exceptionally well favored. In the days
before, she would have been filled with maidenly confusion and
pleasure if she had drawn the attention of such a man.

The interest she drew now made her
heart flutter uncomfortably, but she rather thought it was more
fear than excitement.

His eyes were golden. She’d never seen
eyes that color … on a human. Perhaps it was the eyes, so near in
shade to any number of predators, that lent him the look of
one?

“I am Aslyn.”

“You are a stranger here?”

She’d had no choice but to admit she
was a stranger to Enid, knowing it was too risky to do otherwise
when the woman was obviously a local. She was far more reluctant to
admit it to the king’s man. A huntsman did not commonly lead a band
of soldiers. She didn’t like to think what the purpose of this
group might be.

And yet, she had no option, not now,
not when Enid and Jim had already indicated they had no knowledge
of her.

“I am a pilgrim.”

“Traveling from where? To
where?”

She debated briefly, but knew it would
be better to offer a lie freely, than to pretend outrage at his
intrusion into her private affairs. “From Mersea … eventually to
return once I have fulfilled my pilgrimage.”

A gleam entered his eyes, briefly and
then disappeared so abruptly Aslyn wondered if she had imagined
that spark of keen interest at the mention of her origins. One dark
brow arched. The other descended. “You are young to begin a
pilgrimage, alone.”

“Perhaps I am older than I
appear?”

His gaze wandered over her face, making
Aslyn wish she had pulled the hood of her cloak closer. She sensed
the shadows it offered yielded little protection from that piercing
stare. “You are not a day above eighteen. Your husband did not
object to being left to care for your babes while you went on
pilgrimage?”

Despite all she could do, Aslyn’s eyes
widened in surprise that he’d pinpointed her age so precisely. The
hardships she’d endured should have put more age upon her face than
that. “I am not wed. There are no babes.”

“Why?”

Again, he surprised her. “Why?” she
echoed. “I am supposed to know why I was not chosen as
bride?”