The Boar Stone: Book Three of the Dalriada Trilogy (13 page)

After a moment the tension went out of him and he sighed, pressing his head back against the wall. ‘I’m sorry, Tiger. I just … hate …’ He stopped himself, forced a bleak smile that went nowhere near his eyes. ‘I hate this.’ He touched the slave-ring around his neck.

Gingerly she curled up beside him, relieved by the hint of smile. ‘Me, too.’ They both gazed out into the rain, their combined frustration so heavy it was almost tangible.

‘They are bloodthirsty savages,’ Cian hissed after a while, ‘and we are going to get out of here and find our way back home to civilized lands, and never see another filthy, stinking barbarian in all our lives.’

She understood the words, but all that came to Minna in that moment was that she had no real home to go to. As the rain hammered the earth outside, they sat and watched without speaking again.

Chapter 12

‘F
inola,’ Minna prodded. ‘Answer me.’

The dreary rain had trapped them inside for days at their lessons. This meant that both girls could now write their names, and that Minna had grown more fluent in their own language. However, though Orla galloped swiftly along with her astonishing memory for language and letters, Finola struggled, often slipping into a dreamy state, staring into space.

Now it was late afternoon and needles of rain pattered on the tiny window in a drowsy rhythm. The heat of the small fire in the corner had thickened the air; the puppy Lia dozed in a basket. Finola was gazing at the window, eyes glassy, small white hands spread over the sheet of birch bark on the table.

Minna put aside her charcoal and brushed her dusty fingers. ‘Finola,’ she repeated sharply, pressing a hand against the girl’s cheek. It was burning. She waved her fingers before Finola’s vacant eyes.

‘She’s seeing.’ Orla squirmed under Minna’s elbow and poked her sister’s shoulder. ‘Finola, wake up!’

Finola blinked, and her body went rigid from feet to head. ‘Sails …’ she whispered, her soft mouth quivering. ‘There are sails and boats and red men and … the swords hurt, they hurt!’ Then her eyes rolled back and she shrieked, ‘No,
no
!’ and tossed herself over before Minna could stop her, striking her head on the bench.

‘Finola!’ Minna cried, taking the child in her arms. At her touch Finola shuddered and broke into sobs, her eyelids fluttering.
Goddess …
She raised Finola’s chin, brushing back her wispy hair. Just above the child’s temple the skin was marred by a trickle of blood and a bruise. ‘There, little one,’ she soothed. The child wailed, her arms hanging onto her neck. Slowly, Minna dragged herself up, the puppy jumping up her legs, yipping excitedly.

‘She hurt her head,’ Orla observed.

‘I know,’ she replied unsteadily. ‘We will have to get it seen to. Here, take her cloak and help me wrap it around her. And put that dog back in its basket.’

Minna’s knees shook as she staggered under Finola’s weight, the whimpering girl clinging to her like a limpet as Orla trotted beside her. She had to brave Brónach’s house. The refrain ran through her mind. She had only seen the old lady from afar – a full moon not having passed yet. And now she must come to her with
this
. A royal princess injured in her care.

She paused at the healer’s door, moistening her dry lips. Orla put her head beneath the door-hide, then leaned back and shook it. Inside, the room smelled only of herbs and peat: Brónach was away.

Minna tipped Finola onto the sick bed, surveying the room. The pulse of energy she had felt in this house was here again, raising goose-bumps on her arms. ‘Orla, take that pan and fill it with water, then set it on the coals.’ With one look at her face, Orla ran to do her bidding. Minna pressed her hair against her temples, staring down at Finola. The bruise had spread and sweat dampened the little girl’s dress.
Think
! she berated herself.
Act
!

Her heart hammering, she stood before Brónach’s workbench. The herb bunches were curled and dry from the fire, their leaves shrivelled. Tentatively, she reached to bowls on the bench and jars on the shelves, peeling back lids to smell, dust powder on her fingertips, slick unguent on her wrists. The answer was here, somewhere, but so many plants were unfamiliar to her, the way they were prepared unusual.

Then, gradually, a kind of trance crept over Minna, and her panic began to dissolve into the swirl of musky scents. Her spinning mind slowed, then paused, suspended. Her eyelids closed as if pressed by an invisible hand, and it was her fingers and nose and some other sense that reached for what she needed. A jar here: she pushed it to one side. And here, a glass vial, and there, a bark packet that crackled as she unrolled it. Then her fingers sought of their own accord a bundle of leaves and stalks tied to a post with twine.

In this haze, time moved peculiarly. As she ordered Orla to stir the pot, Minna pressed raw leaves into a mortar. When the scent was released, a song came to hover on her lips, rising and falling in the back of her throat. Distantly, she knew that the song was meant to call to the life in the plants, the … the
source
of it all … and draw it up so it would give that same life to a child’s blood. She knew the song as she had known the language; she unconsciously understood how the bubbling water and rhythmic grinding of pulp in the mortar went perfectly together.

The song was spun thread, knitting everything into a shimmering weave. A pattern that would heal.

At some stage – how much later? – she slowly became aware of Brónach standing before her. The old woman brought the smell of night mist with her, clinging about her cloak and hair. Her cold, grey eyes were boring into Minna.

Minna stirred and sat up. She had been slumped on the sickbed beside Finola, and Orla was curled asleep on the hearth cushions.

‘What are you doing here?’ Brónach’s voice tore the remnants of the veil, the song, from her heart.

She rubbed her eyes, her gaze straying to Finola. The girl was asleep, breathing deeply. ‘The princess had a fever, and then she fell and hit her head …’ She trailed off.

Above Finola’s brow a lumpy compress trickled dark green liquid down her cheek. Beside the bed, an empty bronze pan with speckled dregs stood on a three-legged table. Minna didn’t remember doing any of these things clearly, but in the hours since, the heat had faded from Finola’s face.

Brónach picked up the pan and sniffed it, then leaned over the bandage on Finola’s brow-bone. She dabbed at the liquid and touched it to her tongue before finally sitting down on the bed and regarding Minna with a set face. ‘What did you use for the fever?’ They had both slipped into Dalriadan.

‘I …’ Minna bit her lip, then took up the pan herself and sniffed it. ‘The one with the little white flowers, that grows tall … I think.’

‘There is more than that,’ Brónach snapped. ‘Why use the sun stalk? Why that? I keep it for stomach troubles and the flux.’

Minna was pinned there by the intensity of her stony gaze. ‘I don’t know. I don’t even know the plant of which you speak.’

Brónach flung out a bony finger. ‘Show it to me!’ she demanded. ‘You must know it if you plucked it.’

Her eyes followed that finger to the roof-posts. ‘I don’t know,’ she confessed, just as confounded as Brónach. Now, all the bunches looked the same, a mass of dull green twigs and leaves. ‘It … it called to me to take it. It wanted me to.’ Her voice subsided in embarrassment.

Brónach’s breathing had quickened. ‘And the poultice? You’ve used noon-flower and long-hood together. Why together?’

‘I don’t know,’ she repeated helplessly.

‘I would not have thought that,’ Brónach murmured to herself, studying Finola’s face. ‘It keeps the fleas away, but that is all.’ She pulled up the edge of the bandage, peering at the skin. ‘How bad was the fall?’

‘Bad. She had some kind of dream, a fit. She fell to the ground before I could catch her, and her head cracked the bench. It bled and there was a dark bruise.’

‘There is no bruise now.’

Chewing her lip, Minna craned to see. Beneath the pulped herb, the angry colour had been leached from the cut. The only bruise was a sliver of purple around its edges. Abruptly, Brónach replaced the bandage and peeled off her cloak. The sleeves of her blue dress were rolled up, exposing her wrists. In the glow of the coals Minna could see dark stains on her palms and nails.

‘So,’ Brónach murmured, ‘you know not only the plants, but how to use them.’

Minna stared down at the floor rushes. What she had done for the boys, treating their scrapes and sniffles with the same herbs everyone used, bore no relation to
this
, the blossoming of knowing inside her, the way her hands had moved without her conscious direction. A tremor ran over her. ‘I truly did not know what I was doing.’

‘And yet the fever and bruise you say she had is gone. This is not someone who knows nothing.’

Minna rubbed her face again, exhausted.

‘Do not fear me, child,’ Brónach said softly.

She lowered her hands slowly, so she did not have to look up. This unexpected thing was too tender to be exposed to this woman’s hard gaze, but she could not escape.

Suddenly, Brónach strode to the workbench and searching among the clay jars peeled off a waxen lid, waving it at Minna. ‘Smell that and tell me what it is.’

Resentment pierced her weariness. ‘At home …’ she said slowly in the barbarian speech, ‘it is the tongue of the … the dog. Dog’s tongue.’

‘What about that?’ The old woman pointed a bony finger at a scattering of leaves to one side. Minna knew the plant, but not the barbarian name. Anger flared again. ‘I don’t know.’

‘That, then.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, come, girl!’ Brónach snapped. ‘Are you as witless as a slave?’

That was enough; Minna was on her feet, her cheeks flaming. ‘That is thyme, then. We have it on the moors at home. That we call knit-bone, and that golden head. That we use for wounds and broken bones, and that for fever.’ The words spilled from her, hot and proud. Let Brónach see what was there, then; that she had not always been a slave.

The older woman stared. She had said once never to speak so boldly. Suddenly deflated, Minna swallowed her words.

But Brónach did not seem angry. ‘So you did not lie.’ She walked stiffly around and sank into her chair. ‘About the herb-lore.’

‘No.’

Brónach tented her fingers under her chin. ‘I would say,’ she observed, ‘that you are a girl who does not like to be confined.’

‘I have no choice about that.’

‘True.’ Brónach pursed her lips and abruptly changed tack. ‘You may wonder why I have no one to assist me.’

Minna had barely thought of this lady at all, too consumed by her own survival.

‘It is simple. No one has shown any interest or aptitude, but more than that, I couldn’t stand having some simpering maid around who did not know how to hold her tongue. A slave, though,’ Brónach mused to herself. ‘I never thought of that. A learned slave.’

Understanding flooded Minna’s mind, as if she could hear the old woman’s thoughts.
A slave has no rights. A slave will not speak unless spoken to. A slave is a pair of hands, not a mind or a heart.

Brónach moistened her lips. ‘If you know that many of the more uncommon plants, do you also know the mushrooms?’ At Minna’s blank look, she added impatiently, ‘The pale cups that grow on logs? And berries … the little things like this, red, orange or black? It is late in the year, but there is still much to gather. Do you know these things, the ones that heal?’

‘Some of them,’ she replied warily.

‘Good. Then you will gather what is left before the frosts come, when I do not care to face the woods and moors.’

Her anger was eclipsed by hope. She needed fresh air, the outside world, as she needed food. ‘I would be honoured,’ she replied breathlessly. ‘Though it may be hard to find time. I am with the girls teaching, and then I have other tasks.’

Brónach’s eyes were like two wet pebbles. ‘And was it not you arguing with me that the princesses will benefit from the herb-lore? The queen is much occupied – as long as they are alive and being Romanized she will be content. As for your chores, this is more important than the others.’ She glanced towards the door, where cold night crept under the hide. ‘The snows will come soon, and of course I move … less swiftly than I did.’ That admission seemed to cost her; she looked as if she had swallowed something bitter. Without another word she briskly emptied a net bag and gave it to Minna, along with a digging stick and a pair of iron shears, the points blunted.

Looped over her shoulders, the net bag with the heavy shears swung against Minna’s thigh. The digging stick settled into her hand as if her palm had worn its shape smooth for years.

As if it knew who she was.

*

The next day was cloudy but dry. Finola was still resting, and Brónach said she would watch her so Minna could go gathering plants. Orla was darting fearful glances at her grim great-aunt, so Minna wrapped her up and took her as well. She clutched her digging stick to give her strength: this was the first time she was venturing off the crag.