My Lord Raven (Knights of the Royal Household)

Chapter Twenty-One

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Her lungs are full of infection.”

Bran looked at his wife’s maid with stark disbelief. “What does that mean?” he whispered, knowing full well.

He had kept Olwen’s wound from festering but he couldn’t keep contagion from her lungs. The harsh reality washed over him like a cold North Sea wave. With the help of Meg, he had saved Olwen’s life after the hunting accident. Keeping Father Ellis’ leech away from her, he had staunched Olwen’s blood flow and stitched and dressed her wound himself, applying a poultice as he’d learned in the Holy Lands. That she had not died in the first hours had been a miracle.

Through it all, Bran had been so preoccupied he had failed to search for the dimwitted hunter who’d shot his wife. Olwen’s recovery had meant more to him than seeking out the person responsible.

Meg shook her head. “I know not what to do now.”

The resulting silence lengthened between them. Bran stared at his wife, lying in the master’s bed, her eyelids closed, unaware of her surroundings as she slept fitfully. Her full lips were slightly parted and her face was flushed from the new fever. Her hair hung loose and tangled. She twisted her head side to side and struggled to breathe.

She was so lovely. Even in her sickness, Olwen’s exotic beauty drew him. He reached out and smoothed a strand of silky hair away from her eyes. He touched her brow, feeling the softness of her skin and the ever-present heat. Stroking his fingers over her cheek, he caressed her and trailed his fingertips lightly over the flesh of her jaw and chin. Could his touch extract the contagion? Heal her?

Nay, he had not the gift. His grandmother had possessed it. His mother’s mother. ’Cepting Nain was not here. She had died of old age and deprivation years ago in a hovel near Castle Dinas Bran.

“I once knew of an herbal tea used for such ailments,” Bran spoke softly, his voice hushed by emotion. “Mayhap you have the ingredients.”

Meg looked up at him. “Tell me. I will find in the village what I do not have.”

“Make a tea from meadowsweet flower, wild thyme, licorice root, plantain leaf, and another ingredient I do not remember.” Bran paused in his recitation, wishing he had paid more attention to his grandmother’s concoctions. But that was so long ago. He’d been but a child. A boy prone to playing at war with sticks and stones.

He shut his eyes a moment, summoning his grandmother’s spirit. Nain’s love. Her acceptance.

“Elder flower,” he said at last. “Add a touch of honey to make it palatable and soothe the throat.”

He met Meg’s steady gaze. What did she know about the deepest secrets of her mistress? Did she know if Olwen truly despised him? Was his wife’s desire to enter a convent too great for him to overcome? Could he ever bend Olwen from her belief that he had murdered her cousin and uncle so she would accept him as her husband?

His questions were moot. If Olwen did not shake this contagion and recover from the dreadful wound, nothing mattered.

“I will find the ingredients, my lord.”

“Thank you. You are Olwen’s faithful servant,” Bran said, noting the strange look shifting through Meg’s eyes. “I will stay with your mistress until you return.”

She bobbed a quick curtsey and hurried from the room.

Bran took the chair by the bed, sitting where Olwen had sat nursing Richard.

When Bran had brought his unconscious wife up the stairs that day, the lad had quickly jumped out of his sickbed, gladly forsaking it and the stuffy chamber. He was too weak yet to do much more than rest, but now he accomplished his recovery in the second solar overlooking the bailey while Bran nursed his cousin.

Young Earl Rothmore had not complained about the move, his concern only for Olwen. There was a pluck to him Bran liked, never mind he’d been so sickly upon his arrival.

Yet Bran did not think long on his ward, because the laboring sound of Olwen’s breathing blocked out all other consideration. She had to get well! If not, he would…

What would he do?

Bran swallowed the panic that rose in his throat. Granted, he’d known fear before. Fear as he rode into battle. Fear when his grandmother died and he was taken from Wales to live with strangers. But never had he been afraid for another. Now the concern for his wife obscured all else .

She might die. ’Twas a possibility. With contagion in her lungs and after so much loss of blood, Olwen had no guarantee of survival. That was the raw truth of it, and its implications roiled roughly in his gut.

Life had been tough for him. He could take that. Yet he wanted nothing to harm the woman King Edward gave to him. He wanted to protect his wife, keep her safe. Love her.

The word love plowed in the deep furrows of his mind. At first, he didn’t comprehend it. Bran ap Madog did not love. He loyally served at Edward’s pleasure. He was the King’s Raven. His duty was to the king, and any love he bore to another human being must go to Edward. And Rhys. ’Twas permissible to feel affection for his sergeant-at-arms, he told himself.

But love a woman?

He had always kept romantic love out of his vocabulary. He bore no tolerance for courtly love and tales of star-crossed lovers. Practicality weighed too heavily upon him.

Devotion and respect he gave her full measure, surely. But love? Olwen wanted love. She’d told him so. ’Cept she wanted not his.

She hated him.

’Sides how could he love her when she made it perfectly clear she loved another—a young knight he’d fought on the tourney field and, if rumor were true, slaughtered in cold blood?

As if she felt his thoughts, his wife moaned in her sleep. Bran watched her with a distress that clogged his mind. He was worried about her. Nothing more, he told himself. She was his property. His entrance into the world of the landed nobility. ’Twas right for him to protect his property.

If that was true, then why was he hovering at her bedside when he should be out personally hunting down the miscreant who had damaged what was his.

After Meg returned with the potion brewed into a hot, steaming tea, Bran shooed her away. Olwen was his, and he would tend her. He sat on the side of the bed and lifted her head, forcing her to drink the hot liquid. Letting the steam rise to her nostrils, he urged the fluid down her throat.

She was a poor patient. Querulous. Petulant. Her fever raged, and her cough deepened. Most of the time, she was unaware of him, simply fighting off the “nurse” who tended her, her eyes dull and unfocused.

Bran stripped her of her clothing. He piled on the blankets when she shivered uncontrollably. He removed them when she grew hot. When she burned with fever, he bathed her, carrying her naked to the tub, making sure the water was neither scorching hot nor freezing cold, but tepid, so it gently drew out the fever.

When she could not breathe, he held her in his arms, propping her up so the pressure on her lungs eased. He hoped his arms around her brought some comfort. Comfort she neither acknowledged nor possibly knew existed.

He did what he could for his wife as days passed into nights and nights into days.

Bran lost track of time. His only bond to the outside world was the faithful Meg. He asked not about his castle. He cared not about the people he had ruled so very briefly. Nothing mattered if Olwen died.

Yet, she did not die. One day, she opened her eyes and stared him full in the face with a look of recognition so poignant that it made him flinch.

“My lord,” she said in a weak voice.

“Olwen?”

She stretched a pale finger toward him. “Your face.”

Bran scrubbed a hand over his jaws, feeling the heavy growth of beard on his normally clean-shaven skin. “How do you feel?”

She glanced away, letting her hand drop feebly to the coverlet. “Like a damp rag wrung dry of water.”

“You were wounded in a hunting accident, and you have been ill,” he said, scrambling to recover the formality that had characterized their lives together. If he dared show how his heart had softened toward her during her sickness, she would take his new devotion and shred it with indifference and hatred.

“Wounded?” She seemed flustered.

“Aye, by a stray arrow from a poacher’s longbow.”

“What day is it?”

He did not know. “I will ask Meg.”

“Meg?”

“Your maid.” He sighed with relief. Her confusion did not trouble him. She’d struggled so gallantly. Her mind would recover now that her body appeared to rally.

Catrin did not understand. What was Bran doing here, sitting beside her, looking as disheveled and careworn as a stray puppy? She turned her face away from his penetrating scrutiny. He embarrassed her, making her scalp tingle with the heat of his worried gaze .

Vainly, she ran her hand across the rumpled coverlet, feeling its softness. That she was once again naked in the lord’s bed should trouble her if she had the strength to care. She did not. She had not lied to him when she said she felt limp and exhausted.

Catrin glanced back at Bran, who stared at her still, shifting his sharp scrutiny across her face until she felt her flesh begin to burn.

“How is Richard?” she asked weakly.

“Fine. Recovered.” Bran straightened himself and stood.

“I want to see him.”

“When you are recovered,” he said in a low commanding growl.

She narrowed her gaze. Why did he deny her so forcefully? Richard was her brother, after all.

Then a pain of awareness sliced through her. No. Richard was her “cousin.” Bran had called her “Olwen.” The game continued.

“I want Meg.”

His eyes dimmed. “I can tend to you, my lady. Tell me what you want.”

She frowned. “I want Meg. She can attend me.”

He bowed, stiffly, almost as if he had been sitting too long. “As you will.”

And then he was gone, turning to leave so quickly he almost flew from the room. Catrin shut her eyes. It took too much effort to keep them open.

Bran didn’t want to stay away from her.

His presence in the great hall signaled his wife’s recovery, and the castle folk buzzed with excitement. He ignored them all, preferring the solitude of a good, hard ride on Taran. Returning to the hall long after snores of sleeping servants filled it, he sat in the lord’s chair and stared for hours into the fire, finally dozing restlessly until a distant noise snapped him awake.

Standing, he knew he must defy Olwen’s wishes. He could no more keep away from her than he could refuse to breathe.

Quietly, so as not to awaken anyone, Bran ascended the stone steps to the solar where the wooden door stood slightly ajar. He took a deep breath and slipped inside the room, immediately smelling the familiar scents of sickness and wood smoke. Meg’s gentle snores drifted from the pallet in the corner. All was dark. Why had the candle burned out?

Suddenly, a muffled noise drew his gaze toward the bed. Olwen grunted. A shadow moved.

His warrior’s instinct seized him. “Halt! Who goes there?”

Bran charged toward the bed where a shadowy intruder held a pillow over his wife’s face. The man whipped around, seeming to measure his chances, and then sprang over the bed to the far side, trampling over Olwen’s body in his effort to escape. She whimpered and Bran halted because of his indecision.

In that moment of hesitation, the prowler sprinted around the end of the bed. He shoved past a sleepy Meg, who now stood in the way, and fled through the door. Bran let him go, concern for Olwen filling every fiber of his body. He flung the pillow aside, and, now as he bent over her bed, Bran saw the horrible truth in her wide, frightened eyes.

Someone had tried to kill his wife.