Chapter 11 | Cora

Chapter 11

Cora

T here were no other women in the camp.

Not a single one.

It was a testament to how distracted she’d been the past few days that she hadn’t realized until then. It was only when Cillian had given her a task to “keep her busy” that she’d noticed it at all. After hearing about her visits to the Ossory villages, he’d suggested that she use her skills to aid his men. At first, she’d been happy—relieved, even—to have something familiar to cling to. Surely, she’d thought, losing herself in caring for others would be a welcome reprieve from her husband and the uncomfortable thoughts he inspired.

The reality was not so simple. At home—her father’s home—she’d cared for those with minor illnesses and injuries in the surrounding villages. The villagers would come to her for fevers, cuts, and infections. On occasion, someone with a broken bone might be brought to her, but serious illness and injuries were rare. Not because they didn’t happen, mind, but because those who suffered them rarely lived long enough to be brought to the castle. The English attack had been by far the most brutal test of her skills, and it wasn’t something she wished to repeat.

The first morning of her assignment, two young men carried their friend to her after an unfortunate encounter with a bear. Blood soaked the makeshift bandages they’d wrapped around the deep gashes. It was immediately clear that the injuries were too severe to heal on their own. She’d called for supplies only to be presented with her next challenge—there were none. Well, to be fair, there was no end of linen strips or alcohol to numb the drinker’s pain. But herbs? Salves? Horsehair threads or catgut to sew wounds? There was nothing.

She’d scrambled to help the boy, forgetting her proper manners in favor of shouting at his friends to hurry and find her whatever they had to help her. One had plucked a hair from a very unhappy horse’s tail, and the other had swiped a needle from someone mending their clothes. Hot water was easy enough to come by, and with the help of the two boys and multiple prayers, she saved him.

Afterward, still fuming, she’d searched for her husband only to find that he’d left that morning with a handful of his men. Some lord or another had hired them to track a band of highwaymen a day’s ride away. He hadn’t said a word to her about being gone. Not that he owed her anything at all, but she’d assumed, what with being his wife, that he might at least tell her if he’d be gone for days.

Apparently not.

Determined to make do on her own, Cora searched for resources herself. The women in her father’s kitchens always had useful herbs and ingredients on hand. She’d thought it would be a simple enough matter to search out the camp’s women and borrow some of their stores.

She’d been wrong.

Which led her to her current realization.

There were no other women in the entire camp.

Not a single one.

Cora scanned the camp with new eyes, suddenly noticing things she’d missed before. Men stood around a cook pot, stirring and tossing in a potato or carrot. One man sat outside his tent, idly mending clothes and shoes. Another balanced a small bucket between his legs and scrubbed at a pair of trousers. All trousers. Not a skirt to be seen.

She wondered if she ought to be afraid. Her husband had left her, a solitary woman, in a camp of fifty men with no chaperone or other female presence at all. Was she in danger? The scowling man, Eoin, came to mind. Might he turn that anger on her without her husband there to stop him?

“Lady, are you well?”

Cora looked up to find a young man—one of her patient’s friends, she thought—staring at her. He sported a short, patchy beard and had the gangly, uneven limbs of a boy on his way to manhood. A small, thin fur covered his shoulders—but not a wolf, she realized. Something smaller—a fox, maybe? There was no gold pin holding it in place like Cillian and his ‘brothers’ wore, and she wondered if there was more meaning behind it than she’d thought.

The poor lad shuffled nervously, and Cora realized she’d been staring at him. “Oh, my apologies!” she said. “I’m fine. Thank you for asking.”

He scratched the back of his neck. “Are you sure? You’ve been staring at that rock for ages. Some of us were worried you might be ill.”

Cora opened her mouth to dismiss his words but stopped when an idea struck. “What’s your name, lad?”

The boy straightened, his chest puffed out as much as it could. “Seamus, Lady. Of the Fáelad clan. Cillian—your husband—he’s one of my cousins.”

Cora smiled warmly and said, “Oh! Well, that makes us family, doesn’t it? It’s a pleasure to meet you, Seamus.”

Seamus blushed, the color reaching all the way to his hair. “Did you need something, Lady? You have been here for quite a while, and I—we, me and the others, that is—thought you might need help.”

Cora looked behind him to see a pair of young men with similar uneven beards and scraggly pelts. As soon as they realized she’d spotted them, they glanced away as though they hadn’t been staring.

“Actually, some help would be wonderful,” she said, gesturing at the basket she’d found to hold her nonexistent supplies. “My husband has tasked me with serving the ill and injured here, but I need herbs and other resources to do it. Do you know where I might find comfrey and feverfew in camp? And some catgut?”

Seamus glanced back at his friends, then shrugged apologetically. “I don’t think we have anything like that here, Lady. The luchthonn don’t need much in the way of healing, and the madraí ... well—”

“Forgive me. What do your dogs have to do with the need for medicines?”

“Oh! No, Lady. It’s what we—us from the luchthonn tribes—call the human men in our numbers.”

Cora blinked slowly. “Right. Of course. And how many... madraí are there here?”

Seamus shrugged again. “I dunno. Twenty maybe?”

“And they’re never injured? Never sick? And why wouldn’t the luchthonn need healing? Are they gods that nothing harms them?”

The longer their conversation went on, the more uncomfortable Cora became. If his expression was anything to go by, Seamus shared her discomfort. “We just—well, we heal quickly. I’m not sure why. And sure, the madraí get hurt and sick. But, usually, the other madraí see to them or they just... you know, die.”

It wasn’t fair to the lad to take her frustration—her anger—out on him. She repeated that thought to herself until the urge to shout receded. Finally, she cleared her throat and said, “I see. Well, my husband—your cousin—has tasked me with changing all that. I’ve some skill in this area, as you saw earlier, but I need supplies. Are you familiar with the forest to the east of camp?”

“Aye, Lady.”

“Good. Thank you for answering my questions, Seamus, truly. I’m afraid I know nothing about this world, but I’d like to learn. Do you think you and your friends might travel with me into the forest? If you do, as well as answer a few more questions, I promise to make you the tastiest stew you’ve ever eaten for your dinner.”

CORA COUNTED ON THE fact that young men never seemed to stop eating, and if the interested shine in Seamus’s eyes was anything to go by, she’d judged correctly. He hesitated for a moment, then nodded. A hopeful smile curving on his lips, he asked, “Would you... if I caught you a hare or two, would you add it to your stew? Rabbit’s my favorite.”

“Seamus, you keep me away from any bears in those woods, and I’ll put whatever you like in.”

The more Cora watched her guides make their way through the forest, the more she was reminded of a litter of hunting pups. Like the dogs, the boys had more energy than sense, but they teased and pestered each other just like pups who nipped at their litter-mates' ears. As soon as the initial awkwardness had faded, they’d lobbed question after question at her about life in a castle and the herbs she needed to find. She’d never considered that her former life might be as alien to them as theirs was to her.

“Lady, pardon me, but you lie,” Seamus accused after she’d described the large hall where they held harvest feasts and grand celebrations. “Why would anyone need a whole room for that? Why trap yourself with all those walls when you could just celebrate outside? Sounds awful to me.”

Cora laughed, shaking her head at his expression. “Do the luchthonn not use buildings at all? Do you all live in tents?”

“Well, no, not really,” he replied. “There are houses and such at Clann Abhaile , the Clan’s homeland, but none of the roaming packs ever build anything like a house.”

Cora scanned the ground for the purple flowers that marked the comfrey plant. It was hard to focus on her task when every word out of the boys’ mouths only raised more questions. “What’s the Clann Abhaile ? What do you mean, the roaming packs?”

One of the other boys held up a heather flower a few yards away. “Lady, is this what you need?”

“It wasn’t what I was looking for, but we can certainly use it. That little plant brings down swelling and infections!”

The boy narrowed his eyes at the unassuming flower. “This thing? My mam’s sheep eat this all the time. You’re telling me it’s good for us too?”

Cora nodded, grinning when she spotted the oval leaves of the comfrey plant. “You’d be surprised what common plants and herbs can do. Not all of us can heal so quickly as you mighty men. We need all the help we can get.”

The boy preened for a moment at being called a mighty man before considering the heather in his hand again. Seamus shook his head and helped Cora gather more of the comfrey leaves. “My mam says that all the luchthonn came from a treaty between a man and a wolf long ago. A great evil threatened their homes, so they joined together to save them. Through that treaty, the first wolf-skin wearer was born. Don’t ask me how he was born—I don’t know, and I’d just as soon not think about it. It’s a legend, isn’t it? But he was born and grew into a fierce warrior. He defended his people with the claws and fangs of a wolf and the heart and spirit of a man. When he married, he and his wife formed the luchthonn clan. Over the years, that clan spread into various packs, but all come from the same great clan. Clann Abhaile is where most of our people live now. Our elders, and most families with young pups, live there for safety.”

Cora nodded, plucking the comfrey leaves absent-mindedly as she struggled to make sense of it all. With every new explanation, Seamus turned her world upside down. How was it possible that such beings could exist without people knowing?

“I don’t understand,” she said, tucking the leaves into her basket. “Why don’t you all live in this clan home? Why leave at all? If it’s safer there, why have these... these packs at all? The stories people tell about you—about the wildlings—don’t they worry you? What if people find out the truth? Wouldn’t that be dangerous for you?”

Seamus shrugged. “The packs bring in good coin. This life is good for the males of our kind. For those of us who haven’t had the change yet, it’s a way to train and make use of ourselves. The packs keep us out of trouble, and we make a living doing what comes natural. No one’s forced to join up, but most do until they’re ready to take a mate and settle down. And as for the humans, well, look around you, Lady. This land is full of magic. The humans might pretend it’s not, but it is. And their spirits know it even if their heads don’t. Most are happy to ignore what they can’t understand, and it’s not as though we make a habit of changing our skins in the town square. The madraí who come to us aren’t told the truth until they’re found to be trustworthy. The lords who might know won’t tell because they’d have to admit they knew when they hired us, and they won’t do that.”

“So you’re counting on the fact that people don’t want to believe you’re real? That’s it?”

Seamus’s smile turned sharp and decidedly wolfish. “You think people want to believe someone like Cillian, or Cathall, is really a monster? They’re frightening enough as men, don’t you think?”

“I suppose that’s true. People get comfortable in their way of thinking. It’s... it’s difficult to find out that what you’ve always thought to be true... isn’t.”

She thought of Bran and the ‘truth’ he’d told her about Cillian and his men when she’d still been building her brilliant plan. He’d whispered the rumors of men changing to wolves as though frightened that speaking the words too loud would make them real. But he didn’t believe them—not really. If he had, he’d have sounded terrified rather than excited when he described the beastly way the wildlings fought or the way they turned into giant, ferocious wolves after eating the still-beating hearts of their enemies. So much truth hidden in the fantasy.

One of the other boys sauntered up and dropped his bounty into Cora’s basket. “You think you’ve seen it all now, Lady? You haven’t seen anything. Just you wait ‘till the elders hear about this agreement Cillian’s made with you. Things are sure to get interesting for everybody then.”

Before Cora could ask what he meant, Seamus drove an elbow into his ribs. “Piss off, Rossa!” he snapped. “Nothing’s going to happen, and you know it.”

Rossa glared at Seamus as he rubbed his rib but chose to run off in search of more comfrey rather than try to take revenge.

“Don’t mind him,” Seamus said, “He lives to cause trouble any way he can. Most of us think his mam dropped him on his head as a pup.”

Rossa’s words hadn’t seemed like something to dismiss, but Cora didn’t press him. She could always ask Cillian... if he ever decided to come home.