How to Lose a Bride in One Night (Forgotten Princesses #3)(9)

He and Nadia yanked in unison. Mirela’s hands worked on her thigh, seizing and pushing down hard. Her gnarled hands worked the wrecked limb like she was molding and forming dough.

The girl arched, a deep, anguished moan spilling free.

“There we go.” Mirela nodded to Nadia and Owen. “You may release her.”

Letting go of the girl’s foot, Nadia moved away to return with bandages. She handed them to Mirela. The older woman accepted them, speaking again in that language.

Nodding, Nadia left the wagon.

Mirela looked at him. “If she survives the fever, she should walk again.”

He sighed, unaware until that moment that he had been holding his breath. For this girl. A stranger. He felt vaguely unsettled over the realization. “Thank you,” he murmured.

She stared at him hard for a long moment, and he was hard pressed not to look away beneath that probing stare. “And what of you? What ails you?”

Ails him? “Nothing.”

She snorted. “I know people . . . men. Your kind, Romani, it matters not. Poison can leak into any man’s heart. If it is not purged it is just as lethal as any dagger.”

He could only stare at her for a long moment before finding his voice. “I am not . . . poisoned.”

Shaking her head, she returned her attention to her patient. “Say what you will. At any rate, I haven’t the power to heal what sickens you.”

All business once again, Mirela dismissed him with a sniff. “Look here,” she instructed, lifting the first half of the thin blanket that covered the girl’s torso, exposing the softly sloping belly to the air. Skin pale as milk. Pulling the blanket a fraction higher, she uncovered the nasty bruise spanning her ribs. The flesh there was the deepest purple, almost black, and edged in red.

“Here. This.” She pointed at the bruise. “The river did not do this to her.”

He considered the bruise. “It could have been rocks . . .” He motioned to her leg. “She broke her leg—”

She snorted as her fingers gently tested the bruised area. “I’ve seen what a man’s fist can do. A man did this.” Nodding in certainty, she removed her fingers and covered the girl back up with the blanket. “Just bruised, though. Not broken. There’s that at least.”

Straightening, she rose and moved to an ornately carved cupboard. The elaborate etchings in the wood brought to mind craftsmanship he’d seen in India. She slid open a drawer and selected a pouch. Her eyes made contact with his as she took her place beside the bed again. Opening the pouch, she sprinkled a dark powder into her hands. It sparkled and gleamed like coal dust against the lined and wrinkled flesh of her palms.

Her lips moved then, her voice so soft he had to lean in to hear, but then he realized she wasn’t speaking to him. Nor was she speaking in any language that he could understand. She turned her hands over, letting the substance rain down on the girl’s injured leg.

The odd words continued to flow out of her in a strange litany, almost chantlike. Her hands moved as well, coating the injured leg lightly in the medicine. He watched the bizarre display, the swift movement of her fingers, certain he was witnessing something outside the ordinary. Certainly none of the physicians to tend him and his comrades back in India had ever sprinkled sparkling black dust and chanted in a strange tongue.

His gaze moved to the girl’s face. He recalled those eyes that split second they had opened. The wide pools of brown so brilliant, so bright and deep with pain and fear . . . and something else. A horror that only she knew . . . only she could see.

He recognized it. Had felt it himself. Had seen it in others. In friends. In enemy rebels moments before he extinguished their lives.

As the old Gypsy chanted her liquid words and treated the girl’s leg, the tension ebbed from the girl’s face. The pain that had been etched deep into every line and hollow evaporated like smoke on the wind.

“What did you do?” he whispered.

Mirela smiled. “Just something to help with the healing . . . it will hasten things along.”

He shook his head, tempted to rub at his eyes . . . as though he had not just witnessed some bit of magic, or some trick of poor vision.

She moved away from the bed. “Care for some food?”

He snapped his attention back to her.

“Come.” She waved him from the wagon. “She will be fine. Nadia will return to wrap and splint the leg. You can sit with her after you eat. When was the last good meal you had?” Her gaze raked his tall frame critically.

“What if she wakes?” The moment he asked the question, he winced. He should not be so invested in the welfare of a stranger . . . a girl who might not yet survive.

“She will sleep long and hard until the fever breaks and that will be no time soon. Come. Eat.”

With one final glance for the nameless girl in the bed, he followed the old woman from the wagon.





Chapter Five





Annalise fought through the fog of pain. She felt like she was swimming in it, drowning in a hot onslaught of agony. Her every nerve vibrated, the agony sharp and twisting. A keening moan spilled from her lips, pulled from somewhere deep inside her.

She shifted. Sudden, white-hot pain flared to life in her crippled leg. Her eyes shot open with a gasp. Her hand flailed, reaching for her thigh where the pain burned deep.