BACK TO THE LIVING
Broderick sat up.
“Lord. Lord!”
He groaned. Everything hurt. His head. His back. His chest. His legs. Even his hands hurt when he tried to flex his fingers. And he was cold. So cold! He opened his eyes.
He could see gray. Gray walls, gray floor. A grayish ceiling that had been whitewashed many years ago and was now soot-stained and darker than it was meant to be.
He licked his lips. “Where?”
He heard someone sigh. “Oh, thank heaven!”
Blaine.
He turned his head, which felt as if it had been beaten with sticks, slowly. It hurt.
He found himself looking into the dark, wide eyes of Blaine MacNeil. The boy's eyes glowed.
“Lord!” He grinned. “I said you'd be back. I knew you weren't dead. They cannae kill ye like that.”
Broderick grinned. His lip hurt and when he drew it back he tasted blood. He sighed.
“Where are we?”
“In the monastery!” Blaine explained, enthused. “We brought the wounded here. It was my idea. We're all here. Me an' Fergall and Al and Cam and Douglas...”
“Are we all wounded?” Broderick asked incredulously. He cast an eye around the room. He could see linen-white mounds and guessed them to be beds, with wounded men.
“Most of us.” Blaine grinned happily. “I'm not. Fergall's not, though he doesn't say that...”
“Aye, young man!” a voice boomed from behind them. “I'll show you wounded! Have ye seen yon fingers?”
Fergall. Broderick grinned. His heart was warm with joy. They all survived. He turned to Blaine, who was grinning and, amazingly, had eyes that were so bright he would have thought the boy about to weep.
“We won the fortress?” He almost did not want to know. They were alive. He was alive. And Blaine, Fergall, Al, and all the others, they were alive, too. It was, for the moment, enough.
“Yes, sir!”
Broderick lay back. He stared at the ceiling. All the tension drained from him. They had taken the untakeable fortress. They had won.
Strangely, all he felt was relief. He did not feel joy, or wonder, or even satisfaction. The vengeance had died within him and with it had died the lust for blood. All he cared about, all that mattered to him now, was the fact that he and his friends were alive. That they had the precious gift of living, feeling. Loving.
“We did it,” was all he said. He sat and reached for the boy's shoulder and cuffed it playfully. “Well done, young man.”
Blaine lifted his hand and scrubbed furtively at his cheeks.
“Oh, stop it, sir. Or I'll get the monks to come and give you Valerian again and put ye out, I shall.”
Blaine was laughing, voice rough with held-in tears, and Broderick also laughed. His ribs hurt and so he stopped.
He leaned back against the pillows and looked up at the ceiling. The room was strangely peaceful. If he breathed in, he could smell the scent of incense and herbs and resin and he guessed the monks had doctored them. If he listened, he could hear the slow shuffle of their sandaled feet outside the window as they headed down the path to the chapel for prayers.
They stayed in the monastery for a fortnight.
By the end of it, Broderick could walk out to the gardens and, very slowly, negotiate the paths. Blaine, unhurt and full of youthful liveliness, became his companion and guide, chatting excitedly as they walked through the gardens.
* * *
An evening two weeks after waking, Blaine and Broderick walked around the long paths between the fragrant herbs.
“An' ye can see the valley here, sir!” Blaine was saying. They had reached the corner where the garden dropped away, leaving one staring out across the blue water.
Broderick breathed in. “It's bonny, so it is.”
Blaine nodded.
Broderick felt his ankle start to ache.
“I'm going to sit down over there,” he said decidedly. Leaning on the stick a monk had carved for him, he limped toward the bench.
“You're a right mess, sir,” Blaine said encouragingly.
Broderick cuffed his head. “Thank ye, Blaine. I'll remember that.”
They laughed and sat together on the bench. They had become good friends. Blaine was of the age to be a son to Broderick, and somehow, they had fallen into the pattern without trying.
Blaine chatted to Broderick every day. From him, Broderick learned the tale of his own almost-death.
He had fallen from the fortress wall and landed on his back. The monks said he had broken ribs, a broken arm, a fractured skull. They said his ankle was cracked, and he was lucky he had not broken his legs. They had set his bones and half-expected him to die – from the wounds in his arms and shoulder if nothing else. But he had lived.
Broderick scratched his scalp, wondering. He had lived. Against all expectation or even likelihood, he had lived. And now he valued that life. Would use it as the gift that he knew it was.
He was going back home. To Amabel. And he would make things right.
“Blaine?” he said after a moment. They were watching insects in the late-flowering lavender, listening to the drone and hum of them as they flew drowsily to fetch the nectar. It was a peaceful time.
“Aye?”
“Muster the men for me, will you?”
Blaine nodded, a small frown twisting his face. “Yes, sir...”
He sounded cautious. Broderick jostled his shoulder. “If you're thinkin' I'll fall over, you can place a sovereign on the chances.”
Blaine grinned. “I's not daft, sir. I'd be working my debt off 'til I was old.”
Broderick chuckled. “Exactly. Call the men, you young rascal. And tell them we're going home tomorrow.”
Blaine looked at him, eyes shining.
Broderick smiled. He leaned back, letting the autumn sun warm his back and shoulders.
He was going home. And this time, he knew more than when he left. He knew how to love. And he was going to do that, deeply, fearlessly and always. For as long as there was breath in him.