Part 9 (2/2)
Gordon laughed. ”Calm down! She's stiff and sore as h.e.l.l. You'd be, too, if a springdeer had just crashed down on top of you.”
Ross flushed but accepted the rebuke with good grace. ”After breakfast, then... Are the rest up?”
”A few. Most're still sleeping, or were when I came in.”
”Anything to report?”
The archeologist shook his head. ”No. There was no other action while we were gone, and nothing of significance happened here. Everything on the desk can afford to stay there a while longer.”
The war captain waited until he felt a decent amount of time had elapsed before going at last to the cabin occupied by his chief officer.
He paused for a moment in the door of the single room comprising the small dwelling, although Eveleen had been quick in granting him leave to enter.
She was sitting up in her bed, her back supported by pillows, her magnificent hair spread out like a veil around her. Seen thus, she seemed more like the distant, royal daughter of some powerful Ton than the fiery and able partisan officer beside whom he had lived and fought these last fierce months. She also looked vulnerable and impossibly fragile.
He willed himself to overcome that last feeling and moved into the chamber, all the while studying his Lieutenant intently.
Her small face was still too pale, making the eyes seem even larger and more luminous, but it was quite unmarked.
That was apparently not true of the rest of her body, for she wore the s.h.i.+rt serving as her bed robe fastened tightly to the throat, and even so, he could see a finger of dark brown extending up the right side of her neck from beneath the collar. He shuddered in his heart at the sight of it, knowing how easily such a bruise might have become a break.
She read his thoughts and laughed. ”I'm told I shall live, Firehand. Come here and sit down if you have the time.”
The man was quick to obey, drawing up the chair already placed by the bed so that she need not strain or turn to look at him. ”How do you feel?”
”Sore.”
Her hand went to her hair. The movement was oddly slow, as if it troubled her greatly to make it. ”I couldn't even have managed this if it hadn't been for Marri's help.”
”That'll pa.s.s off soon.”
”I sincerely hope so!” she responded with no little feeling. ”She'll give me no peace until it does.”
”You'll just have to court patience, Lieutenant,” he told her unsympathetically.
”I don't seem to have much choice in the matter.”
He smiled at her expression. ”It won't be for long. I hadn't expected to find you looking so well. Or so pretty,” he added, believing she would be pleased to hear that after having suffered what could all too easily have been at least a temporarily disfiguring accident. ”You're quite beautiful, you know.”
The woman laughed. ”From the neck up. The rest of me makes quite another vision!”
Her expression softened suddenly, and she held out her hands to him. ”There's no way for me to thank you for what you did, Ross.”
His fingers closed over hers. ”Having you warm and alive before me is thanks enough, Eveleen Riordan.” Murdock's grasp tightened. ”I said I had no wish to see you in danger. Now I realize how much I meant it.”
He felt embarra.s.sed and carefully lowered her hands, slowly, so as not to further jar already tormented muscles. He released her but kept his fingers close to hers. ”Lieutenant Riordan, as a favor to your commanding officer, the next time you decide to fall off a springdeer, please don't insist on bringing him down on top of you.”
She responded, as he had intended, with a grimace and an exaggerated shudder. ”No fear of that, Lady Fortune willing!”
Her bright eyes fixed him. ”Well, Captain Firehand, what did we gain for all our trouble?”
He described the contents of the wagons.
Eveleen smiled to hear that report. She was no less aware of the value and significance of those goods than he was and would have entered into a detailed discussion of their future course had her chief permitted.
Murdock rose to his feet. He feared to tire her by remaining too long and already thought her face seemed a little more pinched than it had been when he had come in. ”That'll hold. Rest for now. A few days will give us both time to consolidate our thoughts. We can talk about it then.”
She had to content herself with that, and after learning the fate of their other comrades and exacting his promise to return as soon as his duties permitted, she bade the gray-eyed man farewell.
17.
THE TERRAN WOMAN remained in her quarters that day and the next but after that felt sufficiently free of stiffness and discomfort to return to her normal duties, all save combat, which neither Murdock nor Ashe would permit this soon after her fall. Sapphirehold was not so desperate for warriors as to require or chance that.
There would have been no need for her to ride even had the opposite been true. The days following the raid were quiet with no activity from Condor Hall and nothing to call the partisans away from their mountains save the seemingly endless patrols scouring the lowlands.
They used the time well. There was work to be done in the camp which had been, if not neglected, at least not given its proper attention while the press of battle had been so heavy upon them. Both this place and the watch posts guarding the few pa.s.ses were examined and refitted where necessary to meet the a.s.saults of the fast-approaching winter, whose bite was now to be felt, at times keenly, in the sharp, high wind, and care was taken that those in the noncombatants' village lacked for nothing that might be provided to ensure their comfort and safety.
The officers met frequently as well. Ross had not merely been offering Eveleen comfort when he had promised to speak with her within a matter of days. All knew that the closing weeks of this year and, to an even greater extent, the opening ones of that to come would be crucial to the war's outcome. As far as was possible, they wanted to antic.i.p.ate their enemies' moves and lay their own plans for countering them.
There was opportunity in plenty for rest, too, thrice welcome after the weeks of strain and almost constant effort just gone.
The war captain was no less glad of those hours of ease than were the soldiers he commanded. He pa.s.sed many of them with Ton Luroc, whose company he thoroughly enjoyed, and many more with Gordon and Eveleen.
Especially with Eveleen. Once he had recognized and acknowledged his feelings for her, he had begun to look at her, to study her, with different eyes. What he found left him both amazed and not a little ashamed that he had remained oblivious to it all for so long.
Eveleen Riordan had always been closely guarded about her deeper thoughts and feelings, he realized now. She had to make her way in a world quicker to challenge than to welcome her, and she had set her defenses early both to s.h.i.+eld herself and to keep her strengths and plans concealed before those who might conceivably be prepared to use too intimate knowledge of her against her.
Like everyone else willing to observe and judge her fairly, he had not been long in recognizing her competence, her courage, her good humor and ready wit, her gentleness both as a companion and a woman, but she had always before screened much of her inner life, most of what went on behind the facade she chose to present to the universe around her, and he had allowed himself to remain all but blind to its very existence.
Now, she was drawing back some of those thick veils. He began to see a little and guess more of this hidden part of his comrade and chief officer, glimpses of a strange, bright spirit that ever more powerfully intrigued him. He wanted to delve its depths, even though instinct warned him that he would never be able to fathom them completely.
Eveleen was helping him. Such was the trust that she was giving him that she who was so proud and independent acknowledged her need for closeness in this alien world and time. She went so far as to permit him to see when shadows occasionally weighed her heart, although of these shadows, she never spoke directly.
Darkness seemed to grip the weapons expert almost openly on the afternoon she first took to the saddle again after her accident.
Ross did not at first press her, but he began to worry as time went on without any brightening in her att.i.tude. There was something troubling her, and he wondered if it might not be nervousness over traveling mounted again. A fall such as she had taken could readily have induced fear.
By all appearances, Eveleen Riordan seemed quite free of any such difficulty. She sat Spark easily, with no sign of tension, but that might too easily be meaningless. The weapons expert's courage and iron control were sufficient to mask even stark panic.
Perhaps it was not this at all, but whatever twisted in her heart and mind, he longed to bring her ease, if only that of companions.h.i.+p and sharing.
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