Page 20 of I Loved You Then (Far From Home #12)

Back home, she’d kept a little windowsill garden—lavender, peppermint, a few hardy greens that soothed her need to nurture something living through long night shifts.

During her nurse’s training, one elective course on alternative medicine had turned out to be one of her favorites; she had learned just enough to recognize which plants carried real uses and which were snake oil—if only she could recognize them outside a fully outfitted nursery or the friendly co-op at the corner of her street.

Here, in this brutal century, such knowledge wasn’t a quaint hobby.

So now, basket in hand, she set out with a sense of purpose.

Her mind should have hummed with the names and leaf shapes Ruth had taught her, but instead she kept harking back to the near-smile from Ciaran Kerr, to the very fact that he’d actually ribbed her a bit, that kidding in general was part of his repertoire.

Good Lord, how dangerous would a man like him be if he was good-humored, if he showed what surely must be a devastating smile, if he was at least half as intimidating as he was?

The practical side of her brain wondered if he weren’t dangerous enough already, just as he was, no smile necessary.

Certainly, she was... hm, what was she?

She considered and dismissed a variety of words—captivated, fascinated, smitten even (not!)—and decided on intrigued .

Ciaran Kerr intrigued her, and only partly because he was or seemed familiar to her.

“Stop it,” she told herself. She had no business being intrigued by a man who lived seven hundred years before she was born. None at all.

She marched on, smiling at villagers who responded with curious stares, past the thatched roofs and smoke-plumed chimneys, skirting alongside the MacKinlay army’s camp, to where the land sloped downward into low woodland of beeches and birches.

She kept to the edge at first, hearing Ivy’s warning in her head: don’t stray too far beyond the village, not any further than a scream might carry.

What a way to live , Claire thought, with a greater appreciation for the fact that she rarely had cause for concern when stepping foot outside her apartment building at the edge of her small hometown.

She found next to nothing along the edges of the trees, though, and stepped under the cool canopy of leaves, and almost immediately she spotted what she had come for—tufts of yarrow, their pale clusters standing bright against the green.

She knelt, plucked carefully, and pressed the stems into her basket with an instant sense of pride.

A little further in, she found a white willow, its bark peeling away from the trunk in places. She cut strips with a small knife also borrowed from the kitchens but didn’t take too much for fear of weighing down the basket too early. She decided to fetch more bark on her way back.

Fairly quickly, and not much further inside the woods, she found feverfew next, its daisy-like heads nodding in a patch of sun.

She chased clusters of that deeper into the trees, all the while searching every plant, leaf, and tree around her for anything else she recognized.

She found comfrey near a fallen log and was surprised to discover foxglove not too far from that, or what remained now so late in the year of its tall spikes of pinkish-purple flowers.

She hesitated and then resisted plucking the foxglove—neither Ruth nor Diarmad had mentioned it, and Claire knew very little about it except that every part of the plant was poisonous.

She continued on, moving almost without thought, slipping from patch to patch, stooping and rising, her hands growing stained and fragrant with sap and crushed leaves while the basket grew heavier.

She was sometimes happily distracted by non-medicinal sights, including a flash of blue as a jay darted low through the trees, back and forth several times, apparently scolding her for daring to enter its territory.

Once, she startled a pair of rabbits from a thicket, their white tails vanishing into another section of brush.

They were not the cute bunnies she’d find around Conshohocken, but larger, long-legged hares, the first she’d ever seen in person.

She was sure she hadn’t been gone more than an hour when she straightened once again and bent her back left and right, a bit sore from so much stooping, and decided she’d collected plenty, maybe more than enough to last quite some time.

It was then, brushing damp earth from her skirts, that she noticed how still the woods had grown.

The sun, once high, now slanted lower, shadows lengthening between the trees. She turned slowly, the basket swinging with her on her arm

Nothing looked familiar.

“Oops,” she murmured, though without much concern. She couldn’t have gone far in just an hour—not when she’d only been drifting from plant to plant rather than walking with purpose in any one direction.

She pivoted once, twice, but no smoke from the keep rose above the tree line, no sound of villagers carried on the wind. There was only the whisper of branches overhead and the repetitive knock of a woodpecker in the distance.

She took a few steps one way, certain it was correct, and then halted, second guessing herself.

She’d hadn’t walked straight and direct, true, and she had been searching the brush and foliage, but she had paid some attention to her surroundings, had been so sure she could retrace the path that brought her here.

Now, staring into the endless press of trees, which looked the same in every direction, she wasn’t sure there was a path to retrace.

A few minutes later, growing nervous now, believing she was seriously lost, Claire took back every kind thought she’d had about this century after Ciaran Kerr had nearly smiled at her today.

***

The light was waning when Ciaran set out, teeth clenched around his foul mood.

He’d returned to the keep, nearly looking forward to an early evening, with naught to do but meet with his steward regarding correspondence that had arrived that morning.

But he’d been waylaid by Ivy just inside the hall, her face anxious with worry as she announced to him that Claire hadn’t been seen since she’d taken off early in the afternoon, meaning to forage in the wood across from the MacKinlay camp for plants and herbs.

“And Alaric isn’t returned yet either,” she’d said with excitement, her babe on her shoulder.

“I’d have asked him to search for her but—Ciaran, what if she’s lost?

She’s not any more familiar with Caeravorn than I am, not with anything beyond the village.

And now it looks like it’s going to rain again and it’s going to be dark soon—oh, boy. ”

He’d sighed internally, his day not yet done apparently. “Nae worry, lass. I’ll fetch her. She’s probably on her way at this moment.”

“Oh, thank you, Ciaran,” Ivy had been quick to show her appreciation, relief etched on her face. “I’d have asked Alaric, but he’s still out with—”

He’d turned, essentially cutting her off mid-sentence, calling mildly over his shoulder, “I’ll bring her in. I’ll tell her to check in with ye when she arrives.”

She’d babbled on, something else, but he didn’t hear.

He’d only just unsaddled and stabled his destrier moments ago and decided against bringing him back out again. ?Twas not so far a walk out through the village and into the forest on the south side of the path.

How far could she actually have gone?

For as easily as he’d complied—it wasn’t as if he’d not have gone out for her—he still grumbled about the chore as he’d noted the sun slipping low in the west, and the clouds gathering overhead.

Foolish lass. Who wandered the woods alone with the day so short?

So now he strode beneath the trees, the earth soft under his boots from previous rains, his gaze scanning the trees for the pale flash of her hair, or the dusty blue of the kerchief she’d been wearing earlier when she’d approached him.

His irritation multiplied after a while, when it became apparent that she was not exiting the forest, was nowhere near the edge of the trees, but obviously too foolish to get in before the rain came.

The deeper he was forced to go into the forest, the angrier he became, part of it directed at himself for not having saddled his horse.

He called her name, an edge to his shouts that he certainly expected and wanted to carry through the trees to her ears, lest she not understand how reckless such behavior was.

Still, when at last he caught sight of her, the sharpness of his irritation dulled.

He saw her from a great distance, drawn by the blue kerchief and blonde hair catching his eye in a forest of green and brown.

She was clearly upset, her steps through the trees hurried and yet searching, almost frantic, enough so that Ciaran realized she hadn’t chosen to be reckless, but had indeed become lost.

From a hundred yards away, he watched as her head jerked up then, eyes wide, as she startled like a hare, darting away between the trees, something having spooked her.

Ciaran cursed, striding after her, but she was quicker than he expected, driven by alarm.

By the time he raised his voice—“Claire!”—she had already pushed further into the shadows, in the wrong direction.

Ciaran swore again, lengthening his stride. “Claire!” he called.

He followed the sound of her feet, the blur of motion, until at last she stopped when next he shouted her name.

He broke into a small clearing to find her standing there, chest heaving with exertion, though her grip on the basket was firm and her chin high.

Though she tried to portray a calmness, she looked very close to tears.

“You scared the hell out of me,” she said, a hand pressed to her ribs. “I thought—I thought you were a wolf or something.”