Draco A Medieval Scottish Roma - Jayne Castel Page 0,77

him, struggling to keep him upright. With Aila’s help, the three of them lifted him onto the pallet, rolling him on his side so that the arrows didn’t pain him any more than they were already. Meanwhile, the two guards carried the dead warrior from the infirmary.

“Don’t waste a bed on me,” Draco ground out. “Just sit me in the corner … I’ll be right tomorrow.”

The women ignored him. Immortal or not, they couldn’t let him suffer like this.

“We need to remove those arrows,” Heather said, glancing around. “But first, we must snip the tips off.”

“Here.” Elizabeth retrieved a pair of blacksmith pincers, presumably taken from the ruins of the forge. “These have already come in useful.”

Gavina swallowed as nausea rose within her.

However, the other women here had stronger stomachs than her. Stepping forward, face set in a determined expression, Heather snipped off the arrow tips.

The jolt of it hurt Draco, waking him from the strange daze he’d fallen into.

He gave a pained grunt, his long body going rigid.

Heather’s gaze met Gavina’s then. “Ye are going to have to pull out the arrows, My Lady. Aila and I will hold him while ye do it.”

Gavina started to sweat. She’d been helping on and off in the infirmary over the past days, dressing and tending wounds. But she’d left the harsher treatments to the other women.

“Don’t mess around, Gavina,” Draco instructed through gritted teeth. “Grab the arrow and yank it.”

“He’s right,” Elizabeth added. “The slower ye go, the more it hurts.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Gavina replied, the tremble in her voice betraying her nervousness. Placing a knee upon the pallet to brace herself, she grabbed hold of the shaft. She then heaved in a deep breath and yanked.

Draco’s hoarse shout of pain echoed through the infirmary.

Heart hammering in her ears, bile stinging in her throat, Gavina grabbed the second shaft and yanked it free.

Blood poured out of the wounds.

Elizabeth murmured an oath and rushed forward, placing a roll of cloth hard up against his back. “I need more bandages for the front of his chest,” she called out.

Aila rushed to fetch additional strips of linen, handing them to Gavina, who shoved them against the twin arrow holes, staunching the heavy flow of blood.

Draco’s eyelids fluttered as he struggled to remain conscious. His coppery skin had gained a worrying pallor.

Gavina tensed. For an immortal, he appeared in a bad state.

She glanced up, meeting Elizabeth’s eye. From the look on her sister-by-marriage’s face, Elizabeth was thinking the same thing.

“It looks bad,” Heather spoke up then. “But if it’s any consolation, I’ve seen Maximus in a worse condition.”

Gavina wet her lips. Heather was right. She remembered Cassian leaning against that ancient oak, the knife blade embedded in his heart. Aye, she’d seen how these men could suffer and then be reborn. Even so, Draco was doing a convincing job of looking like a dying man.

“Come on,” Elizabeth said, straightening up and reaching for the fresh bandages that Aila now passed her. “Help me wrap his wounds.”

“We have to bring that ‘Battle Hammer’ down,” Cassian announced, his expression grimmer than Maximus had ever seen it. “If we don’t, it’ll breach the gates before nightfall.”

A chill settled in the pit of Maximus’s gut at his friend’s words. “You’re right. We need to focus our attention on the battering ram,” he replied, reloading his crossbow. “And if the bastards would just stop putting up ladders, we could.”

“Let me deal with them!” William Wallace bellowed from farther down the wall. He and Donnan De Keith now wielded iron-tipped spears, which they were using to stab at the English soldiers who tried to scale the top of the wall. Just one ladder remained now, but it had so many men climbing it that it was proving difficult to budge.

Jaw clenched, Maximus favored his leader with a nod, fired his crossbow into the surging mass of helmeted heads below, and ducked as another volley of arrows whistled overhead.

He then turned to the two lads behind him. “How much pitch do we have left?”

“Just one pot,” one of the youths panted. His face was red and sweaty, his eyes glassy with fear. He was one of the stable hands. By rights, the lad was too young to be up here—but they needed all the help they could get to bring missiles and weapons up to the wall.

“Is it still hot?”

“Aye.” The lad motioned to where an iron cauldron smoked at the northern edge of the wall. The cauldron had been