Free Susan Johnson by Silver Flame (Braddock Black) Page B

answer his questions. Hazard had seen enough men die in his life to recognize the color of death. He’d known then how slim the chances were. How infinitesimal the hope for their son.
    He led Blaze to the door, willing to do whatever was required to save his only child. “We’ll be right outside if you need anything,” he said.
    “I don’t want to leave,” Blaze exclaimed abruptly, rebelling against stoic acceptance. Turning, her glance briefly touched on Empress and then went to Trey’s still form. “I can help.” Her voice was suddenly firm, her eyes shiny with tears but determined. “You can’t do it all alone.”
    Empress debated momentarily. The beautiful flame-haired woman, dressed in the height of fashion, looked at first sight as frivolous as a butterfly. Large sapphires sparkled at her throat and ears. Her cut velvet dress was recognizably a Worth, blue as a summer sky, sumptuous as a queen’s ransom. Had they been entertaining, or did she dress so for dinner every night out here on the frontier? It seemed another age ago when her own mother had a wardrobe from Paris’s best couturier. But she knew her mother had possessed a strong spirit beneath the genteel facade, and perhaps this woman did too. “It may be fearsome to watch,” she warned cautiously.
    “I’ve watched four of my children die,” Blaze said quietly. “Nothing is more fearful than that. Tell me what I can do to help,” she said, finishing with a resolute lift of her chin. “What
we
can do,” she amended, looking up at Hazard.
    Hazard’s fingers tightened on his wife’s small hand, and with an apologetic smile at Empress, he said, very softly, “He’s all we have.”
    “If I’m doing something for Trey,” Blaze explained, “it’slike … somehow—” Her eyes filled with tears, and she finished in a trembling whisper, “He’ll know we’re here, and he won’t die.”
    Empress understood. Medicine could cure on its own merit, but everything she’d learned from her mother and grandmother, who knew the old herbals by heart, verified that people lived who hadn’t the barest hope of survival, and others died who shouldn’t have. And the difference was their will to live, or caring human contact, or whatever one wished to call that small spark of inextinguishable energy that passed between human spirits.
    “Then first,” Empress said, “we have to make him comfortable, take away the pain so his body can begin to heal. You can help. Have some ice brought up to keep the eggnog cold. We’ll feed that to him all night.”
    Empress dissolved the sleeproot and pipsissewa powders in a small portion of the eggnog mixture. And then they took turns in the laborious process of dripping it into a small funnel attached to a hollow reed, placed far back in Trey’s mouth. His swallowing reflex took care of the rest.
    An hour later, one cup of the eggnog had been administered.
    “We have to get a poultice on the wounds,” Empress explained, “now that he’s sedated.” The doctor had extracted the shotgun pellets—at least as many as he could find—and although therapeutic, it was weakening to the patient. Trey had lost considerably more blood.
    Empress took dried yarrow from her saddlebags and added enough boiled water to make a thick paste. Hazard helped turn Trey so the wounds on his back could be treated. It was a gruesome mass of bloodied flesh, which Empress gently dressed with the poultice, then wrapped with bandages.
    “Now some yarrow tea for him,” she said, and Blaze helped brew a small amount with the boiling water. Hazard, Blaze, and Empress took turns, again bending low over the comatose man, dripping small spoonfuls of the yarrow tea through the funnel-reed apparatus. It had to be accomplished very slowly, so Trey wouldn’t choke or accidentally draw some into his lungs.
    Through the night their ministrations continued: fresh rosehip tea to bring him strength; a monkshood brew in a minutecarefully modulated