Lady Wildwood started to shake her head but paused at once, wincing in pain. “Nay, but I can smell the scent your father brought you back from his trip to Spain,” she explained.

“How do you feel?”

Her mother smiled grimly. “How do I look?” At Iliana’s hesitant silence, she grimaced. “That is about how I feel.”

Iliana squeezed her hand sympathetically, then reached gently to brush a strand of hair from her mother’s damaged face. “Gertie went below to collect some mead to put some of her tonic in. We’ve been giving that to you to keep you sleeping while you heal. She should return shortly.”

The hand in hers shifted impatiently. “I do not wish to sleep. I have no doubt slept for days already.”

“A week,” Iliana agreed quietly.

“Aye, well, that is long enough.”

“Gertie thought you would heal swifter if—”

“Bruises and broken bones take time to heal no matter if the patient sleeps or not. She would just have me sleep through the pain.”

“Mayhap,” Iliana agreed quietly. “And mayhap that is not such a bad idea. You—”

“’Tis a bad idea,” Lady Wildwood disagreed at once. “The pain my body gives me is naught compared to the pain of losing your father. ’Sides, I seem to have done naught but sleep these last months since his death. ’Tis time I awoke and faced life.”

“But you have faced life,” Iliana argued. “You arranged for my marriage and even managed to escape Greenweld yourself.”

“I sent a letter to the king and fled Greenweld as soon as I knew you were safely away,” she corrected, then turned her face toward Iliana, seeming to try to see through her swollen eyes as she asked gently, “Have you been all right? All is well with you?”

“Aye,” Iliana murmured at once, eager to ease her mother’s worry.

“Your husband is kind to you?”

Iliana hesitated over answering that. Saying that Duncan was kind to her was slightly overstating the case. On the other hand, he was not unkind to her. She did not know exactly how to classify their relationship. They had seemed to do little but argue until they had consummated the marriage. Their relationship had recently taken a vast turn in direction, but she was not sure how exactly. Her husband was demanding and passionate, yet at the same time gentle as a lover. But they had not exactly talked since the afternoon that she had fallen in the dung heap and lured him to their bed. The only time they had even seen each other since her mother’s arrival was the day she had gone to complain of the noise his men were making. She did not think what they had done in the clearing he had dragged her to would be considered meaningful conversation.