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half day of fishing, but he’s worn out when he returns.” Tiree was the nearest inhabited island, perhaps an hour by boat according to the maps Geneva had studied.
    “Even here, he can die, can’t he?” She checked the wound beneath her hands, pleased that the bleeding had slowed. His skin still showed the ashen pallor of the critically injured.
    “Aye,” Rannulf said. “The power only does so much. He can take ill, or be killed outright in battle, same as any other man.”
    “Do you have a physician here on the island?” Others had been injured in the squid attacks, too. Did the island’s magick work for them? “What do the other residents do?”
    “We’ve healers.” Quentin’s glare burned like acid on the back of Geneva’s neck as she bent over her patient. “Better than any quack. We don’t need your kind here.”
    “Stubble it, lad.” This was obviously an old argument between the two men. “Your laird won’t thank you for chasing off the ladies who saved his hide. You think without care, he’d have survived until we found him?”
    “Sorry.”
    Geneva ignored the grumbled, grudging apology and caught her breath as they entered the bailey of a medieval castle at the top of the island’s central hill.
    Clearly, she’d stepped into a fairytale of local granite and blooming wildflowers, gaslights and well-oiled machinery side by side with architecture unchanged for centuries.
    Alice spoke the words caught in Geneva’s throat. “It’s beautiful.”
    Rannulf gave Alice a warm smile. “Aye. ’Tis home.”

Chapter Three
    After she reset Magnus’s pelvis and restitched several of his wounds, Geneva left him under the watchful eye of a maid. Geneva and Alice followed Rannulf to a steam-powered lift that creaked and groaned its way back down to the great hall. A relic of the castle’s medieval origins, the giant stone-walled room was full of what must have been half the village. Long trestle tables were arranged in a U-shape, and in the center, a line of perhaps a dozen men and women sporting a variety of bandages waited, some standing, others on benches. The rest of the crowd, at least a hundred, gathered around the outside.
    “If you don’t mind, Doctor, I’d thought you might take a look at some of the other wounded men, since you can’t leave until morning.” Rannulf cast her a sheepish grin. “Our healers are good, but with the kraken attacks, there’ve been more wounded than two women can handle.”
    Geneva chuckled and exchanged wry glances with Alice. “In for a penny, right? Lead on, Mr. MacAuley.”
    He did, placing her bag on the head table and sending a maid for hot water and soap. Other supplies were already laid out. “Sure of us, wasn’t he?” she whispered to Alice.
    “Mmm.” The older woman shot a glance that bordered on indecent at Rannulf’s back. “Still, he seems like a good man.”
    “That he does.” Geneva had yet to see anything not to like in the burly older man.
    Rannulf, or someone at his direction, had lined the patients up in order of need, meaning they saw the worst wounded first. A man named MacRae, game warden for the laird, had a festering cut on his arm that had been stitched by his wife, but not before infection had set in. “Healer said it wasn’t worth bothering with,” he grumbled as Geneva and Alice painstakingly cleaned the wound. He held still, fortified with a dram from Rannulf when Geneva rebandaged it with a poultice of bread mold, unstitched to let the toxins drain. “Can’t get close to them since this damn kraken business started.”
    “Come by the castle first thing in the morning,” she said. “I want to look at that arm one more time before I leave. I’ll leave instructions with Mr. MacAuley. Someone will help you take care of it after I’m gone.”
    “Thank ye, miss. Yer an angel, to be sure.” With a little help from another man, he made his way from the room.
    “And who do we have here?” Geneva knelt in front of