The Hyhborn lord halted.
“My nose isn’t even bleeding anymore,” I rambled. “It was barely a hit.”
A moment of silence passed. “I’m not going to hurt you.” His shoulders tensed. “I . . . I won’t hurt you again.”
At least he had the self-awareness to realize that he had, even if his actions had been accidental.
“You knew . . . the man?” He dragged a hand up his face, through his hair.
“Yes. He worked at the bakery.”
“He was . . . waiting around outside when I left the tavern. He was with . . . two others. The one . . . at the tavern . . . and another who was there drinking.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. He was speaking of Porter and likely Mickie.
“They’ve done this before,” he continued, voice becoming hoarse.
I shuddered. For them to know what Fool’s Parsley would do to a Hyhborn and to have the lunea blades, they’d probably done this more than once.
He then looked down at himself, pressing his finger just below the wound on his chest.
“Does it hurt?” I blurted out yet another incredibly pointless question.
His head lifted, and now all I saw was the straight line of his nose. “It feels like a . . . hole was carved . . . through my chest cavity.”
Bile rose. “I’m sorry.”
The Lord went still again. “You do that a lot? Apologizing . . . for something you’ve had nothing to do with.”
“I’m empathizing,” I told him. “You didn’t do anything to deserve that, right? You were just at the tavern, for . . . for whatever reason. That is all. No one deserves what was done to you.”
“Including a Hyhborn?”
“Yes.”
He made a noise that sounded like a dry laugh.
I took a small breath. “I need to leave. So do you. The others involved in this will come back.”
“And they will die too.” He turned, swaying.
My heart lurched with alarm. “My lord?”
“I need . . . your help. Again.” A ragged breath left him. “I need to clean up. The lunea— it contaminates the body. It’s in my blood and sweat, and the Fool’s Parsley . . . is making it hard to . . . flush it out. I need to bathe. I need water. If not, I won’t be able to heal completely. I’ll pass out again.”
I looked around. There was no water here, surely not enough to bathe him or for him to actually ingest.
Tension poured into my muscles as I stared at him. The logical part of my brain was demanding I tell him that I could be of no more help, that I wished him well, and then get as far away as I could. But the other part, the one that I was born with and that always, always won over anything my mind was telling me, demanded I do the exact opposite of what was smart and reasonable.
But it was more than my intuition. It was also because it was him. My Hyhborn lord— no, he wasn’t mine. I needed to stop with that.
I looked to the door and then to Weber, hands closing at my sides. “Can you walk?”
He didn’t answer for a long moment. “Yes.”
“Good,” I whispered, taking a step toward him. I spotted the milky-white blade in the moonlight. Bending, I picked it up and glanced beyond him, to the darkened aisle. “Stay here. For real this time.”
The Lord didn’t answer as I inched past him and hurried back to the stall he’d been held in. The gas lamp was still on. I walked forward, hand tightening around the lunea blade as I kicked over the buckets of blood.
CHAPTER 5
I was concerned.
The Hyhborn lord was strong, obviously, but he’d been able to take only a few steps outside of the stall before his breathing became labored. He stumbled. I shot forward, folding an arm around his waist, and held on to him as best as I could. My own strength was quickly cracking under his weight, but the wound on his chest was bleeding again and no longer just seeping. It also looked larger. I didn’t think his other injuries fared any better.
“Just a little further,” I assured him, hoping that Finn was right and Jac would be occupied till dawn, because if not . . .
It would be bad.
He nodded, the hair now hanging in stringy clumps around his face. That was the only response I got as we made it out of the barn. As we crossed the uneven ground, I looked to the woods and spotted Iris’s shadowy form grazing.
Gritting my teeth, I forged forward, fingers slipping over his now-slick waist. It felt like an eternity by the time we reached the back door of the blacksmith’s home. The Lord leaned against the cement siding typical of buildings of this age, head hanging limply on his shoulders. “Who lives . . . here? The blacksmith?”