33
I jerked upright with a gasp.
Pain. Sharp, agonizing pain that cut me in two.
Where was I?
Someone was touching me. I lashed out at them before I was able to stop myself.
“Control her,” an older female voice barked, and another set of hands grabbed my shoulders, pushing me firmly back to the bedroll.
The threads evaded me. But those hands—those were familiar.
“Don’t kill the healer,” Atrius growled, though I couldn’t be sure if I imagined that he sounded relieved.
Healer.
I reached for my abdomen, and someone smacked my fingers away.
“Don’t touch,” the healer snapped. “The stitches are fresh. And my medicines only go so far on a human.”
I steadied my breath, following the threads fanning out around me. They came into focus slowly, and brought with them a blindingly powerful headache, but I was just relieved to grasp my surroundings again. For a few terrifying moments back there, it had felt like I’d been cut away from the only thing that tethered me to the world.
I was back at camp, in a tent—mine? Atrius’s? It was still so hard to grasp. The healer, a vampire woman, knelt beside me. Her presence radiated sadness and exhaustion.
I turned my head, which was slightly elevated, and realized that I lay against Atrius’s lap.
When the memories from before I was injured filtered back, the first was Atrius’s voice as I faded.
And then the explosions, and the bodies, and— The bodies.
I bit my tongue hard, right over that old scar tissue. I still nearly drew blood. It didn’t help.
If I had been lucky, the wave of rage I’d felt in my final moments of consciousness would have been a symptom of my delirious state. If I had been lucky, I would have woken up the steadfast, calm Arachessen I had been trained to be.
I was not lucky.
The healer stood and said something to Atrius in Obitraen, to which he responded with a nod and a few curt words. She left the tent, leaving the two of us alone.
It was Atrius’s tent, I realized now. He’d brought me back to his.
I sat up again—slowly this time.
“She said to be careful,” Atrius snapped.
“I am being careful.”
I turned to face him. His weariness seeped from him like a stubborn scent. His walls were heavier than usual—they felt more forced, and like it was taking him more effort to hold them up.
But I could still sense what lay behind them.
I gingerly touched my wound. No, the vampire healer had not been able to help me the way an Arachessen healer could have, but she still did a damned good job. The wound hurt, and it would still bleed if I pulled the stitches, but it was far from life-threatening. Interesting that Nyaxia’s magic could be used to heal humans, too, albeit imperfectly.
“How many?” I choked out.
The terrible, ironic echo in those words didn’t hit me until they left my lips. But Atrius heard it immediately, and his face fell.
“Too many,” he murmured. “Too many.”
His answer twisted in my heart, right into the secret wound that had bled there for twenty years.
I knew it was coming. I knew that those people hanging in the trees were already dead, whether their hearts still pumped weak amounts of blood or not. But that did nothing to lessen the shards of anger inside me at Atrius’s answer.
Outside the tent, voices collected. The amount of rage and grief in the presences around us left me dizzy.
“How long have—”
“We killed all of the Pythora King’s men.” Atrius’s lip twitched into a sneer, weakly, as if this bloodshed was barely enough to bring him satisfaction. “Not a single human soldier made it off that island alive. We ensured that. Even if we had to pay heavily for it.”
A small victory. It didn’t feel like much. The Pythora King would have only sent a small group to the island, knowing they would be sacrifices. Those lives were a small consolation for the number they had taken.
“We took back all the wounded we could,” Atrius went on. “Including you. But there are many more.”
A strange flicker over his face—something I couldn’t quite decipher.
He stood.
“You rest. I need to—”
But I started to stand, too.
He caught my arm when I was halfway up. “What are you going?”
“I’m no great healer,” I said, “but I’m not useless—”
“No.”
“I’m not going to argue with you.”
I stood up and was greeted with a wave of dizziness. Atrius didn’t loosen his hold on my arm.