32. Maren
32
Maren
T he voice inside my head screamed.
Moisture in the air fizzled, a thousand wicks threatening to ignite. But my calls to water collapsed around me, sputtering into nothing.
Demyan glanced around, then whipped his head to look at me, as though he’d forgotten I was there. He stood, the jagged scars across his face warping his features as he advanced on me, reaching for the cutlass in between the roots.
The ropes Kye had slashed had become a puddle around my ankles, tripping me as I struggled to evade him, my legs cumbersome and slow. Hanging by my right arm, I listed, my body revolving in a slow orbit. My toes searched lethargically for purchase, but I’d fallen into a wide divot between roots, the ground just beyond reach. The knife embedded in my side flared through my thoughts. Raw pain lanced across muscle and sinew, but somehow, it felt very far away. Almost as if it didn’t belong to my body anymore.
Demyan’s lips curled. He grabbed my hair and yanked my head back, ignoring my left hand as it beat sluggishly against his chest. The wicked edge of the cutlass was cold as he pressed it to my throat. I spat, misting his eyes and nose.
The pirate didn’t react. He stared at me, panting and tired, poised to slice me open, but didn’t move. His eyes snaked over my face, fingers tightening on my hair, as though he stood weighing the decision to kill me. On the edge of consciousness, feeling myself teeter toward the unknown, I met his gaze and refused to shrink away.
“ Zoznámime sa s rybím krá?om, malá ryba ,” he finally muttered, his panting beginning to ebb. He pulled me back to solid ground, ignoring my soft yelp as my feet flattened over the roots, sending a sharp bite into my hip.
Through my numb thoughts, it occurred to me he wasn’t going to kill me. He was leaving, taking me with him. My hands found traction along his forearms, and I sunk my nails deep. I kicked at him again, the motion futile. Strung up by one hand and my hair, I’d become immobilized. It hardly mattered what I did.
Motion caught my eye. A flutter of light came from behind Demyan, there and gone in an instant.
Following my gaze, the pirate began to turn, and I felt the blade that entered his back through his body. Felt strength leave his fingers as he released my hair, letting me dangle beside him as his momentum continued the turn he’d begun. Felt breath that left his mouth as it hitched.
The scent of fresh blood stained the air.
Demyan staggered, then sat drunkenly over the roots of the tree, cutlass dropping from his softened fist. Standing in his place, Kye leaned a bloodied forearm against the tree trunk. One of his eyes loomed half-closed, his jaw and temple already swollen. Demyan must’ve been wearing a ring—four square shaped cuts peppered his face.
Kye pulled me across the roots, his knuckles painting my dress with blood, until my toes landed on a tall gnarl in front of his. Arm shaking, he severed the rope, and I fell against him.
Pain rained down my side and my knees gave out, but Kye caught me, his own body supported by the trunk of the tree. His skull-white forehead dipped into the curve of my neck as he gathered me in. I drooped against his chest, unsteady breath escaping my lungs. I sent my hands under the edge of his jacket, seeking the solidity of his body against mine, desperate to chase away the doubt swirling in my stomach that he was there.
Alive.
Demyan coughed. We glanced down at him, both of us folded into the other. The pirate rocked, his mouth slightly parted, the edges of his lips gleaming ruby-red. Kriska’s knife protruded from his mid-back, his breath leaving him in fragments. He eased down to the ground beside his captain. Claimed by death only minutes before, Kriska gazed ahead as if looking into the shadows of eternity, his skin pale, Kye’s knife still lodged in the back of his neck.
Demyan tucked his cheek against the roots. “ Do étericky vzduch, m?j brat,” he whispered into Kriska’s face. “Perpetska.”
Kye’s fingertips curled possessively into the small of my back. He turned away, scanning for a soft patch to set me down. But I couldn’t tear my gaze from Demyan.
The seconds ticked away, slowly stealing his life. I didn’t know why I needed to watch him die. Kriska’s knife in his back, I couldn’t help counting the seconds, wondering how long it had taken Naheso to succumb to the same fate.
Kye lifted me a few feet away, guiding me across the woody floor to the opposite side of the tree. I gasped at the stab in my hip, my hand reaching for it—though I didn’t let myself touch the knife. Kye drew a sharp breath. He walked heavily to where Kriska lay, bracing his boot against the captain’s skull as he wrenched the knife from his neck, then bent to wipe the blood off on Kriska’s shirt.
Demyan’s glazed eyes lifted to watch him. His lungs seized, loud enough that I heard it. His heart stalled a moment later. His jaw slackened; his body relaxed into the tangle of roots.
Kye swallowed hard, his own eyes fixed on my flayed patch of skin.
“He didn’t strip you down to the muscle. It’s not that bad,” he said in a voice that made me worry he was lying. Now that the fight had stopped, I realized I couldn’t feel my back, my nerve endings severed with my skin.
Kye called Kolibri to us, stealing a clean shirt from my saddlebag.
“Are you okay?” I finally asked, my voice still a whisper. My eyes strayed shut, and the sudden desire to sleep overtook everything else.
Kye didn’t answer. He plucked a rock the size of my fist from the weeds, kneeling at my side. “I need to take the knife out,” he murmured, and I felt my body recoil at the thought. “I don't want you to go into shock.”
I nodded. My body had given way to shaking, whether from nerves or loss of blood, I wasn’t sure. The air had thinned, my skin somehow sweaty and cold, and an icy hue had entered the skin under my nails.
He lifted the satin aside for a full view of my hip, then hissed through his teeth. My head nodded forward, eyelids closing as my temple grazed his shoulder. The motion seemed to chase whatever hesitance he fought against. Wrapping the shirt around my pelvis, Kye glared at the knife. “Ready?”
I didn’t have the words to answer him. In a sudden yank, he extracted the knife from my body, smooth and fast.
I hardly even felt it.
But something in my body did. My eyes rolled, the world turning upside down momentarily before righting itself.
Through the haze, Kye fit a scrap of cloth over the wound, pressed the rock over it, and tied it tight enough the surrounding skin flared white.
I watched, numb to the worry that I couldn’t feel a thing. Kye leaned me against his chest, studying the flayed skin at my back. Mouth dry and sticky, I managed to slur the only thing I cared about. “Are you okay?”
He sighed. “I think the easiest way to cover it would be to tie another shirt around your chest.” The words thick like syrup in my ears, I tilted to look up at him. He met my gaze with molten eyes, as though forbidding me to ask whether he was alright.
“Okay,” I said, locked in the grip of his stare.
“I have to take your dress off.”
“You just want to see me naked,” I said, lifting my trembling hands over my head and angling myself so he could help. I’d hoped he’d crack a smile. Make a joke. Respond with his own brand of dry humor. He didn’t.
Though his hands were primed with speed, Kye took care to hike the ruined satin out from under my weight and over my head, his fingers warm and soft where they brushed my skin. He replaced the flap of skin, then wrapped his shirt around my back, bringing the sleeves together and knotting it between my breasts. My eyelids shuttered as I looked down at myself, my attire made up of knotted scraps of clothing, and I was suddenly too tired to think of what to do next.
“Stay with me,” he softly demanded. My eyes snapped open, but my head only bobbed again, exhaustion beckoning.
Kye swore under his breath. “Can you walk?” he asked. I realized his teeth were bright red.
“Can you ?” I countered.
He ignored me, looking over me intently, tilting my chin and feeling under the layers of my hair. His hand stopped at the clot of bloodied hair at the back of my head, and I flinched under the brush of his fingers. A fresh flash of hot metal lit the air. “He hit you from behind?”
“I fell on a rock when he pulled me off Sero.” I wondered where the gray horse had gone.
Jaw tight, Kye nodded, shifting my back against the trunk of the tree. A split in his chin shined, pink and bloody, stark against the white chalk. I ignored the strange numbness in my back. The tightness of every twitch. The canyon had dropped into silence, and I tried not to think about the two bodies on the other side of the tree.
“Burian ran down the hill.”
“Don’t worry about Burian. He’s a dead man.” Kye staggered to his feet, his hands on his knees, staring at the grass. He swallowed thickly, took a step, and vomited. “I’m fine,” he quickly said, holding a hand upright before I could say a word.
Doubt gnawed into my belly. I could barely sit upright. Kye could hardly stand.
Behind us, Kolibri nickered, staring down the ravine. A moment later, a bulky gray head appeared, mane bouncing as he nodded at the black mare. Kye stopped to wipe his mouth with the back of his arm.
“Don’t sleep,” he panted softly. I frowned, turning my cheek to escape the bright light. The fading sun behind him cast him in shadow, a fiery halo shining through his hair and around his head, stabbing at my eyes and drawing an ache into my skull. My jaw slackened, my shoulders slumped, and I heard Kye swear again. “Leihani,” he snapped softly. I reluctantly slid my gaze back to his. “Don’t sleep.”
“We can’t leave them here,” I argued.
Kye reached for his fallen sword, shoving it into the baldric at his back. “You have a sudden fondness for pirates? Going to recite Theia’s prayer and give them a proper burial?”
“What if someone finds them and follows us?”
He rocked back on his heels, thinking. Then shoved to his feet. “Fine.”
I opened my mouth to ask what that meant, but he’d already turned and left, disappearing behind the opposite side of my tree. Thumps and rustling met my ears, the sounds of a man rearranging dead bodies. I swallowed down the nauseous thought until Kye whistled finally at the horses.
Sero loped to him like a carefree hound, happy to let Kye harness a rope around his shoulders. One at a time, they dragged Demyan and Captain Henri Kriska the Third over the edge of the ravine and into the water below.