34. Kye
34
Kye
T he sorry bastard that founded this town built its only inn as far from the fucking road as he could. It sat on the left, the last structure before the trees dissolved into hills. The Sylus Mountains loomed just beyond, titanic peaks dusted with snow, disappearing into the mist above.
We were mere days from Calder. Just over those mountains, and we’d be out of Rivea.
Faces lifted as Sero’s hooves slammed against the dirt path. We sailed through the square, the townspeople still cleaning up their own festival from days before, coal paint lingering in the cracks and wrinkles of the men’s faces. In front of the inn door, I pulled Sero into a stop, not bothering to secure him to the hitching post at his shoulder.
A woman crouching in the vegetable garden sprung to her feet. Radishes bulged from her apron pockets, her hands and nails encrusted with soil. “Yasha, run to the doctor’s house,” she commanded in Rivean. A ginger-haired boy peeked from behind a vined wall of winter-dead cucumbers, then rushed down the road and out of sight.
I’d already left Sero behind and was halfway to her front door when she bounded inside. “Havel!” she shouted, inviting a man to steer around the corner with a small honey cake in hand, his cheeks round as he chewed. His eyes widened at the sight of Maren, naked but for the blood-soaked wrappings I’d wound across her body, limp in my arms.
“Come with me,” Havel said, tossing his unfinished honey cake to a scruffy dog beside him and turning on his heel. I hitched Maren against my shoulder and followed him up the stairs and into a room, laying her down over a patched quilt. Through the open door came the clatter of pans in a kitchen, and Havel’s wife appeared, carrying a steaming pot of water. She tsked me aside, peeling the wrapping at Maren’s hip to find the slice underneath. Heavily caked in dried blood.
The three of us took a collective breath.
“Where is Yasha?” Havel asked.
“Gone to fetch Vilem,” she answered, intent on the steaming cloth she wrung out over the pot.
Havel nodded to himself. “Let’s clean you up, friend.” His Rivean strained in my ears. I stared at the compress the woman slid over Maren’s skin, carefully cleaning away dried blood down her leg, carefully avoiding Maren's wound, and it was only after she glanced over her shoulder at me that I realized I was the recipient of Havel’s words.
“I’m fine,” I said. His brows rose at my accent, and I felt him take me in with more interest than he had the moment before. A foreigner alone with a wounded woman in the foothills of Rivea.
“Are you from Calder?” he asked, switching to suspicious tones in my native tongue.
Aalto-fucking-above. My hackles raised, fingers curling into fists. But he was only an innkeeper, curious about the strangers he welcomed into his home. His gray eyes traveled over my face, swollen from Demyan’s tender ministrations. “We came to Rivea to visit my uncle,” I said. “We were on our way back when we were attacked.”
Havel leaned into the wall. “Bandits don’t usually target people this close to the coast. They stay inland so they can run and hide in the mountains. And the ones that do attack don’t usually stay for a fight.”
I didn’t answer, though I slanted my eyes away from Maren’s form to gauge him.
“Where does your uncle live?” he asked.
“Havel,” the woman interjected. “I need more clean linen.”
“Vranna,” I replied.
“What’s his name?”
“Havel,” the woman hissed.
“I’m not leaving you alone with a foreign man, Simona,” Havel hissed in Rivean, gesturing vaguely to me. Simona grunted with impatience, pushing against the mattress to gain her feet. Havel watched his wife vanish through the door. “Are you outlaws?” he asked, voice dropping to a murmur.
“No.” I closed my eyes and leaned on the wooden wall. Blood rushed through my head, cracking against my skull. Every heartbeat pounded through my veins, thundering in my mind, and though I’d been able to ignore the slow waves of grogginess while riding, I couldn’t now. My stomach rolled as I rested against the wall, willing my pulse to ease the hammering in my head.
“If you’re running from the authorities—”
“We’re not.”
“Because the slave trade up north deals with exotic women—”
A sudden blaze ignited in my chest. I rounded on the man in an instant, pressing him into the corner of the room as I loomed overhead, leaning to avoid scraping my crown against the low-hanging corners of the ceiling. “She’s my wife .”
Havel shrunk away, though to his credit, he held my seething gaze. “I don’t see a ring on her hand.”
Fuck this. “What do you want? Money? Horses?”
“I want my family safe,” he forced out, lifting his hands to shield himself from me.
“They’re safe,” I spat. Heel rotating behind me, I let myself lean against the wall once more, closing my eyes against the throb that threatened to split my fucking skull.
Havel cleared his throat. “Though our rooms are in high demand this time of year.”
My jaw clenched, though I’d expected he’d say as much. I wondered what I could offer the bastard. We had some ú?et left, but not much. I could barter Sero. Something told me that Maren would have my head if I tried to sell Kolibri.
Footsteps sounded against the wooden floor in the hall. Simona popped through the door, arms full of clean rags. Behind her came a short, wiry man, his gray hair sticking out in all directions as though he’d just woken from a nap. He crossed the room with a limp, a club foot shuffling behind him, and set a physician’s bag next to Maren on the bed.
“Come on, Havel,” Simona said, reaching for her husband’s elbow as the doctor began peeling back the rest of Maren’s bloodied wrappings. The innkeeper let his wife usher him to the door. “I’ll expect payment before the day is over,” he said softly enough, though he aimed a glare at me before disappearing down the hall.
Arms crossed as I leaned against the wall, I watched Vilem’s back as he assessed Maren’s thigh with a single interrogative finger. He wrung a steaming cloth out, wiping crusted blood from her open skin. “The boy made it sound urgent. When did this happen?” he asked in Calderian, his accent rough but his voice gentle.
“An hour ago. Maybe two.” Maren hadn’t moved since I’d laid her across the bed, though I’d kept a close eye on her chest. The steady breaths in and out brought me only a measure of comfort.
Vilem frowned. “Is she drugged?”
My eyebrows threaded together. “No.”
“Drunk?”
“No.”
“Why is she asleep?”
I felt myself stiffen. “I assume because she lost a substantial amount of blood.”
Vilem glanced back at me. “This wound is a few days old. This tissue would be swollen, had she been injured earlier today.”
Biting back a surge of dizziness, I stepped into his side to peer down at Maren’s hip. A pale pink membrane fused the clean edges of her skin together. I blinked at it, waiting for logic to weave its way into what lay before my eyes. I’d dressed more field wounds than I could count. Patched, staunched, stitched, and tourniquetted. I’d watched hundred of wounds heal over the course of days, weeks, months.
I’d never seen one close within hours.
Vilem tracked my hand as I pulled the wrappings away from Maren’s back. Smooth skin met my gaze, the edges of the long strip Kriska had flayed hidden somewhere within the hollow between her shoulder blades. Invisible. My fingers trailed across her back in bewildered wonder, my own knuckles cracked and bruised, and I felt the doctor’s eyes hover, watching me askance.
“She was hit in the back of the head,” I said, separating the long strands at Maren’s crown to show him her scalp. But under the leagues of crusted blood, I could only find smooth skin and a perfectly rounded skull.
“She wasn’t injured today,” Vilem said slowly. “But you were. Your left pupil is blown.”
“I’m fine,” I said, grasping the edge of the blanket and lifting it over Maren. And even as the sight of mended flesh soothed the sharp worry in my gut, something squirmed around the slowly sinking reprieve. An intuition in my bones that belied fact.
She’s a witch.
“What do I owe you?” I asked, my fingertips following the length of her arm through the quilt as I straightened.
“For examining a naked woman?” He chuckled softly, though his smile faded at the withering gaze I sent him. “Nothing. Nothing, friend. Havel will take enough. You should be sitting. Maybe even lying down.”
I shook my head, waving his suggestions away, though my stomach threatened to disagree. The doctor eyed me warily. “Regardless of when it happened, I see enough blood loss on these wrappings to cause for some concern. How deep did the knife go?”
“All the way in.”
His mouth quirked humorlessly. “Do you have it?” I fished the blade out of my belt, holding it out for Vilem to see. “Hmm,” he sighed, studying the length of the steel before glancing to the crimson-colored wrappings. “I’d recommend three weeks of rest, perhaps two and half with the way her injury looks now. And at least a day or two from you.”
Stowing the knife away, I gave a stiff nod, watching the doctor pack up his bag of unused medical supplies. Three weeks. It would be almost Saginnus by the time we’d be ready to travel again. I’d been nervous enough about crossing the mountains this close to winter. Waiting three more weeks—I wasn’t sure if we would survive the climb.
Vilem paused at the door. “You’re planning to board a ship back to Calder?”
Fuck . Lie. Say yes.
Was the mountain pass even still an option? Say no.
My head pounded. I shook it vaguely, unable to conjure a clever story. “Yes.”
“Good,” he said, turning the knob and pushing the door open. “I thought you might have said you’d planned to climb through the mountains. The passes are closed due to an avalanche that fell a week ago, and the Rivean Army is working to dig the road back out. But even if they were open” —he jutted his chin in Maren’s direction— “I wouldn’t recommend bringing her through them. Oh—don’t let yourself sleep for more than an hour.”
I scoffed as he snicked the door shut, his feet receding down the hall. The room became quiet but for Maren’s soft breathing and the distant roar of the ocean outside the open window. My eyes lifted toward the sound. The surge of waves against rock that we’d left behind had found us again in this little coastal village surrounded by trees. A tiny harbor waited under the gray horizon, its ships small in stature compared to the merchant vessels we’d seen in Vranna, but my gaze lingered on one in particular. A little two-mast structure with a familiar flag. An orange sun, a blue mountain.
I wondered how long it would stay before returning south.
The door opened to Havel’s face, cheeks once more round as he chewed on a fresh honey cake. Fucking perfect. Let’s get this over with. I forced him to take a step back as I strode into the hall, closing the door behind me. “Let’s see what I have to pay you in my saddlebags,” I ground out. “Then I want a fucking key.”
He followed me outside under a wall-less shelter, the straw floor embedded with hitching posts. Someone, perhaps Havel, had tied up our horses. I thrust my hand into Sero’s bags, feeling around for the presence of my coin purse, and my fingers closed around something else.
Cold, fragile shock drifted around me , snowflakes in the dead of winter. I drew the little thing out, my mouth parting as surprise leeched my thoughts.
And hoped that she wouldn’t leave me when I gave it to her.