Chapter 67
T he ride to the next village was interminable. The walk from my horse to the undertaker, even more so.
And now, I didn’t want to leave them here.
We had all survived by refusing to leave one another behind, and now the undertaker’s assistants were pulling two of my men into a back room and I was supposed to walk away.
“Where should I take them to rest?” he asked, looking from me to my unusually subdued companion.
I had always thought the ways that people tried to soften death were inane, but I found myself appreciative of it now. They were resting, in a way, something none of us had done much of in our lifetime.
Especially not lately.
I pictured them both standing guard outside of my hallway for days on end when Rowan was in danger. Igor hadn’t slept much on the road, either, taking first watch at every inn and barn we came across.
“Dmitriy has no immediate family.” I gestured to the larger…corpse. He and his wife had never been able to have children, and when she died in the plague years back, he had never married again. “Send him home to the estate.”
Rowan sucked in a breath at my side, but she didn’t cry, a fact for which I was strangely grateful.
“And Igor’s parents are at Kostoya Village.” They had been so proud that he had been chosen for my personal contingent, had thought it was an honor.
He used to talk about it all the time, how afraid he was of disappointing them. How much he had to live up to as the youngest member of our group, like he hadn’t already earned his place with sheer skill and grit.
Would his family have been quite so honored if they had known it would get him killed? Would he have?
At least I could go deliver the news in person after we returned, which would be well in advance of the carriage that carried him home.
I handed the thin man some coin, despite the fact that he wasn’t technically allowed to charge for a soldier killed in the service of their work. He hesitated, but pocketed it after a beat.
“Is there anything else, my lord?” he asked when I still didn’t turn to go.
No. Nothing else. Just my men, the ones under my protection, lying still beneath black sheets.
Rowan put a hand on my wrist, so similar to the way I had done so often when she was in the throes of her own nightmares. I had often wondered if she remembered that on any conscious level, but she must have. To an outsider, the gesture merely looked like a request for my attention, but I knew what she was doing.
Bringing me back from my own mind.
“No. There’s nothing else,” I said, spinning on my heel toward the door.
Suddenly, I couldn’t leave fast enough.
My abdomen pulsed with each step, but I was hardly going to complain about the pain when Dmitriy and Igor would never feel it again. I crossed the two streets that led to our inn, heading directly upstairs.
Kirill was in the dining hall. He would protect my lemmikki while she ate, something I had no intention of doing.
But she didn’t stay to eat.
I was still pulling clean cloths from my medical pack when she pushed open the door to our room. She stood in the doorway, a rare bit of hesitation in her posture, while I stripped off my shirt to care for my wound.
I reached up to untie the cloth I had used to bandage it earlier—after Taras insisted I do before he would consider leaving the makeshift battlefield, and the others were taking care of Igor and Dmitriy—when she decided to move. Shutting the door behind her, she walked to me in three quick strides.
“Let me,” she said, putting her hand over mine.
Her eyes were churning with an emotion I didn’t want to read. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her no. I didn’t want her caring for my wounds out of some misplaced sense of obligation, didn’t want her touching me when I already felt like I was teetering on a precipice.
Her expression hardened into a demand, and I didn’t have the energy to fight with her right now. So I leaned back on the bed, staring at the ceiling while she went about the work of tending to my wounds.
I wondered where she had learned to do that. The same place she had learned to fight?
A knock sounded at the door, and I started to get up until she put firm pressure on my shoulder.
“It’s only dinner,” she said quietly, covering the small distance to the doorway. Sure enough, she took three bowls from someone, along with more cloths.
That must have been why she was a minute behind me earlier. It was strange. I had never seen her take initiative outside of battle. Just one more thing I hadn’t given her enough credit for, I supposed.
Though it still felt odd that she was bothering to do so for my sake.
I couldn’t deny a small bit of relief at one less thing to worry about. She would eat. My wounds would be clean.
This day would be over.
Setting two bowls to the side, she grabbed the third, which turned out to be nothing more than hot water. Gently, she cleaned around the wound before pulling a cleanser from my bag and pouring it over the laceration.
It bubbled up, burning like the hottest part of the fire had been applied directly to my nerves, but it still had nothing on my stepmother’s whip lashing through day-old gashes.
I had learned a long time ago not to flinch.
“I’m sorry,” Rowan said as she was wrapping the injury at last.
“It’s nothing,” I told her, which was comparatively true.
“Not about this,” she murmured, tying the cloth with a gentle precision. “About Igor and Dmitriy. I know what they meant to you.”
I couldn’t tell her that was nothing, not when their memories demanded more.
I took a deep breath, telling myself it only hurt because of the fresh wound. “Igor was my youngest recruit, but no less loyal for it. And Dmitriy was...He was my friend.”
My family, really. Long before I acknowledged him as such.
She squeezed her eyes shut, swallowing. “They died because of me, and I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me for that.”
Was that what she thought? I refrained from telling her that if I had the capacity to hate her, I would have done it by now. That sure as hell wouldn’t change because my people had targeted her yet again.
Or more likely, my stepmother.
I met her gaze solidly. “That wasn’t your fault, Lemmikki. If anything, it was mine. I wasn’t paying the attention I should have.”
Guilt flickered in her eyes, and I knew what she was thinking. She was right, and she was wrong.
I was distracted by her, but not because of her. It was up to me to have more self-control than that.
She averted her gaze, finishing the knot on my bandage before grabbing one of the bowls. I expected her to start eating, but instead she pushed it toward me.
“You ordered that?” I asked, though I was fairly certain I knew the answer.
“Yes. You should eat.” She said it simply, like it wasn’t unusual for her to care about whether or not I had eaten.
I swallowed down the bile that rose in my throat at the thought of eating. It wasn’t usually in my nature to be wasteful, and I probably needed to eat in order to recover. Still, it was an effort to take the bowl and spoon. And a greater effort still to choke down each bite while Rowan silently did the same.
After she was finished, she got into the bed next to me, but said nothing.
This room was reminiscent of the one we had stayed at during the storm on the way back from the Summit. Tiny and freezing. Only this time, we didn’t fight over the blanket.
Maybe neither of us had the energy. Maybe it was just easier to be cold.
As desperate as I had been for the day to end, sleep wouldn’t come. Instead, I was haunted by an endless cycle of memories of the men I had failed today, followed by visions of Rowan lying as lifeless in the snow as they had, crimson hair eclipsed by a pool of crimson blood.
“You know that this wasn’t your fault either, right?” Her voice was a shock in the silence, her meaning even more so. She couldn’t possibly have known that was what I had just been thinking. “You have protected far more people than were lost. I’ve watched you do it.”
I let out a bitter huff of air.
Yes, she had watched me protect my men, but she sure as storms had never watched me on one of my father’s errands .
“You don’t know the half of the things I have done and the people I have failed to protect,” I told her.
“I don’t need to know those things,” she insisted, rolling on her side to face me. “I know you . I’ve seen what you do when you think no one is watching, and don’t think I haven’t realized that I would be dead several times over if it weren’t for you.”
It was the first time she had acknowledged that I actively worked to protect her, but I certainly wasn’t the reason she was alive right now. Hell, I hadn’t even noticed the attack until it was too late.
“I saw you with that sword today,” I told her. “I don’t think I get the credit for that.”
“The sword that you gave me when you didn’t have to,” she countered.
“After I took you,” I reminded her, wondering how we had wound up on the opposite ends of this argument.
“After you saved me from being Iiro’s puppet,” she all but yelled.
Was that how she saw it now? Had that ever been my intention?
Looking back now, I could see how much it had irked me to watch him taunt her about being amicable and accommodating while he left her vulnerable to men like Mikhail, but would it have been enough to save her if her death had been better for my people?
“Don’t kid yourself, Lemmikki,” I growled. “We both know I would have taken you anyway. If I thought Theodore was the other half of your soul, and you were going to fling yourself from the nearest balcony as soon as you got back to the estate, I still would have taken you to keep that alliance from harming my clan. And it still wouldn’t have been close to the worst thing I have ever done to keep them safe.”
She surprised me again when her only reaction was to tilt her head like she was studying me.
“I think you sometimes forget that I’m a princess.”
For some reason, a small snort escaped me.
The woman who drank with my soldiers and sat on the floor to play cards and walked around in nothing but my shirt telling me I was the one who forgot who she was supposed to be.
“I think you sometimes forget that you’re a princess,” I countered.
She sighed in exasperation. “I mean that I come from a family of rulers. I’ve never had to make the decisions you have, but I know that weighing the greater good comes with the territory.”
Her words washed over something raw inside me, reminiscent of the night that Dmitriy had told me something similar. I rolled to face her, trying to read her expression better.
Did she mean it, or was this an apology for all the misplaced blame she was carrying?
The firelight was low, but it was enough to discern the resolute set of her features. And the shiver that racked her body as another icy draft blew through the room.
Letting out a slow breath, I rolled back to my side and extended my arm. She might say no. She might rather freeze than further convolute the boundaries of whatever was between us.
Still, I couldn’t help but offer.
I didn’t protect her earlier, but I could keep her warm now. More than that, though I knew it was stupid and selfish, I needed to feel her close and alive and still here .
Soon, she wouldn’t be.
She hesitated only a fraction of a moment before sliding across the bed and laying her head on my chest, placing her arm well away from my wound. I pulled her closer, trying not to notice how she fit perfectly against me.
Trying not to wonder if this was what it was like when Kirill went home to his wife after days like this one. Acceptance. Support.
A thousand other things I didn’t want to name when grief was still so bitter on my tongue.
Her hair spilled out around us both, her fist clenching into my shirt, and then I heard it. The smallest hitch in her breathing.
Had I ever heard her cry before? She had whimpered in her sleep, had broken up in the middle of words when she was talking, but never this, like she was breaking. It made sense, of course.
She had seen death before, but these were men who had protected her, joked with her. She had considered them friends as well.
Tears flooded onto my shirt and I pulled her closer, pressing my lips against her hair in the only comfort I could offer. Then she was sobbing in truth, clinging to me like we were in another hailstorm and I was the only shelter for miles.
Maybe I wouldn’t have been her first choice for comfort, and hell, maybe she was thinking of another set of arms right now. But I was selfishly glad to have her here, expressing all the grief that threatened to drown me from the inside out.