Chapter 9 Kielyne #2
I’m aware of the warmth leaving my body in a steady stream.
Aware of the cold creeping in to replace it, starting at my fingers and toes and spreading inward.
My vision narrows to a tunnel—Blorjorn’s chest at the center, the black veins retreating inch by agonizing inch, my blood soaking into him in a steady crimson flow.
Someone is calling my name. Fenrik, maybe. Or Grothak. The voices sound far away, muffled, coming from somewhere beyond the tunnel of my fading consciousness.
I can’t answer. Can barely think. Everything I have is focused on one thing: keeping my arm pressed against him. Keeping my blood flowing. Keeping him alive.
Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.
The blight fights back. I feel it—not through the oath, but through my blood itself. The curse clawing at each drop I give him, trying to corrupt it before it can do its work. It’s hungry. Angry. It doesn’t want to die.
Neither do I. But I’ll take this thing with me if I have to.
The cold reaches my chest. My heart stutters, struggling to pump blood that isn’t there anymore. My vision is almost entirely dark now, just a pinprick of light at the center showing me Blorjorn’s face—still gray, still slack, but cleaner. The black veins are retreating. Dying.
Morra’s chanting reaches a crescendo. The air crackles with power. My blood burns hotter, brighter, and I feel the moment the blight breaks—feel it shatter like glass, the last of its dark veins dissolving into nothing as my blood floods his system.
The chanting stops.
“Enough!” Morra’s voice, sharp and urgent. “It is done. Pull her back—quickly, before she gives too much!”
Hands grab me. Pull me away from Blorjorn’s body. Someone presses cloth against my bleeding arm, binding the wound with rough efficiency. I try to ask if it worked, if he’s alive, but my mouth won’t form the words.
“She’s ice cold.” Grothak’s voice, rough with something I’ve never heard from him before. Fear. “Get blankets. Build a fire—I don’t care who sees the smoke. We’ll lose her to the cold if we don’t warm her up.”
“Blorjorn—” The word finally escapes, thin and reedy.
“Alive.” Morra’s face swims into view above me, wrinkled and ancient and something almost like kind. “The curse is gone. You burned it out of him with your own life, child. He will live.”
Relief crashes through me—and then darkness follows, and I feel nothing at all.
I wake in fragments.
First: cold. Bone-deep cold, the kind that comes from blood loss, from a body trying to function on less than it needs. I’m shivering—violent, uncontrollable tremors that rattle my teeth.
Second: warmth. Something large pressed against my side, radiating heat into my frozen limbs. Slowly, so slowly, the shivering begins to ease.
Third: the smell of smoke and leather and something underneath that I’m beginning to recognize. Something that means safe, even though it shouldn’t. Even though nothing about this situation should feel safe.
I force my eyes open.
Night has fallen over the Bonefields. Stars overhead. A small fire burns nearby—risky, given the pursuit, but someone must have decided I was more likely to die from cold than from discovery.
Blorjorn lies beside me.
His body is pressed against mine, sharing warmth, his arm heavy across my waist. Not an embrace—more like he’s wrapped himself around me to keep me alive. Blankets cover us both, trapping heat between our bodies.
His chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm. Bandaged but no longer blackened. The blight is gone. Only clean flesh remains, pink and raw where the curse once spread.
He’s awake. Watching me with those dark, unreadable eyes.
“You almost died.” His voice is hoarse. Wrecked. But stronger than it should be, given what he’s been through.
“So did you.” My own voice comes out thin. Reedy. I try to push myself upright and fail, my arms shaking too badly to support my weight.
His arm tightens around me. “Don’t. You need to stay warm.”
“I need to check your wounds—”
“My wounds are fine.” His grip doesn’t loosen. “Morra checked them. The blight is gone because you bled yourself almost to death to save me.”
The words hang between us. Heavy. Complicated.
“The oath—” I start.
“The oath didn’t make you do that.” He cuts me off, something raw in his voice.
“The oath hides your blood-signature. It warns us when the other is dying. It doesn’t compel sacrifice.
It doesn’t force you to pour your life into someone else’s veins.
” His jaw tightens. “That was your choice. Yours alone.”
I don’t have an answer. Don’t know how to explain the desperate certainty that had driven me, the absolute refusal to let him die. It wasn’t logic. It wasn’t even the oath.
It was something else. Something I’m not ready to name.
“You would have done the same.” The words come out before I can stop them.
His expression shifts. Something flickers in those dark depths.
“Yes.” The admission is quiet. Almost reluctant. “I would have.”
We lie there in the darkness, inches apart—less than inches, with his arm still wrapped around me and my body pressed against his for warmth. The fire crackles softly. Somewhere beyond our small circle of light, the war band keeps watch.
I’m exhausted—drained in ways that go beyond physical—but I can’t bring myself to close my eyes. Can’t stop looking at him. At the rise and fall of his chest. The proof that he’s breathing. That the curse is gone. That my blood saved him.
His hand finds mine beneath the blankets.
The contact is warm. Careful. His fingers thread through mine, calloused and rough, and he doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t need to. The gesture speaks for him—gratitude and wonder and something neither of us has words for yet.
I let my eyes close. Let the warmth of his hand and his body anchor me to consciousness, to life, to this strange new reality where an orc captain holds me in the darkness, and I don’t want him to let go.
“Sleep.” His voice is low. Rough. “I’ll keep watch.”
“You should be resting. You almost died—”
“I’ve rested enough.” His thumb traces a circle on the back of my hand. Unconscious, maybe. Soothing. “You gave me your blood, Kielyne. The least I can do is let you sleep.”
My name on his lips. The way he says it—soft, almost reverent—makes something ache behind my ribs.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “For not dying.”
A sound escapes him. Almost a laugh, low and rough. “Thank you for not letting me.”
I drift into darkness with his hand wrapped around mine and his warmth pressed against my side. The last thing I’m aware of is his voice, low and rough, murmuring something in orcish that I don’t understand.
It sounds like a promise.
I wake to shouting.
Gray dawn light filters through the Bonefield’s permanent haze. I’m still weak—gods, so weak—but the cold has receded, replaced by the lingering warmth of the body still pressed against mine.
Blorjorn is already moving. Pushing himself upright with a grimace, his body tense and alert despite the wounds that should still have him flat on his back.
Someone has placed his weapons within arm’s reach, and his hands find them automatically.
The iron has returned to his expression—the war captain, not the wounded man who held my hand in the darkness.
“What is it?” My voice comes out stronger than I expected. Weak, but present.
Fenrik crashes through the camp, pale-green skin gone almost white with fear. “Hadrin’s trackers. They found the blight trap’s signature—they’re converging on our position. Less than an hour out, maybe less.”
My blood runs cold. The blight trap. Of course. The magical explosion would have sent a signal for miles—a beacon announcing exactly where we were. Hadrin’s blood-mages would have tracked it the moment it detonated.
“We have to move.” I try to sit up and nearly collapse, my arms giving out beneath me.
Blorjorn’s hand catches my shoulder. Steadies me. “You can barely move.”
“And your wounds are barely closed. We’re quite a pair.” I lean into his grip despite myself, drawing on his strength when I have none left. “We don’t have a choice. They catch us here, we’re both dead.”
His jaw tightens. But he doesn’t argue. We both know I’m right.
The war band moves once again with desperate efficiency.
Tents collapse. Horses are saddled. Wounded are loaded onto makeshift stretchers.
Grothak appears with a horse, and between him and Blorjorn, they manage to get me into the saddle.
My head spins. My vision grays at the edges.
I grip the horse’s mane with fingers that feel like they belong to someone else.
I expect Blorjorn to mount his own horse. Instead, he swings up behind me, his chest solid against my back, his arms wrapping around my waist to take the reins.
“You’ll fall if you ride alone.” His voice is low, close to my ear. “And I’m not losing you after everything it took to keep you alive.”
The words hit hard. I don’t have the strength to argue. Don’t have the will either.
We ride into the dawn, his arms around me and the Bonefields falling away behind us. I’m still weak. But his warmth seeps into my back, and his heartbeat thuds steadily against my spine, and somehow, impossibly, I feel safe.
Hadrin’s soldiers are closing in. More dangers wait ahead. The world still wants us dead.
But right now, in this moment, we’re alive. Both of us. Because I gave him my blood and he held me through the night, and neither of us is willing to let the other fall.
The oath-mark on my arm pulses once. Quiet. Steady.
I lean back against his chest, and I don’t let go.