Bonus Scene #2
As he takes over my makeshift compress, I ease over to peer into Ivy’s face. She stares back at me, her stunning blue eyes turning muddled to me as my vision hazes again. But it isn’t her looks I need to take in right now.
I need her words.
But gods above, it sharpens the ache inside to see her face so pale and slack. I tap my hand down my front in a silent appeal to the divinities before I find my voice.
It comes out thick and dark. “Who stabbed you? Who fucking did this, Ivy?”
“I wouldn’t have thought Anya would go this far…” Alek mumbles as if I asked him.
The royal bastard lets out a snort. “Not when it might mean getting blood-splatter on her pretty dress.”
I bare my teeth at the two of them. “Let Ivy tell us.”
Her lips move. A wordless croak seeps out of them. Her jaw seems to work.
The faintest whisper emerges. “The wind…”
The wind? Or am I mishearing, and that’s the start of someone’s name? Thew Ind? Thewin D-something?
Thudding footsteps break through my panicked confusion.
“Here!” Casimir shouts. “Please hurry. I don’t know—it looks awful.”
A woman in a medic’s robe hurries after him. Aleksi and Benedikt pull away so she can kneel beside me and examine the wound.
I ease to the side as well, feeling abruptly, chillingly helpless. There’s nothing any of us can do that really matters here.
Ivy will survive or die based on the limitations of the medic’s magic.
My hand comes to rest on Ivy’s head, as if she’s likely to take any comfort from my touch. I stiffen against a shudder that runs through my body.
The medic inhales with a rasp and rests her hands over the wound. “I’ll do whatever I can…”
She closes her eyes in concentration. After a few heart-wrenching moments, she adjusts her position and then focuses again.
“The cut doesn’t go as deep as I thought from looking at the amount of blood,” she says with obvious surprise. “Somehow it didn’t puncture her lung.”
I know enough about battle wounds that a portion of tension rushes out of me. No vital organs pierced?
Our thief was damned lucky.
The medic stands. “I’ve patched her up well enough that she can be moved. We need to get her to the infirmary for the rest of the treatment.”
Aleksi has folded his arms across his chest. “Will she make it?”
The medic’s forehead furrows. “I think… I think she will. You must have found her just in time.”
I’m by far the strongest of the five of us around her, and the only one other than perhaps the medic with significant experience carrying the wounded. I’m not letting anyone else lay their hands on her.
I give Ivy’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I’m going to be as careful with you as I can be, Ivy. You can curse me out later for however much it ends up hurting.”
Great God help me, I’m looking forward to that tongue-lashing. I’d listen to her hurl verbal daggers at me for days if it means never having to see her laid this low again.
I slide my arms around her as carefully as I can manage and lift her so she’s tipped against my chest. She’s such a forceful presence when she wants to be that I’ve forgotten just how slight her body actually is. It feels wrong, the lightness of her sprawled limp in my grasp.
I brace my prosthetic against the ball of silk containing any lingering bleeding and stride toward the infirmary with the medic leading the way.
I’m not sure how much attention I actually pay to the staff meeting I’ve been summoned to.
Someone mentions proper evacuation procedures, and someone else scoffs at the idea of those ever being necessary, and someone else rants about needing to keep the students safe—and my mind is back in my bedroom.
Has Ivy woken up yet? The medics said she should fully recover.
But you never actually know how a major wound has affected a person until you can speak with them.
A quake ripples through the room, and everyone tenses. My right hand clenches at my side.
I couldn’t think of anywhere safer to bring Ivy than my own blasted room. Maybe I should carry her right out of the college.
My mind definitely shouldn’t linger on how comfortable she looked tucked beneath my covers, her bright hair spilling across my pillow. As if she belonged there.
Chairs scrape, telling me the meeting is finally over, thank the gods. I hustle out of the room as fast as I can move without provoking stares, down to the first floor of the Quadring and out into the courtyard…
Where a figure whose gait I recognize at a glance is just slipping into the shadows of the Quadring’s main entry hall, a few strands of her red-blond hair drifting from beneath the hood of her cloak to catch the sunlight.
I stall in my tracks and then barge after her. What in the All-Giver’s name does that obstinate woman think she’s doing now?
How is she even on her feet? She was still out cold when I left not much more than an hour ago.
I’m going to haul her right back to my bed and chain her there if that’s what it takes for her to actually rest.
But as I follow behind her, something about her furtive movements gives me pause. She tugs her hood lower, flits from shadow to shadow to avoid notice. And she’s heading for the gate that’ll take her right out of the college.
Is she truly fleeing on us—as far as she can get? Abandoning the cause now that it’s come so close to killing her?
My chest constricts, but I don’t know if I could fairly blame her if she’s made that decision.
Maybe I should give her the choice. A chance to leave all the shit here behind.
I’m not going to leave her completely at the mercy of the city streets when she almost died yesterday, though.
At the gate, I let myself fall farther back. I set my feet carefully on the cobblestones, drawing on all the techniques for stealth my father taught me.
Every few seconds I sweep my gaze back and forth to regain my focus. A dark brown cloak with the trim of a pale green dress showing beneath it.
Just keep following that figure.
I almost lose her a couple of times in the inner wards when she makes an abrupt detour into an alley or through a shop. But I’ve prowled these streets enough times in the past year to know my way around. After a few tense minutes, I catch sight of her up ahead again.
Once she’s hopped over the old city wall, she seems to relax more. Fewer glances over her shoulder, fewer sudden diversions.
She isn’t really expecting to be followed. She assumes anyone who had questions about her leaving the college would have confronted her by now.
I draw a little closer so I have less chance of being left behind while still keeping the length of several buildings between us.
Those buildings become increasingly shabby, the scents of rotting food and emptied chamber pots clogging my lungs. Ivy doesn’t slow her pace for a second.
She’s taken out a leather pouch I don’t remember seeing on her before, curling her fingers around its smooth surface.
Not long after, she pauses to peer around her. I leap into the shadows behind the shack I was skirting before she’s quite turned around.
When I sneak a glance around the slanted wooden side of the building, Ivy’s taking a sudden turn where there isn’t a road at all. She clambers over a ramshackle fence into the back garden—if you can call the scruffy patch of weeds that—behind one of the outer-ward shacks.
As I ease a few steps nearer, she delves into the pouch and extends her hand toward the shack’s rear window.
Something glints silver in the afternoon light. I give my head a twitch to briefly hone my vision.
She’s left a small stack of coins on the window ledge.
I stop in my tracks and simply stare for the space of a few breaths, my mind spinning. It can’t really— What are the chances—
I force myself to walk closer and peer down the row of houses she’s slinking along. Matching piles of coins gleam at two more windows, and she’s just reaching toward a fourth.
Gods above. It’s really her.
It’s obvious where Ivy’s route will take her. I double back to a parallel street and stride along it so I’ll be in place when she finishes her series of offerings.
I’ve called her a thief since the first time we knew she wasn’t some childhood friend of Julita’s. I said it with such fucking disdain.
The woman who’s been sleeping on my sofa for the past two weeks, who I’ve derided and belittled… has been running the largest charity operation in the city secretly and steadily for the past five years.
A charity operation almost certainly funded by ill-gotten gains, to be sure. But having met the Hand of Kosmel now, I’m even more certain than I was before that any complaining merchant who lost loot to her thievery had gotten the wealth pretty ill to begin with.
Ivy isn’t the type to make innocents suffer. I figured that out before I had any clue she’d built a life around reversing as much suffering as she can.
How many risks has she taken… how many patrolling soldiers dodged… how many tight squeezes barely escaped…?
Just to do this. Little stacks of coins at the windows of those who have the least and need it the most.
I position myself just out of view by the next cross-street. It takes several more minutes for Ivy to come into view, gracefully vaulting over the final fence.
I suppose Julita must say something to her, because she ducks her head as she starts up the street—toward me, back the way she came.
“I’m not,” she murmurs. “I’m going back. I just needed to—”
I step out in front of her before she has to go on. Ivy jerks to a halt, staring at me.
What am I supposed to say to her?
Like I have so often in the past year, I grasp hold of the dryly nonchalant air that’s seen me through ambushes and rallying of my troops as easily as rounds exchanged at the pub, hiding every trace of vulnerability that no one else needs to see.
“So, you’re even more of a thief than I guessed.”