Enzo
The quarter mile to the clearing took the better part of an hour, and I felt every careful step Sugar took move through Nadia like a wound.
I led the horse at the slowest pace I could justify, eyes on the road ahead instead of the woman bleeding into my saddle behind me. I heard every held breath. Every careful shift of weight. Every time her fingers tightened around the saddle horn when the ground sloped beneath us.
I had put her on the horse without permission, and she’d let me. Only because she couldn’t stand without holding onto a tree, and we both knew it.
She could be furious about it from the saddle.
I would take that. I would take her fury, her silence, every sharp-edged “Prince Veyne” she cared to throw at me, so long as she wasn’t face down in the mud because she’d decided walking ten feet behind me mattered more than keeping blood inside her body.
I’d trained soldiers for centuries, and yet I’d never met anyone more committed to dying on a hill than Nadia Voss once she’d decided the hill deserved company.
The rage in me had nowhere useful to go, least of all toward her. She was wounded, bleeding, half-held together by spite and training, and anything I said in the state I was in would only become another wound.
I had already given her enough of those.
So I walked.
I watched the tree line for the next threat, the road for the next bad step, the sky for the failing light. I didn’t look back. I held the line one foot at a time, the way she’d held hers all day.
She might have appreciated the irony, if I could have told her.
The clearing was where I remembered it: flat ground set back from the road, sheltered on three sides by a low rise and thick pines, with a narrow stream running clean along the lower edge.
I had stopped here on patrols. I knew the angles.
The lines of approach. The bend in the track that would force anyone coming from the road to show themselves before entering the clearing.
It was the best defensive ground within twenty minutes’ walk. I’d been thinking about it since the moment she stepped out of the shadows covered in blood.
I led Sugar through the narrow track and set her at the old picket point. Then I walked back to Nadia’s side and reached up.
“Don’t.”
Her voice was thin. Her face was thinner. Somewhere in the last quarter mile, she’d gone the color of paper, and her hand was still locked around the saddle horn with the careful concentration of someone who knew exactly how little was holding her upright.
“Nadia.”
“I can get down.”
“No, you can’t.”
“I can—”
“You’ll fall.” I kept my voice level. Flat. Battlefield calm. “Let me or sit there and bleed on my horse. Your choice.”
Her eyes closed. For half a second, she worked through every option left to her and hated all of them. Then she opened them.
“Fine.”
I lifted her down.
Quickly. Efficiently. Contact lasting only as long as necessary. Or that was what I intended.
Then her body went slack against mine when her weight came off the injured thigh, and her breath caught against my jaw, and her forehead brushed my cheek before she remembered she was supposed to hate me and pulled back.
The connection between us howled.
I set her on her feet beside Sugar with one hand at her elbow until she found her balance. The moment she could stand, I let go and stepped back. She didn’t thank me, and I hadn’t expected her to.
Then I made camp.
I chose the driest ground near the rise, where the sightlines were clean and the wind would carry sound from the trees.
Her bedroll went down first, then the second blanket over it.
Clearing a fire pit, I laid kindling from the inn’s pack, and struck flame on the first try because some standards didn’t require discussion.
Then Sugar.
Saddle off. Bridle checked. Legs inspected. Water from the stream. A measure of grain, no more than she needed.
“You did well,” I murmured, running a hand down her neck.
She pinned her ears at me with the weary dignity of a horse who’d saved several lives in two days and expected all future praise to arrive with oats.
Fair enough.
The whole time I worked, Nadia sat where I had put her and said nothing. I could feel her watching. Cataloging. The camp. The angles. The fire. The way I moved through each task without wasting motion. She was assessing me like a soldier assessing the officer whose orders she might have to survive.
Not like the woman who’d kissed me on a broken road.
Not like the woman I’d held in a bath and then hurt so badly she’d slept on a roof rather than under the same ceiling as me.
That was fine.
It was one of many lies I told myself while I made camp.
When the fire was steady, Sugar was settled, and the perimeter was set, I went to the saddlebags. My pack had gone over the cliff with the grey. Everything of mine that mattered was gone with it, save the blades on my body and the blood in my veins.
All that remained was hers.
I found the small leather roll in the side pocket I had watched her use a dozen times this week.
Field kit. Needle. Runed wraps, the cheap kind, woven to hold off rot but not much else.
A salve that smelled of crushed yarrow and something brighter underneath, the faint clean scent of low witch-work.
A single pain draught at the bottom, which she hadn’t touched, because why would she?
A knife sharp enough for cloth and flesh both.
As expected, she’d packed properly. Naturally, she’d tried to bleed through her own bandages, anyway.
I carried the kit to the bedroll and knelt beside her, close enough to work without pretending the distance had anything to do with kindness.
“You need help with the ribs and the thigh,” I said.
Her gaze cut to mine—too pale, too sharp. “I can manage.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Prince Veyne—”
“You’re bleeding through your leathers in three places, and you lost enough blood today that you should be unconscious.
” My voice came out flat. Commander’s voice.
Battlefield voice. The voice that didn’t make room for pride when pride was trying to kill someone.
“I’m not watching you do a piss-poor job of keeping yourself alive because you’ve decided I no longer get to put my hands on you. ”
Her mouth tightened. There. Wound found.
Good. Let it bleed where I could see it for once.
“You don’t,” she said.
“I know.”
That landed between us harder than I intended.
I set the kit down beside her. “I’ll touch what needs dressing.
Nothing else. If you tell me to stop, I stop.
If you tell me where not to put my hands, I won’t put them there.
But if you expect me to sit across this fire and watch you bleed into the dirt because you’re pissed off at me, you’ve sorely misunderstood the kind of bastard I am. ”
The fire snapped softly beside us. Beyond the clearing, the pines shifted in the wind, dark and watchful.
Nadia’s attention moved from the kit to her thigh, then to the blood darkening the side of her coat where the cut along her ribs had soaked through the makeshift wrap.
I watched the calculation move through her face.
Fear had nothing to do with it. This was cost—what it would cost to let me close, what it would cost to refuse, what dying of stubbornness would cost when she still had a job to do and a prince to keep alive.
Finally, she looked away.
“Ribs,” she said. “Thigh. I’ll do the arm.”
“Fine.”
“Don’t talk while you do it.”
“Fine.”
“And don’t look at me like that.”
I went still. “Like what?”
“Like it hurts you.”
The words hit somewhere I had no intention of acknowledging. I reached for the kit, anyway. “Then don’t watch my face.”
She gave a small, humorless sound and turned toward the fire.
I cut through the bad wrap at her ribs first.
The wound beneath was shallow but long, a hot red line running from her back along the curve of her side where the enforcer’s blade had grated against bone. The skin around it had already gone purple, with a deeper bruise blooming beneath that told me exactly where the rib had cracked.
I didn’t press to confirm it. I had no need.
She held herself still while I cleaned the cut. Too still. The kind of stillness soldiers used when they were trying not to give pain the satisfaction of being noticed.
The salved cloth touched the worst of it, and her breath caught. Once. Barely. My hand tightened around the cloth.
I hated him then.
The enforcer. Whatever had made her into a woman who could sit bleeding by a fire and treat pain like an inconvenience beneath her dignity. I hated myself, too, but that wasn’t new.
I bound the ribs snug, tight enough to support the cracked one without stealing breath she couldn’t afford to spare. I tied the knot where it wouldn’t work loose in sleep and moved away the instant the work was done.
The thigh was worse.
She hadn’t reached it properly. The cloth she’d slapped over the wound had slipped half-free, and blood had soaked through the binding, through the leather, into the bedroll beneath her leg.
I cut away the ruined strip.
Her hand closed around the edge of the blanket.
I pretended not to see.
The cut was deep. The salve would slow the bleeding and dull the worst of it, but it was consumer work, brewed for scrapes and shallow blades, and it wouldn’t close a wound like this.
She needed a witch. The nearest witch with the skill for it was days away, in the next town that warranted the name, and until then the thigh would have to be stitched and watched and stitched again.
Or.
I sat with the “Or” for exactly as long as it took to reject it.
My blood would close the wounds. The shallow ones I could seal with a touch, the way I'd sealed her throat in the bath. The deep ones—the thigh—would need her to drink, and that was a line I wouldn’t approach for reasons that had nothing to do with the wound and everything to do with what feeding this particular Shadow Fae my blood would begin.
But the shallow ones I could close. Easily. In seconds.