Chapter 2
EIRIK
Consciousness comes in pieces, and none of them fit together. The smell of herbs is the first piece. Green and sharp and layered, thick enough to coat the inside of my throat, which means I'm breathing, which means I'm not dead.
My wolf logged that information with far less relief than the situation warrants. He's been awake longer than I have, monitoring the heartbeat that keeps faltering and the pain that keeps trying to pull me under, and his assessment of the odds is less optimistic than mine.
I'm not dead. My wolf reserves judgment.
The second piece is heat. A fire burns close. The warmth reaches me on one side, and the cold presses in on the other. Between the two of them my body can't decide whether to shiver or sweat. It does both, which solves nothing and hurts considerably.
The third piece is hands.
Cold fingers press into the meat of my shoulder where the claws went deepest, steady as stone.
The pressure is precise, not gentle, not rough, just accurate in a way that tells me the person attached to these hands has done this before and isn't interested in my opinion about it.
The fingers probe the wound margin, pause, move a fraction to the left, probe again.
I can feel her thinking through her hands, every touch a question she's already answering. I'm being read like a map by someone who has memorized the terrain.
Then she speaks. "Deltoid separation at the inferior border. Fascial tear running parallel to the muscle fiber. Subclavian not involved." The voice is low, measured, and directed at no one. She's narrating the damage to herself while she works, a running commentary that isn't meant for an audience.
The words land in my ears without fully connecting to meaning, but the tone connects. It says: I know exactly what I’m looking at, and you won’t die on my floor if I have any say in the matter.
The pain swells, and consciousness slides.
When it comes back, the hands have moved. They're lower now, working along the second claw track where it crosses my ribs.
She's still talking, still calm, and I catch fragments through the fog.
"...intercostal intact, which is the only reason this conversation is one-sided rather than nonexistent...
" The medical language carries the driest humor I've heard from a healer, but I'm too far under to appreciate it properly.
Everything about this cottage belongs to her.
The tone of her voice made that clear, even through the fog, even without the words.
I remember a door that opened, a voice that said 'move with me,' and legs that obeyed because the voice carried more authority than the pain.
I remember stone and a floor beneath my knees.
Before that there was snow and ice in my lungs and the mist trying to take me with every step.
My wolf was clawing toward the surface because the man's body was failing and the wolf's body might survive the cold long enough to find shelter.
I told him no. I told him wait, because a wolf can't open a door and a man can.
If there was a door out there in the blizzard, I needed hands to reach it.
I try to open my eyes. The light is amber and unsteady, firelight through the slits of eyelids that won't cooperate.
The ceiling is low. Dried herbs hang from the beams, swinging in a draft I can feel on the parts of my skin that aren't covered in blood or bandages.
The space is small, warm, smelling of lavender and something bitter and medicinal underneath, and it belongs to one person who isn't accustomed to sharing.
The healer leans over me, and I get my first real look at her through the fever-haze. She has silver-blonde hair pulled back from a face that gives nothing away, and pale eyes fixed on the wound rather than on me, because I'm irrelevant.
The tissue matters. The suture line matters. I have the distinct impression that I could be anyone and she'd be doing exactly this with exactly the same precision.
The impersonality should be cold, and it is. But her hands are inside my body and they're keeping me alive. She's choosing to save me without knowing or caring who I am, and that isn't cold at all.
The wound flares. My vision whites at the edges, and beneath the white the memory bleeds through.
The council table was oak, old and dark, and I knew every scar on its surface because I'd traced them with my fingers since I was old enough to sit in my father's lap during meetings.
I knew this because my father's blood pooled in those scars, following channels the years had worn into the grain, filling them the way liquid fills any crack in unfinished wood.
I was seated at the table when Balric stood.
My father's brother, my father's blood, a man who'd eaten at our table and laughed at my jokes and brought salt pork from the southern traders every spring because he knew I liked it.
He stood, and the blade was already in his hand, drawn so quietly that the steel didn't sing.
He'd oiled it. The realization hit me before the fear did.
He'd oiled a blade for his own brother's throat, which meant he'd planned it, which meant the laughter and the salt pork and the years of sitting across the table had all occurred in the mind of a man who knew he was going to do this eventually.
The four wolves behind him erupted in silvery mist, the transformation taking them between one breath and the next.
The hall filled with the low, electric hum of four bodies becoming wolves, and the mist curled across the floor like fog off a winter river.
My father looked at the blade. He didn't reach for a weapon.
He didn't step back. He looked at the blade with the expression of a man who has just realized that the conversation he thought he was having is not the conversation that is actually occurring.
The distance between my chair and my father's shoulder was three steps.
I know because I counted them later, in my mind.
I could have closed three steps. I've closed three steps more times than I can count, in training, in drills, in the casual daily geometry of a hall I knew the way I knew my own hands.
The distance was nothing. The time was everything.
Balric's blade found my father's throat before my foot landed on the second step.
The wolves hit me before I reached the third.
One set of claws caught me across the chest, shoulder to sternum, opening the muscle in three clean tracks that burned cold before they burned hot.
The pain was secondary to the sound my father made, which wasn't a word.
Then he was silent, and the silence was worse than any sound he could have produced, because the silence meant the sound would never come again.
I fought out. The hall was chaos by then, chairs overturned, wolves snarling, the mist still hanging in the air with nowhere to go.
One of the shifted wolves lunged for my legs and I twisted to put my knee through its jaw, which further tore two of the slashes on my chest the claws had started and opened a new wound I wouldn't feel for hours.
The door was behind me. I found it with my back, slammed through it, and the mountain air hit the exposed muscle in my chest like a blade made of ice.
I ran. I kept running until the running became walking and the walking became crawling and the crawling became the blizzard and the blizzard became a door and the door became these hands.
I come back to the hands. The memory recedes, and the cottage reassembles around me.
The healer's fingers are threading something through the torn edge of my deltoid with a rhythm that suggests she's sutured more muscle than most wolves have torn. She's sewing me together with the unhurried competence and fundamental lack of sentimentality of a woman mending a shirt.
I go under again. When I surface, the needle has moved to the second claw track, and she's talking her way through the procedure.
"...drainage color indicates the infection preceded arrival.
Initiated before the cold slowed the bacterial response, which means the wounds have been open and unmanaged for days rather than hours. Treatment adjusted accordingly."
The days are right. The precision of her assessment, delivered to an empty room while the patient drifts, settles over me with a weight I didn't expect.
She's not talking to me. She's thinking out loud, keeping herself company with the sound of her own expertise because solitude has made her own voice the only reliable audience. The habit tells me more about her than any introduction could.
Outside, the storm presses against the walls. I can hear it through the stone, a constant low moan that rises occasionally to a howl and drops back, and the sound is familiar because I've been inside it for days.
The blizzard saved my life. If the weather had been clear, the wolves tracking me would have closed the distance long before I reached this door.
The wolves are still out there. My wolf's attention splits between the hands on my shoulder and the memory of the scent trail I left through the mountains.
The snow will have buried some of it, but how much?
Whether the wolves who put these claw marks in my chest are patient enough to wait for the storm to break or reckless enough to search through it is a question I can't answer from a cottage floor.
Consciousness slides again, and when it returns the fire has changed. The log has settled lower and the light is different. The hands are wrapping something around my chest with a practiced tension that compresses the wound without restricting my lungs.
She's been working while I was absent. The silence in the cottage is total except for the wind and her breathing and the soft sound of linen pulled tight.