Chapter 16
The door bursts open before Evran expects it.
Not Vaike but Delia, breathless and flushed, her hair escaping its braids, eyes wide and urgent. She is in the doorway for barely a second before she is across the room, her hands finding Evran's arms and gripping them.
"Vaike has been injured," she says.
The words hit Evran in the chest like a fist. His vision narrows and the room tilts and for one terrible, suspended moment everything inside him stops, his heart, his lungs, the blood in his veins, and then it all restarts at once, too fast, flooding him with a cold, electrical panic that makes his hands shake.
"What happened?" His voice comes out steady, which surprises him, because the rest of his body is not steady at all. "How bad?"
"He's alive. He's conscious." Delia's grip on his arms tightens, as though she can feel the tremor running through him and is trying to hold it still.
"His horse threw him on the road back from the eastern villages.
He was trampled, his shoulder and his head.
The other Warlords pulled the horse off him. "
"His horse threw him?" Evran is already moving, pulling free of Delia's hands, looking for his boots. "Vaike doesn't get thrown. He's been riding since he could walk."
"Evran." Delia catches his arm. Her voice drops and her face changes, the open worry tightening into something more controlled, more careful, about to say something she does not want said in a corridor where anyone might hear. She pulls him back from the door and leans close.
"The animal was dosed with something," she says, barely above a whisper. "Something that made it go into a rage. The stablemaster found the evidence in the horse's feed bag after the fact, traces of a compound that causes aggression and panic in large animals."
Evran goes cold. The chill starts in the center of his chest and radiates outward, flooding his limbs and his hands and the base of his skull, and for a moment the room feels very far away and very small at the same time.
"If the other Warlords had not been quick enough," Delia continues, and her voice is steady but her eyes are not, "the horse would have trampled him to death before he could get to his feet."
The world goes very quiet. Evran can hear his own heartbeat, rapid and thick, and the faint crackle of the fire in the hearth, and the distant sound of activity somewhere else in the Keep. He can hear Delia's breathing, measured and controlled, and his own, which is neither.
Bran and Leona took precautions. They posted extra warriors, flanked the riding party, kept alert for ambush or attack. They were watching for assassins, for men with blades, for the obvious threat.
They were not watching the horses.
Evran's hands curl into fists at his sides. The nails bite into his palms and the pain is sharp and grounding and he uses it to anchor himself, to keep his feet on the stone floor and his mind in the present moment and not in the place that is trying to pull him under.
"This is not a coincidence," Delia says, watching his face, reading it the way she reads everything, quickly, accurately, without mercy. "Someone is actively trying to kill the Drakkari Warlord. First the blade in the night, now the horse on the road. This is coordinated."
"I know who it is," Evran says.
The words come out flat, certain. He does not whisper them. He says them in a voice that is quiet but carries the weight of absolute conviction.
Delia's eyes sharpen. She waits.
"But I don't have enough evidence yet to bring him to justice."
Delia grips his arm, her fingers strong, pressing through the fabric of his tunic with an urgency that matches her voice. "Whatever you need from me, you have my support. My husband, my household, my name, all of it. Use it."
Evran looks at her, this woman who opened her home to four clans and fed them and housed them and kept the peace, who has spent fifteen years building something fragile and precious and is watching someone try to tear it apart.
Her dark eyes are fierce, her jaw set, and she is not asking him to explain or justify or prove anything.
She is saying I believe you, and I am with you, and the trust in that declaration lands in his chest and stays there.
He reaches out and embraces her. It is sudden and graceless, his arms around her shoulders, his face against the side of her head, and she holds him back, tight and brief, the embrace of two people who do not have time for comfort but are taking it anyway.
"Thank you," he says, pulling back. "I have to go to him."
"The medical wing. Eastern corridor, ground floor."
Evran is out the door before she finishes the sentence.
He runs.
He runs through the corridors of the Keep with a disregard for dignity that would have horrified him a week ago and currently means nothing.
His boots slap against stone. Retainers press themselves against the walls as he passes.
A guard at a junction calls out, asking if he needs help, and Evran does not stop, does not answer, just runs.
The medical wing is at the end of the eastern corridor, behind a heavy door that swings open at his push.
The room beyond is long and well-lit, with windows along one wall and rows of beds along the other, most of them empty.
The air smells of herbs and salve and the sharp, clean scent of something astringent.
Vaike is at the far end, shirtless on an examination table, looking surly.
The sight of him, alive, upright, scowling, sends a wave of relief through Evran so powerful it nearly takes him off his feet. He grabs the doorframe for one steadying breath, then crosses the room at a pace that is just short of running.
Vaike's expression is unamused in a way that means he is in pain and annoyed about it and refusing to acknowledge either thing.
His jaw is set, his brow furrowed, his dark eyes radiating a controlled displeasure that is aimed not at any individual but at the general concept of being injured and the subsequent indignity of being treated for it.
The medic attending him is a slender man with thin lips and wire-framed spectacles who has long since lost the capacity to be intimidated by warriors, up to and including Warlords.
He is applying salve to a bruise that spreads across Vaike's left shoulder and down his upper arm, a vicious thing, dark purple at the center and greenish-yellow at the edges, the mark of massive blunt force applied to vulnerable tissue.
Evran reaches his side. His hands find Vaike's forearm, the uninjured one, and grip it.
"I'm fine," Vaike says immediately.
"You do not look fine." Evran's voice is thin, his eyes moving over Vaike's body with the desperate, cataloguing urgency of confirming that all the pieces are still in place. The shoulder. The bruise. And then the gash on his temple.
It is stitched up neatly, five small, precise sutures closing a wound that must have been bleeding freely when it was fresh.
The skin around it is swollen and discolored, a darker purple-red against the brown of Vaike's skin, and the stitches are black thread that stands out starkly against the wound.
"You look as though you got trampled by a horse," Evran says.
The medic looks up from his work with an expression that manages to convey vindication and exasperation simultaneously.
"That is exactly what happened," he says, his thin voice clipped and precise.
"And he is lucky the horse missed anything vital.
The shoulder needs to be rested for at least a week.
No lifting. No training." He pauses, his spectacles flashing as he fixes Vaike with a look that says he has dealt with enough Warlords to know this next part will be ignored.
"He should definitely not be doing anything as reckless as swinging a sword. "
Evran fixes Vaike with a look.
Vaike gives him a look right back, defiant, a lifetime of swinging swords behind him and no intention of stopping because a medic with spectacles told him to. His eyes hold Evran's, steady and challenging, and the message is clear: I will not be coddled.
Evran does not argue, not here, not now, not in front of the medic.
He will argue later, in private, in a voice that does not carry and with an expression that Vaike cannot dismiss.
For now he simply holds Vaike's forearm and looks at the bruise and the stitches and the general state of his husband and files it all away under things he is going to lose sleep over.
"The gash on his temple," the medic says, moving to examine it with a practiced eye and a gentle fingertip that Vaike endures while suppressing the urge to bite.
"That was from the boulder that stopped his fall.
He's fortunate it caught his head and not his neck.
A few inches lower and we'd be having a very different conversation. "
Vaike makes a sound that might be thank you or might be stop talking, and it is difficult to tell, as his jaw is so tightly clenched that individual words are not making it out.
"A boulder stopped your fall," Evran says flatly.
"The medic's bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired," Vaike says, to no one in particular.
"His bedside manner is the least of your problems right now."
"Agreed," the medic says, without looking up.
He produces a length of linen bandage and begins wrapping the shoulder with brisk efficiency.
"The headache will persist for at least two days.
Avoid bright light where possible. If the dizziness worsens or his vision blurs, send for me immediately.
" He ties off the bandage and steps back, examining his work with professional satisfaction.
"He can go. Keep him still, keep him fed, and keep him out of trouble. "
The medic fixes Evran with a look that says I am entrusting this to you because you seem the only person here with any sense. Evran nods and does not mention that he has precisely zero ability to keep Vaike out of anything, let alone trouble.