Chapter 7
Casrian couldn’t move. His limbs felt impossibly heavy.
There were strange sounds all around him.
The relentless howling of wolves. A rattling he felt in his bones.
His head felt like someone had driven a spike through his brow.
There was a sharp pain in his side when he tried to move.
Inside, his throat and lungs burned. He struggled to make sense of it, trying to swim to the surface of consciousness, but the darkness tugged at him, making it hard to think.
What was wrong with him?
Drawing in a deep breath that stank of sickness and damp and smoke, he struggled to open his eyes. Flickers of light danced behind his eyelids.
Perhaps there was a fire. Or perhaps the witch was burning him alive…slowly…from the inside.
The witch.
Panic knifed through him, making him fight against the lethargy weighing him down.
He remembered the witch. They had been sent to the very edge of the kingdom to hunt her.
A farmer near Caris had petitioned the Church for help.
His well had gone dry, and some of his sheep had died unnatural deaths, the corpses disemboweled, nothing eaten save the heart.
There were reports of strange lights in the woods.
They’d come to investigate, he and the nine men under his command.
Daris, brokenhearted because his sweetheart had decided she didn’t want to be married to a man who spent so much time on the road.
Asher, whose wife had just delivered their first child.
Kenet, always pleased to leave the city for the wilderness.
They’d traveled to Caris to verify the claims and then had moved on to Sulen to find more of the same, each stop leading them deeper into the woods and closer to the border.
They’d found rot in the woods. Trees dying.
Dead animals. The strange sludgelike mold that spread along the forest floor.
They’d spent a week circling the edge of it to try to get a sense of the scope of the corruption and had come to the northern part of the woods where it was as yet clear.
He’d thought they were safe. They’d been looking for a place to camp for the night.
And then they’d encountered that thing in the woods. A twisted, unnatural creature with the claws and teeth of a wolf but a misshapen body covered in dark, leathery skin.
He’d been hurt during the fight. He’d lost his sword in the battle, diving off Kenzi to retrieve it.
He remembered blazing agony ripping through his body as claw-tipped paws tore into him.
His men surging forward to chase the thing down.
He remembered dragging himself through the woods toward the sound of a river. And then nothing.
He groaned, surprised he could make the sound.
His men…
It took every ounce of willpower he possessed to roll over onto his side and push away from the hard, lumpy surface he was lying on. His arm shook where it supported his weight, but it held as he finally managed to force open his eyes and look around. It took him a moment to blink away the grit.
The first thing he saw was a fire, died down to embers in a small fireplace.
It was dark and hard to focus, but he thought he was inside some kind of hunter’s shed.
The walls were bare wood and thin. He could hear rain pelting against the outside and feel a cold draft slipping between the cracks in the door.
He pressed back, meaning to sit up, but he was stopped by a stabbing, pulling sensation in his side.
Those claws…
That hadn’t been a nightmare then. He’d been injured. Badly.
He panted to catch his breath, waiting to move again until the sharp pain receded to a throbbing ache. Tentatively, he lifted his hand to press at the spot, his fingers meeting the weave of a rough bandage. Someone had tended to his wounds.
Asher?
His eyes slowly adjusted to the light and he took in more of the room—the cot he lay on, a chipped bowl on the table nearby, a bucket full of rags on the floor. A woman slept in a chair nearby, her body hunched down at what looked to be an uncomfortable angle.
She was pretty, with long, wavy hair and a sweetly heart-shaped face. Her eyelashes seemed impossibly long against her pale cheeks. There were freckles scattered across her nose. Her lips parted with the soft, even breath of a deep sleep.
An angel.
He blinked twice, not quite believing she was real, but the woman remained even as his vision cleared. There was a cat on her lap, staring at him with round, suspicious eyes. Intelligent eyes, like a witch’s familiar.
“Who are you?” He had to force the words out one by one, each a superhuman effort.
The woman’s eyes flew open as she jerked awake. The cat leapt from her lap and disappeared into the gloom behind her.
For a moment, he and the woman only stared at one another. Her eyes were a very dark gray, luminescent in the firelight, tipped ever so slightly at the corners. Lovely. Strangely familiar, though he didn’t know her.
He would have remembered someone like her.
She moved suddenly, tossing her blanket aside and coming at him with an outstretched hand.
Witch.
Grabbing her wrist, he yanked her off balance. As she fell forward, he twisted, jerking her onto the bed. She landed sideways with a small grunt, and he collapsed on top of her. Pain ripped through him with the movement, and his body shuddered.
Dear Lord, he was weak as a babe.
She shoved at his shoulders. “What the fuck are you doing?”
He didn’t move, both because she was warm and softly curved and beautiful—even injured as he was, part of him responded to the feel of her under him—and also because he didn’t know if she was a threat.
“Who are you?”
The woman shoved him again, more insistently this time. “Get off of me, you oaf. You’ll tear out your stitches.”
“You’re the one who sewed me up?”
She jerked her chin in a nod. “I knew I’d regret it.”
He withdrew enough for her to slip out from beneath him and she scurried away, clipping his hip as she went. He grunted as he fell back onto the bed.
The woman glared at him from several paces away, her dark eyes spitting fire. Her pretty lips pressed together in a hard line. She looked ready for a fight. He didn’t blame her. She’d saved his life and he’d treated her like a threat. He saw everyone as a threat lately.
“Where are my men? Please…I need to know. I’m sorry I grabbed you. You startled me when you lunged at me.”
“I didn’t lunge at you. I was checking you for fever.”
He grimaced. “It’s trained into me. A hand is raised against me and I react.” He scrubbed a hand down his face. “How long have I been out?”
She glared at him for another heartbeat, then turned around.
He closed his eyes against the throbbing in his head, but listened to her move about the room.
There was the trickle of water and the sound of a stool being scraped across floorboards.
A cool hand was placed across his forehead and then the wooden rim of a cup touched his lips.
“Drink this,” she said. “You need water more than anything. You’ve been running a fever since the first night, and we couldn’t get you to keep anything down. It seems to have broken, though, which is good.” She gave a brittle laugh. “I didn’t think you were going to make it.”
He swallowed just a few sips before she removed the cup.
“I found you injured in the woods. You’d lost a lot of blood, but the infection was what worried us.”
He opened one eye. “Us?”
“My mother lives here too. She’s a healer. Try not to tackle her if she checks on you in the morning. She’s old and blind and no threat to you.”
“I promise you I’m not in the habit of attacking defenseless women.”
Again, that bitter laugh.
He closed his eyes. “How long have I been here?”
“Two nights. This is the second.”
Fuck. “Have you seen any sign of my men?”
“No,” she said, a note of sympathy in her voice. “There was no one else but you in the woods. No one’s come looking for you since either. At least not that I’ve heard. Your horse was with you. She’s fine. Out in the shed at the back of the house.”
At least there was that. He’d grown fond of Kenzi the last two years. He’d hate to lose her. Drawing in a deep breath, he tried to sit up again. “I have to go.”
She was instantly on her feet, her hands on his bare shoulders. They were rough hands for a woman, calloused and strong. She pushed him back down easily. “Are you stupid? You’re not going anywhere.”
“If my men haven’t come out of the woods, they’re in great danger. I need to get back to them.”
“It’s the middle of the night with a storm raging. Your men are fine, or they’re dead. Either way there’s nothing you can do for them right now.”
He glared at her. “I can’t do nothing. There’s a witch in the woods, dug in to the center. My men are trapped in there with her. They need help.”
Her face paled. She believed him. Good. But, still, she shook her head. “There’s no one here who can help you.”
“Of course not.” He couldn’t hide his disgust. The townspeople never helped. They only got in the way. “Send for your priest. He’ll be able to dispatch a rider to request more troops.”
“There is no priest.”
“What do you mean there’s no priest?”
“I mean there is no priest here. There are twelve houses in this village. Thirty people live here. None of them are priests.”
Fuck.
He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, trying to calm himself.
He was in the squatter’s village they’d seen along the way.
The one they’d avoided as likely corrupted.
This wasn’t a hunting shed. This was likely the woman’s house.
And what was a woman who looked like an angel doing living amongst the lowest elements of society?
He couldn’t ask. She’d helped him which was miracle enough in itself.
It was a wonder she hadn’t stolen his horse and left him for dead.
Schooling his features to neutrality, he looked up at her. “What is this place called?”
“Toam.”
It meant tomb in the old tongue. He thought she might be joking, but there wasn’t so much as a trace of amusement on her face. Of course, someone who lived in a place like this was unlikely to know ancient Fae.
“Is there someone I can pay to deliver a message to Sulen?”
“Not before morning.” She pulled the blanket up over his body, and he only noticed then that he was shivering. “You need to rest. In the morning, I’ll find someone willing to go to Sulen. No one’s going anywhere tonight. I can give you something to help you sleep if you like.”
He shook his head. He couldn’t risk her giving him a potion. Who knew what she’d already forced down his throat? He needed to keep his head clear. “Just water.”
She grabbed the cup on the table and held it to his mouth again, tipping the liquid into his mouth.
It didn’t taste like poison.
He didn’t want to sleep. He didn’t think he’d be able to sleep with his thoughts spinning and his worries snapping at him like wild dogs.
His men were well-trained. Daris could have had his own patrol years ago if he’d wanted it.
Asher was a good medic and Kenet was a woodsman at heart.
Sol was a veteran with a good head on his shoulders and Lew would keep them from despair.
They’d keep the younger soldiers alive until he could find them.
There was a chance they’d make it out of the woods again.
There was always a chance. Closing his eyes, he cast up a silent prayer, placing it in God’s hands.
He asked for protection and guidance. He asked God to guard the lives of his men.
He asked for peace, for quick healing, for the courage to go back into those woods to face that thing again.
When he opened his eyes, the woman was watching him with a complicated look on her face. “Are you in pain?”
He shook his head. It was a lie. He was in a great deal of pain, but he wasn’t drinking her medicine.
Because sometimes witches looked like angels, after all.
“I’m fine for now,” he said. “You’ll wake me at dawn?”
She gave him a short nod and withdrew, moving back to the old rocking chair to settle herself again. She pulled the blanket all the way up to her neck like she wanted to hide from his gaze. Had she been watching over him tonight before she fell asleep?
He’d never had a woman take care of him. Not that he remembered. She’d said her mother was the healer, but she was the one who was here, trying to find a comfortable spot in that hard chair.
For the first time, it occurred to him that he’d probably taken her bed. The bed he’d pinned her to earlier. A flush of heat crept up his neck.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “For grabbing your arm and…for misjudging you.”
She snorted. “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Darkness pulled at him, weakness loosening his limbs. But he held on to consciousness.
The woman chewed at her lower lip as if she couldn’t decide whether to answer him. “Rowan.”
“Rowan,” he repeated softly, liking the sound of it. “Thank you. Thank you, sincerely, for all of your help.”
She didn’t answer that except to nod, an acknowledgment more than acceptance. She was still angry with him. He couldn’t blame her.
Angel, he decided, as exhaustion overtook him.
A witch would have killed him by now.