ANNE
What did it mean to be a minotaur’s mate?
I sat with the question roiling inside me for two days while I did my best to avoid Remmen. It almost felt like I was angry at him, but that wasn’t quite it. I was angry at the world for bringing him so close to me and threatening to tear him away if I took one step toward keeping him.
Fate was a real bitch.
I also owed Alistair an apology. Maybe. Not because the asshole cheated on me with my best friend… okay, no, I never owed him an apology for anything. But I understood it a little better now, how he’d said you don’t understand. We tried to stop this. It just happened.
Would I say the same thing to Nezara when she fired me?
If. If she fired me. We hadn’t been caught yet.
I didn’t delude myself into thinking that I would stay away from him for good. I could only fail so many times before I stopped trying.
A screeching yowl tore through the air and I jerked my gaze to the north side of town.
I’d never heard anything make that sound. No animal in a barn made a noise like that. It was a hunting sound, a wrong one, and every hair on my arms stood up.
A figure came around the grain store at a dead run.
It took me a second to see it was a person.
Rauf. He ran with everything gone loose, his arms swinging, his head down.
When he got close I saw it. His left side was a ruin.
Something had opened his collarbone to the bone, a long ragged gash gone dark at the edges, and the arm under it swung and didn’t work.
He’d run to town on that, the whole ten miles.
He grabbed me by my shoulder and nearly took us both down.
“Where’s Remmen?”
“Probably in his office.” My hands went to the wound on their own, and he was burning up under them, fever or shock or both. “What’s wrong, Rauf? Someone needs to see to that. You should go to Otho.”
“No time!” He shoved me, not gently, and put me backward on my heels toward the tavern doors, hard enough that I stumbled. “Get inside!”
Then he threw his head back and bellowed, in a voice I didn’t know a body that wrecked could still make. “Remmen! Get out here! Now!”
Doors opened up and down the square. Across the way the city hall door swung wide and Remmen came out of it, unhurried, coming to answer a shout.
Rauf’s mouth moved fast. I watched Remmen’s face change. It went from the patient nothing he wore for the town into what I’d seen come over him once, out at that yard, the day he stepped in front of a charging beast for me.
A second runner came in off the north road.
Mestyn. He was in worse shape than Rauf, a wet red mess down one thigh he was favoring, his belly wound bleeding through his shirt. Some idiot reflex moved me before the rest of me could vote, out from the tavern step into the open, a hand up like I could flag down a seven-foot man mid-sprint.
The gorrel was hot on his heels with blood on its mouth.
I got a good look at it, and I froze.
I’d heard it in a barn. I’d caught a half-second of it in the dark of that yard the day everything went wrong, a shape, an impression, Remmen’s arm shoving me behind him. I hadn’t truly seen it. Not like this, in the flat noon light.
It was huge and it was wrong, every part of it, too low and too heavy, running on six legs when nothing on Earth had ever needed more than four.
It was covered in black fur with hints of white.
Its mouth opened way too wide, crammed with more teeth than any mouth had any business having, and they were bloody.
It swung its head around and it saw me, standing out in the open like an idiot with nothing in front of me.
I couldn’t move. Every survival instinct went out of my head and I stood there frozen.
Mestyn lunged in front of me.
He put his ruined body between me and that mouth, both arms out. At first I thought he was protecting me. Instead, he was reaching for it and speaking in a low, crooning voice like it was a scared dog and not a killing beast.
Behind me, close, Remmen roared my name.
“Anne—”
The gorrel’s head snapped to me at the sound, and it charged.
My legs wouldn’t work. I stood in the open and watched it bear down on me and understood I was about to die.
Then Remmen tore off the tavern step faster than anything that big should move, drove himself between me and it, and caught the whole charge on his own body. The collision slammed up through the ground and into my teeth. They crashed down in a boil of dust, and I lost him in it.
Get up. Please get up.
The dust thinned. He’d locked both hands in the loose hide under its jaw, forcing the teeth off his own face. It bucked and clawed and screamed, and he held it off at arm’s length and gave it nothing, and did not let go.
I lunged toward him. I don’t know what I thought I’d do. I had nothing, no weapon, no reach, and I’d only get us both killed.
I stopped.
My hands hung in front of me, grabbing at air, ready to tend a wound I couldn’t reach. Blood flew off both of them and I couldn’t tell whose. I stood thirty feet away with my useless hands out and could not do one single thing to help him.
“Don’t kill it!” Mestyn threw himself onto Remmen’s back, an arm across his throat, hauling him backward. “It’s mine! We can still cage it—”
For one sick second the three of them tangled into one thrashing mass, and the gorrel dragged a leg back under itself.
Rauf hit Mestyn like a falling wall, tore him off Remmen, and pinned him in the dirt with one arm and all his weight. It bought Remmen the half-second he needed.
Remmen took it.
He shifted his grip, one hand up under the base of that flat skull, the other still fisted in the throat.
He set his shoulders. He wrenched. The sound was wet and heavy and final, and the screaming stopped all at once.
The legs fell slack. The gorrel dropped out of his hands into the dirt and didn’t move again.
Silence dropped over the square, and I didn’t breathe until I saw him straighten up, still on his feet.
Rauf knelt on Mestyn’s back, grinding his cheek into the dirt, and Mestyn snarled and clawed one hand toward the dead beast anyway. Remmen stood over the carcass, chest heaving, splattered head to foot in blood, but planted on his feet like nothing on the planet could put him down.
He didn’t look at the crowd. He looked at Rauf.
“Get him out of my sight.” His voice was low and gravelly and dead level.
I was already moving.
I didn’t stop to think about who was watching, and everyone was watching, the whole square lined with faces, brides and bulls and the two counselors I worked beside. A man bled in the middle of the road, and he was mine, and I reached him at a dead run and put my hands on him.
“Sit down. Sit down, you enormous idiot, before you fall down.” I was already pulling his arm across my shoulders, already running my hands over him, braced for the wound that had to be under all that blood.
Most of it wasn’t his. What was his ran shallow, a set of claw tracks torn down his ribs, bleeding steadily and nowhere near deep enough to do the job.
Scrapes on his forearm, bruises coming up dark under the rest. He was battered and winded and mostly whole, and I let out a breath I felt in my knees.
“Look at me. Eyes here. Good. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”
Remmen’s eyes focused on me. He leaned into me a fraction, this male three times my size, letting me take a little of his weight in front of the whole settlement.
“Get Otho,” I yelled and hoped someone obeyed.
The order was unnecessary. Otho pushed through, bag slung over his shoulder, and already wrung out. Rauf rolled off him and Otho dropped down in his place. One glance at Mestyn’s belly made him swear.
“Get this fool to the clinic before he bleeds out.” He was already packing the wound, hands moving. “And strap that thigh before you carry him anywhere.”
Two bulls got Mestyn up between them and started him across the square, still swearing at the dead beast over his shoulder.
Otho looked around for what else the day had left him and found Rauf, down on one knee in the dirt where he’d let go of Mestyn, that ruined shoulder hanging.
“You. Clinic.” Rauf opened his mouth and Otho didn’t give him the room. “That arm’s gone bad already and you ran ten miles on it. Walk there now or I’ll have the mayor carry you, and neither of us wants to watch that.”
Rauf went, slow, but he went.
Then Otho glanced up at me, at me with the mayor’s arm over my neck and the mayor’s blood to my elbows, holding a man twice my weight upright by will alone.
“You seem to have him well in hand. I could use an apprentice like you.” He jerked his chin at Remmen without slowing his hands. “Mayor, how do I get one of those?”
I felt Remmen draw a breath to answer. Ever the mayor, even bleeding.
“The mayor will deal with all requests later,” I snapped, and I turned him toward his place, and I walked him out of that square with all of New Knossos watching me do it.
Fuck it all, I didn’t care.