44. Eradin
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
ERADIN
My toes caught on the tent's threshold. I slammed onto my hands and knees and scrambled back onto my feet.
Fen sat up in his bedding, blood running down his left arm in dark rivulets and collected beneath the limb, dark against pale fabric, spreading too fast.
Alive.
He was alive. With a blade sticking out of his shoulder and completely…bare chested, but alive.
Shock flickered across his face before something softer took its place.
He saw the terror and relief on my face. My hands still shook because a short time ago I’d thought he was dead and my chest had split down the middle.
Even if the trial hadn’t let him into my innermost thoughts, I’d just told him everything with my face.
His careful prince mask cracked. His hand lifted from the bed, toward me, before dropping.
Elite riders crowded around me, their voices rising in a wall of sound I couldn’t make sense of. Someone grabbed my arm. Another shouted orders.
“Everyone out,” Fen barked. Silence suddenly echoed in the small space. “Get out. I’m not dead yet.”
Lady Severine’s face went tight. “Your Highness, there’s a knife sticking out of your shoulder. You need—”
“Now.” His jaw locked. “Everyone out except Eradin.”
Vella stiffened, her eyes narrowing as they flicked from Fenian’s blood-soaked shoulder to my mud-caked bare feet.
“You would choose a commons stable hand over proper healers?” she hissed, the calculation in her gaze turning razor sharp.
“I’ve already spoken, Vella,” Fenian grated. “Get out of my tent.”
She turned to leave, but as she drew level with me, she didn’t just pass. She drove her shoulder into mine, intending to send me sprawling toward the tent pole. As I stumbled, her hand twitched in my direction.
A thin line of invisible pressure hissed through the air. My left tunic sleeve split open at the shoulder, the fabric parting with a clean snip. The magical cut stopped a hair’s breadth from my skin.
“Vella.” Fen said her name in a low, predatory growl that didn’t sound like it came from a human throat.
He’d surged upward despite the wound, his good hand gripping the edge of the mattress so hard the wood creaked. His gray eyes weren’t just angry; they’d gone feral, and a flicker of cold blue flame danced in the center of his pupils.
“If you lay another finger on her,” he said, his voice a deadly, quiet rasp that made the other riders at the entrance recoil.
“Or if you so much as graze her with a spell again, I will kill you where you stand. I don’t care who sees.
I don’t care about your family’s contracts or whatever they’d been negotiating between us.
Touch her again and you are dead. Do you understand? ”
Vella’s face went bone-white. The calculation in her eyes vanished, replaced by the realization that he’d stopped pretending to be the perfect prince.
She didn’t speak or even nod. She turned and swept out, the others scrambling to keep up.
The tent flap fell closed behind them.
I stood in place, my heart beating itself against my ribs, staring at the slice in my tunic.
Fen still vibrated with rage that seemed to hurt him more than the blade in his shoulder.
“You know,” I said, finally dragging air into my lungs. I stepped toward him. “I’m fairly certain threatening to murder the daughter of a great house is a violation of at least three royal protocols.”
His shoulders dropped, the blue fire in his eyes fading as he collapsed back against the pillows with a strangled groan.
“Four,” he panted, his face going gray. “Maybe five.”
I knelt on the bed beside him. “Try to stay alive long enough for the council to arrest you, alright?”
He looked up at me, a ghost of a smile tugging at his mouth before he winced. “I’ll add it to my list of priorities.”
“You’re wounded.” My hands fluttered above the knife.
“I’ll survive.”
“The blade needs to come out. You’re bleeding.”
“Help me. Please? There’s no one else I trust.”
It was all I could do to breathe with the feeling of a fist in my throat.
He trusted me. The crown prince, a man surrounded by elite healers who’d spent their lives learning how to tend wounds in ways I could barely imagine, was asking me, a commons who stole food from his kitchens, for help.
My hands were shaking for a different reason now.
“Of course.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “Let me see.”
He moved on the bed, making room beside him.
“We’ll need to remove the blade.”
“I assumed as much,” he grated out. “Make it quick.”
“Have you had a knife removed from your flesh before?”
“This is a first for me.”
“My first for removing one.”
“I trust you,” he said.
“Even though I just said I’ve never done this before?”
“Yes,” he said through clenched teeth.
“I do know some general things. We’ll have to take care pulling it out because the pressure of the blade in your arm could be keeping something vital inside from bleeding. Removing it could cause a lot of blood loss.”
“Are you suggesting I spend the rest of my life with it sticking out of my shoulder?”
I swallowed hard. “Um…no.”
His lips quirked up before smoothing. “Good. Just do it.”
“I need supplies.” I raced for the tent entrance. “Don’t move.”
I flew from his tent, my bare feet slapping wet grass. Elite riders clustered nearby but none tried to stop me. I grabbed the medical supplies he’d sent from my pack and ran back, securing the tent flap behind me.
When I turned, he was watching me.
The coppery smell of blood filled the space.
Selira sent concern through the bond. I sent reassurance back.
I lowered my bag onto the bed beside him and opened it, pulling out a thick bandage, placing it on his uninjured chest. His naked chest. I tried not to look but…
The dream swirled through me, reminding me of how close we’d gotten to being fully together, even if it hadn’t been real.
Our gazes met, and I swore he saw. He knew. Had he shared the dream too?
I didn’t dare ask.
I forced my eyes back to the wound.
“Alright,” I said, struggling to sound practical. “I’m going to do it fast. Brace yourself.”
I wrapped my hand around the hilt, taking care not to jar it, and placed my other hand on a smooth section of his shoulder.
“Do you want me to count?” I asked.
“Count?”
“I do that a lot. Count, that is. It…settles me.”
“If counting settles you, then you should do it but—”
I pulled the blade out as smoothly as I could and pressed the bandage over the entry point.
Blood. More than I’d like.
My stomach turned over. I breathed through it the way my mother had taught me. Slow. Steady. The wound doesn’t care.
A breath hissed through Fen’s teeth. “You didn’t count.”
“This didn’t feel like the best situation for counting.”
“You did that on purpose.” A touch of humor shone in his eyes, though how could it? He had to be in agony.
“Not too much on purpose.”
His snort rang out.
“I’m going to take a look.” I lifted the bandage away and leaned closer.
The wound was deep but appeared clean. A blade had gone in at an angle, missing anything vital but carving through muscle. Blood still oozed from the puncture, but slower now. I doubted they’d hit anything vital.
“Who did this?” I growled.
His jaw worked. “I don’t know. It was dark. I was asleep. I heard movement and saw a shadow, felt the blade, and then they were gone.” Frustration bled through each word. “I should’ve been more aware. Should’ve—”
“What, never slept?” I lifted an eyebrow. “You have to relax sometime.”
“I can’t afford to.” His voice flattened. “Not ever.”
The certainty in those words stopped me cold.
I’d spent my life assuming the elite had it easy. That their biggest worry was which clothing to wear or which wine to drink. But he was sitting here bleeding because someone had tried to kill him while he was asleep. A person he probably knew.
At least in Shaleside, no one was trying to murder me in my bed. The threat came from hunger, cold, and sickness that took its time. Not blades in the dark wielded by people who smiled at you during the day.
“I’m sorry that you can’t rest. That’s no way to live.”
His throat worked. “It’s the only way I know.”
“Walk me through it,” I said. “Your tent sits in the middle of the elite camp. Servants up before dawn. Riders on every side. Dragons that can scent a stranger from half a valley away.” I counted it out the way I counted coal. “And Aristus never made a sound.”
His gaze went to the tent wall, toward where his dragon slept. “No. He didn’t.”
“So either your killer can pass a dragon’s nose without waking it—”
“Or they didn’t smell like a stranger.” His voice stayed level, which frightened me more than shouting would have. “Someone in this camp already knows. Or someone who never had to cross it at all.”
Lord Andra had stepped out of thin air that very afternoon to whisper with Vella. The council didn’t need to walk past anyone to reach him.
“It needs stitches. Are you up for that?”
“I will be.”
I sniffed and pulled what I needed from the kit he’d given me.
After threading the needle and ensuring it was clean with the proper herbs, I leaned closer. “This will pinch.”
“I’ve dealt with worse.”
The healed scars across his chest and sides in pale lines told me he had.
My hand hovered above the nearest one without touching.
Stories written in old damage, nothing I had any business reading.
I focused on the thread. The needle. On anything that wasn’t the way his breath hit my hair each time his lungs rose and fell.
He was alive. Blessedly alive.
“Are you counting?” he asked, a frown knitting his brow.
“I should be.”
“It’ll be alright. I know you won’t hurt me.”
I held the wound together and started sewing. It took ten stitches to close, but at least it had stopped bleeding.
“I’ll take them out in a week,” I said, then realized that both of us could be dead long before the stitches would need to come out. “Or a healer can do it for you.”
He captured my hand and held it, his gaze locking on mine. “You’ll do it for me.”
“Very well, Your Highness.”
“Fen. You called me Fen before.”