Chapter 7
Wounds
Aleksi slowed Zolotoy to an easy trot for the
cool-down lap around the track, pleased with how well the stallion
had run. It was the last day of training before the third and
longest race, and Zolotoy was well fed, well rested, and well
trained for the hundred-league course. Which was more than Aleksi
could say for himself.
He was well fed and well trained enough, but
he had not gotten much rest the past two nights, not with the
memory of Sahar’s face blanched white with shock at finding him
with Roxanna. When he’d told Sahar that he and she were nothing to
each other, her crystalline eyes looked shattered and dulled with
his betrayal.
Yago and his pack of Taweel and Anastasia had
wasted no time in spreading the story with their own twists and
embellishments. By the next morning the palace was abuzz with the
tale of how the princess had cried and pleaded with Aleksandr to
denounce his favorite whore and come back to her, and how he had
rejected her, telling her she was nothing compared to the
harlot.
If the tables had been turned and Anastasia
had been the princess left publicly humiliated by a man beneath her
in station, much less her supposed lover, heads would have rolled,
but Sahar had held her spine erect and her head high through it
all, refusing to acknowledge the side glances and palm whispering
around her. When Aleksi had passed her at the training track
yesterday, she had answered his greeting with a stubborn silence,
her chin lifted and her eyes glinting green shards of ice.
He had considered eating his supper in the
stables last night to avoid any further arguments or fistfights
with Yago the Worm, but he had not wanted to abandon Sahar again.
Though the meal had been quieter and more subdued than most,
everyone had been on their best behavior. Even Yago was not foolish
enough to taunt Sahar in front of her father, who at forty and five
years of age, still looked more than capable of tearing the Wolf
apart limb by limb if incited to do so. By the simmering anger in
his golden eyes every time he looked the Wolf’s way, it would not
have taken much.
Aleksi seemed to have been spared the king’s
ire, and he figured it was due to Munir and Brawn, who had no doubt
informed their king of what they had witnessed in the stables, and
of how it differed from the wolf pack’s account. If Aleksi could
only convince Sahar of their duplicity and his innocence—but first
he would have to get her to even acknowledge him.
As he walked Zolotoy out of the training
kraal, Sahar rode Lasair in through the gate on the far side and
urged the mare into a slow trot to start their training session.
Tethering Zolotoy to the fence, Aleksi hitched a foot up on the
rail and admired horse and rider as they broke into an easy gallop.
It wasn’t only that Lasair was a gorgeous animal, or that she ran
like the wind, or that Sahar was an excellent rider—one of the best
Aleksi had ever seen actually, man or woman—it was the rapport
between horse and rider that mesmerized him. How they moved as one,
intuitively, instinctually, effortlessly, something few riders were
able to attain.
Sahar was not only a good rider, but a good
trainer as well. She understood her horse’s needs, working the mare
hard enough to keep up her endurance, but not so much that she wore
her down. Of course, the princess had been raised in a royal
household known for its stable of fine horses, and her father was
renowned for having won the Great Race of the Seven Tribes four
times in a row on his stallion, Storm Chaser. He’d chosen the
yearling filly Cloud Dancer as his prize for winning that race.
Sahar’s mare, Lasair, was the last foal out of the pair and worth
her weight in gold in breeding rights.
“Well, Z,” he told the stallion as Yago and
Taweel arrived for their training session, “you may still have a
chance to win the right to breed with that leggy mare, but I would
wager all my winnings so far that I have lost my chance with the
tigress.”
He untied Zolotoy’s reins and led him back to
the stables.
“At least I still have my Kiska,” he said,
removing Z’s saddle. “Until I leave here to return home, when
Ratter will take her in and keep her.”
Speaking of, where was Kiska? She hadn’t come
running out of his antechamber or emerged from a burrow of straw to
greet them as she usually did.
“Kiska?” he called. No answer. “Where are you
my little Kiska?” She wasn’t bundled in the bed linens on his cot,
or in his pile of clothing, her two favorite napping spots. “Here,
Kiska,” he called. “Here, kitty, kitty.”
She was nowhere in his chambers, and a knot
formed in the pit of his belly as he searched the stall, unraveling
only a little when he didn’t find her crumpled little body buried
in the straw.
He went to Ratter’s antechamber, but he was
not there, and neither was Kiska.
“Here, Kiska,” he called, walking several
stalls’ distance. She had been growing bolder in her explorations
the past few days. “Here my little Kiska, here kitty, kitty, come
to me, my Kiska.”
He doubled back, calling out and looking into
every bucket and every pile of blankets and clump of straw.
“You have lost Kiska?”
Aleksi looked up from the empty bucket he had
overturned to find Sahar approaching with Lasair.
“I cannot find her anywhere,” he said, the
knot coiling tighter in his gut.
“Let me stable Lasair, and I’ll help you look
for her.”
Aleksi resumed his search and Sahar joined
him, the both of them calling out for the missing kitten as they
checked the stalls to the west. They had finished with the sixth
stall down when Sahar held her hand up.
“There,” she said, tilting her head. “Do you
hear that?”
Aleksi cocked his head and listened. There it
was, a faint mewling, high pitched and insistent. They followed the
cry to a stall ten gates down from Aleksi’s, where they found Kiska
huddled between two buckets of oats lined up against the wall.
“Come to me, my little Kiska,” he crooned,
scooping up the terrified kitten. He tucked her into the crook of
his arm and took a good look around. They were only two gates away
from the stall where Yago’s stallion, Tor, was housed. He walked
over to Tor’s empty stall and saw nothing amiss, but for a linen
rag with a few drops of blood on it. He held Kiska up and saw no
blood or open wounds on her, but he did not like the way she was
holding one of her hind legs.
They took her back to his room and he set her
down on his cot. The knot in his belly twisted as Kiska hobbled
across the cot to him, her left hind leg dangling from the knee
down.
“I am sorry, little one,” he said, kneeling
down beside the cot. “I need to find out what your injury is so
that I might fix it.” He looked up at Sahar. “Can you hold her
while I examine her leg?” he said. “She is not going to like
this.”
Sahar kneeled down on the opposite side of
the cot and gently held the scruff of the kitten’s neck with one
hand while holding her front legs with the other.
“I am sorry too, little Kiska,” she said,
nodding to Aleksi as she tightened her grip. “Be brave, little
Kiska,” she crooned as Aleksi manipulated her hip joint. And though
Kiska growled and spit as he did, the joint was still in its proper
place. “Such a brave little girl you are,” Sahar continued her
sing-song patter as Aleksi moved his fingers down Kiska’s leg. “So
brave and strong.”
Kiska’s femur bone felt intact, but when
Aleksi touched her tibia she screamed like she was being skinned
alive, and would have jumped off the cot if Sahar had not had such
a good hold on her.
“I have her,” she said, switching her hold so
that one hand still scruffed the kitten while the other held her
good hind leg, stretching her out and giving Aleksi better access
to her injured leg.
As slowly and gently as he could, Aleksi
prodded the length of the bone, grimacing as he felt the broken
ends grind against each other mid-tibia. Kiska had stopped
screaming and just lay there, trembling, as Sahar’s gaze met
Aleksi’s.
“Is it fixable?” she asked, her expression
full of concern.
“It should be,” he said. “It feels like a
clean break mid-bone. A splint for a moon or two should do the
trick.”
Sahar let out a long, slow breath as she
released her grip on Kiska and cuddled the kitten to her chest, and
Kiska seemed content to snuggle. Aleksi went about gathering the
materials to make a splint. The handle of his wooden spoon would
do, and after whittling it down to size, he tore a clean linen rag
into strips and shaved a thin layer of felt from the edge of
Zolotoy’s saddle blanket for padding. Kneeling across the cot from
Sahar as she positioned Kiska, he met and held her gaze. “I’m sorry
I hurt you, Kitten,” he said.
Raw pain flashed over her face and ripped
open his gut, shredding the coiled knot there into tatters. Then
she blinked and lifted her chin. “You didn’t hurt me,” she told
him. “As you said, we are nothing to each other.”
Sahar took her seat at the table of honor for
the winning riders between Aleksandr and Yago, the last place she
wanted to be, and the one place she seemed to end up over and over
again. She gave each of them a wordless nod of greeting and took a
long drink of her wine, and then another. It would not do for her
to become drunk at the feast tonight, nor did she want to be
starting the race tomorrow with a drunkard’s aching head and
thickened tongue, but she was not going to be able to make it
through this night sober.
Draining her first cup, she motioned for the
serving maid to refill it, and caught her mother’s furrowed brow as
she lifted the cup to her lips and took only a quick sip. She set
the cup down and let the warmth of the spirits spread from her
belly to her toes. Her mother’s attention now focused on the
uncomfortably pregnant Rima. Sahar turned to Aleksandr. “How is
Kiska?” she asked.
“Better,” he answered, his warm brown eyes
tender in the same manner he had shown splinting the kitten’s leg.
That tenderness confused Sahar, for it made it harder to hate him,