Chapter Thirty-Seven Happily Ever After
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Happily Ever After
First things first. The scorpion octopus had fallen from Angelique’s hand. I eyed it warily.
The creature flopped in my general direction. It moved awkwardly, flinging its tentacles ahead and then rolling over them in a kind of drunken zigzag. A light breeze sprang up, stirring the dust. The little monster lost its balance and tripped over its own limbs.
I frowned. Was this really the deadly killer she’d described? She hadn’t used it in any of her assassination attempts. Could it have been a bluff? A failed experiment or one not yet ready for use? Perhaps she’d wanted nothing so much as for me to panic and run.
I didn’t care to find out. I stomped on it. It squished beneath the thick leather of my boot with a satisfying crunch. No sting penetrated the sole; I was not stricken with paralysis, nor did my internal organs dissolve.
The breeze had picked up, gradually dispersing the haze.
I wondered if Kit had survived or if it was simply the weather.
Finding out would have to wait—I had patients in front of me.
I took a breath to steady my nerves and tried to give the situation a calm assessment, as my mother and father had taught me.
Angelique was dead. Jack’s sword had pierced straight through her heart. She hadn’t even been slain by magic, no curse that might be reversed. There was nothing I could do for her.
While my impulse was to attend to Sam, there was hardly anything to be done for him. Either his brain was swelling inside his skull, or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, he might wake and be fine in a couple of minutes. If it was, he would die.
That left Jack. I stumbled to her side and rolled her off Angelique’s corpse.
A quick initial examination told me little.
Her blood-soaked tunic made it impossible to find the injury.
I tore it open, ripping it from the neck to the bottom.
If I had qualms about exposing her long-held secrets, I suppressed them.
One of my earliest lessons had been that hesitation could cost a life.
She’d been speared just above the armpit. Blood flowed from her wound in uneven spurts, a bright red gout, then a trickle, then another gout.
Bright red blood in time with her heartbeat means an arterial bleed. Survival time without intervention depends on location and severity but can generally be measured in minutes. As a first step, stanch the blood flow by applying pressure.
With nothing to use as a disinfectant, I slid two fingers into the wound and pressed. The blood slowed and then stopped.
So far, so good. Now what? I needed proper equipment to manage more than that.
Jack’s eyes cracked open. I was surprised she was conscious. The rate of bleeding suggested the artery had been nicked instead of severed, but even so, she’d been lucky to remain alive for so long. She must have had the stamina of a mule.
“What are you doing, witch?” she asked.
“Sorcer—” I stopped. It wasn’t worth it. “I’m keeping you from bleeding to death.”
“With a spell?”
“With my fingers.”
“Will that work?”
“Maybe. Call it fifty-fifty?”
“Oh.” She did nothing but breathe for a few moments, then added, “Thank you.” Her eyelids drifted closed.
The dust had mostly cleared. I wasn’t sure if anyone was looking in our direction, and I couldn’t afford to turn around to check. Too much movement and I might let up on the pressure. She’d lost far too much blood already.
I was about to cry for help when a figure stumbled up to us. I risked a glance upward, worried it might be a monster that had somehow survived the battle.
Gervase stared at Angelique’s corpse, a complicated expression crossing his face before he schooled it into stillness.
His eyes then went to Jack, and he reddened as he took in her torn garments, averting his gaze for a moment before bringing it back.
I didn’t find the blood-soaked torso of a hemorrhaging patient particularly arousing myself, but Tailliz has some odd notions about feminine modesty.
He dropped to his knees at Jack’s side and took her hand. The engagement ring she had never removed lay gleaming on her finger.
“Don’t jostle her!” I snarled.
He ignored me. “Jack,” he said. “Jacqueline. I love you. I have always loved you. Now that the kingdom is safe from…from my sister, I will accept no other as my bride, and, uh…” His voice trailed off, his eyes finding mine, acknowledging my presence at last.
“Let’s sort that out later,” I said. “Fetch me a—”
Jack snapped awake. “I stay on as general, too.”
Gervase blinked. “What?”
“She’s not in any condition to talk,” I told him. “Really, you need to—”
“Queen and general,” Jack growled, sounding more irritated than anything else. “The soldiers will follow me. I saved the kingdom.”
Gervase sat back on his heels, her hand still held in his own. His lips were pursed in consideration. “The council of nobles will have a fit.”
“They can bite my arse,” Jack said. “Let them protest to their troops. See how far they get.”
“The lion—”
“Important as this conversation might be,” I said tightly, “I am currently preventing her blood from leaving her body using only my hands.” Was this the third inappropriately timed heart-to-heart of the day?
Although to be fair, I’d been responsible for the ones I’d had with Gervase and Jonquil.
“None of this will matter unless someone can bring me—”
A vast dark shadow passed over us, cutting off the sunlight. The dragon alighted, so close we were dimly reflected in its gleaming scales. Seawater cascaded off it. It flapped its wings to dry them, spraying all of us with a shower of droplets.
On its back was my entire family. Jonquil had rescued Calla, Liam, and Gnoflwhogir from the waves.
Calla had so many wet, shivering animals clinging to her that she resembled a haystack made of damp fur.
The rest were soaked to the skin, and they looked much the worse for wear from a staggering variety of cuts, bruises, and burns.
Liam leapt off the dragon before the others had gotten their bearings and rushed over to me, something held in his outstretched hand.
“Needle and thread?” he offered.
“Yes!” I grabbed them with my free hand. “I don’t suppose you have any disinfectant, too?”
He passed me a bottle full of something strong enough to make my eyes water. I smiled in thanks, and he gave me a quick nod and spun back around, holding out his arms to assist his wife and in-laws down.
“Now,” I said, “if someone would just—”
“How can I help my sister?” Sam asked from behind me.
I permitted myself a fraction of a second to revel in the sound of his voice, to feel the knot in my chest unravel. He was awake. He was alive. Again and again he had risked himself at my side, and again and again he had returned to me.
But I tucked those feelings away for later. “Clean your hands with what’s in the bottle, and then put your fingers right where mine are. Apply pressure.” Considering who I was talking to, I added, “Normal human pressure. Don’t dislocate her arm.”
More blood that Jack could ill afford to lose leaked out when I removed my hand, but Sam’s fingers replaced mine almost instantly. I threaded the needle, tied a quick knot, and used what was left in the bottle to disinfect everything I could.
“Don’t die on me now, Jackie,” Sam said.
“Doing my best,” she grunted, wincing as I pierced her flesh and drew the thread through.
“We’ll talk of your position at court later,” Gervase said. “Once we know that you—”
“Queen and general,” she said. “The other hunters get knighted. As their true selves.”
“How are you even awake?” I muttered.
She grinned through the gore that spattered her face. “I’m relentless. That’s my talent.”
“That’s not a talent,” Sam said. “You’re just too pigheaded to give up. On anything. Ever.”
Jack turned to Gervase. “And no more women’s wing.”
“Stop moving!” Stitching her up was a tricky enough procedure as it was.
The king seemed to be rather at a loss. “My love, I don’t say you’re wrong. But…must we discuss it right at this moment?”
“Now’s the perfect time. Darling.” She gazed up at him with wide eyes.
She would have been the complete picture of a smitten damsel if not for a certain strained tension at the corners of her mouth.
And all the blood, of course. “I might be dying. Fifty-fifty chance. Ask the witch. You can’t refuse a dying wish. ”
He rocked back as if slapped. “That’s…”
“Fair?” she finished for him. “Promise me.”
Gervase looked grim. “Can I? You remind me I am already on the verge of forsaking my last such promise.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” I said as I tried to pierce a lip of ragged flesh without tearing it further.
“Obviously I’m not going to marry you. You love someone else.
I love someone else.” Sam’s breath caught as my hand brushed against his.
“Sam, move your fingers to the left, would you? No more than a hair.”
“That’s very well to say,” Gervase replied. “But will not the queen of Skalla devastate my lands, and turn the forest into a desert, and leave me blind, penniless, and wandering the wasteland for the rest of my days?”
“Yes, if you refuse me. But you’re not. I’m refusing you. King Gervase of Tailliz, I find I cannot honor our marriage pledge. I’m terribly sorry. It’s not you, it’s me. Any punishment will be mine alone to bear.”
“And what will that punishment be?” Sam asked. “What will your stepmother do to you?”
“I’ll handle her,” I said.
“But—”
“I will.” Somehow. “Your Majesty, I reject you entirely. Find someone else.”
Gervase hesitated no more than a moment. “All right,” he told Jack. “I promise. All of it.”
“Took you long enough,” she grumbled. “Fine. We’re reengaged.”
“Then I am yours, and you are mine,” Gervase said, “and nothing shall ever part us again.”
Her hand tightened around his. I’d have taken it for a sign of passion, if it hadn’t been accompanied by a sharp gasp while I finished off a stitch. Maybe it was romantic, even so. Certainly I’d have wanted Sam to be the one holding me if I lay bleeding.
“I love you,” Gervase proclaimed.
“I love you more,” Jack avowed.
“That is impossible. There can be no love that is greater than mine.”
“My love is impossible. Love you more than…greatest amount of love…one person could feel.” Her face was pale, and her eyes fluttered shut again. The pain and the blood loss were taking their toll, but she rallied enough to flash another grin at him. “I win.”
His answering smile looked somewhat worried. “You cheated.”
“You still. Lost.” Jack’s voice was a whisper, barely escaping her lips. “Suck on your loss. Loser.”
I tied off a final knot and might have collapsed on the ground myself if Sam hadn’t steadied me.
“Done,” I said. “Get her feet elevated above her head. And keep her warm. We’ll need to monitor her lips and her fingernails.
It’s a bad sign if they turn blueish. But if infection doesn’t set in—which is a big if, we need to watch for that carefully—then I think there’s a good chance that she, uh…
” My voice trailed off. Now that my attention wasn’t entirely on my patient, I noticed there were a lot more people around us than when I had started. “I mean, that he…”
My family was there, of course, in front of a wet, sleeping dragon.
Jonquil and Liam were looking at me with some concern—had they overheard my intention to defy my stepmother again?
—while Calla’s gaze seemed focused on the way Sam’s arm was wrapped around my shoulders.
Gnoflwhogir was prodding Angelique’s corpse with her foot.
I’m not certain she knew who Angelique was; stabbed bodies always attract my sister-in-law’s attention.
But the rest of the hunters had also crowded around us—the quick count I made showing all of them alive, astonishingly enough—along with a host of soldiers.
The commoners and noblemen from inside the castle were standing at the back of the pack, straining to see what was going on.
Everyone, it appeared, had poured out onto the remains of the bridge and gathered around our little group, talking in a great confusion of murmured conversations punctuated by shouts and questions.
Everybody was speaking at once, about the king, about the hunter he was now holding in his arms, about Angelique’s body, about the dragon snoring tiny jets of fire, even about me.
While I tried to make sense of the cacophony, the lion limped forward, keeping his weight off a broken leg, muscling aside soldiers and huntsmen until he reached the king. His tawny fur was matted with blood.
Squinting nearsightedly, he glared at Jack, taking in everything revealed by the tunic I’d torn to shreds.
“Now do you believe this is a woman?” he asked Gervase.
A thousand rejoinders flitted across the king’s face in an instant. In the end, though, he simply said, “Yes, Lion. You were right all along.”
“Right about her, maybe,” Sam muttered under his breath. “Wrong about so much else, it’s impossible to keep track.”
If the lion heard this at all, he chose to ignore it. He huffed a hot breath over us and hobbled away with the expression of immense self-satisfaction that only a cat can ever truly achieve.