Chapter 33

She saw Arin go down. She skidded in the sand as she ran, her ears roaring. Her mind closed over. A shaking dread.

A few paces away. Her dagger was tight in her hand. The Valorian’s back was an armored wall. The man raised his sword again. He didn’t hear her come at him.

But where, where? She had a dagger, but there was nowhere to stab—not the back of the neck, which she couldn’t reach, not the torso or even the legs. He was armored from shoulders to boots. A dagger wants flesh, her father would say. Find it.

A great pressure in her chest. Desperation as she came up behind. She didn’t know what to do, couldn’t think, and then it was as if someone else noticed the looseness at the top of one of the man’s boots and dropped her to her knees in the sand. She seized the boot’s top, yanked it back, and slashed the ropy tendon at the ankle.

He screamed. She seemed to feel him feel the excruciating pain of the cut tendon curling up into his calf. His collapse. The pumping agony. How a girl climbed onto him—feral, foxlike. But: a girl? But: her hair, her skin, her eyes, her armor. Not the enemy. The enemy?

Then the dagger found his throat and he knew exactly what she was.

Her hand, her arm: bright red. She couldn’t let go of the dagger. She made herself sheathe it. She needed her hands, she needed Arin.

The sprawl of him. She was weeping, crouched in the sand, empty fingers wild when she reached him, searched him, found the dagger in his side, his blackened brow, purple cheek, split skin. She touched his face and felt his head loll. A pulse? Or just her own pulse? Her body vibrated with it, she couldn’t keep her fingers steady against the hollow under his jaw.

She made herself look again at the dagger in his side, and unbuckled the armor to see better.

Only the tip of the dagger had entered the flesh. It was stuck between the ribs. Her sudden hope was savage.

She didn’t want to pull the dagger out—she had nothing to stanch a flow of blood—and returned her attention to Arin’s head. This time, when her fingers went for his pulse, she found it and knew it to be his. Her tears flowed fresh.

The wound in his side was minor. Yet a blow to the head can do anything, can kill, paralyze, take away his senses, his mind. It could make him sleep forever.

“Arin, wake up.”

Once the words came, they didn’t stop.

“We have to move. We can’t stay here.”

“Please.”

“Please wake up.”

“I love you. Don’t leave me. Wake up.”

“Listen to me. Arin?”

“Listen.”

Someone was weeping. Her tears fell warm on his brow, his lashes, his mouth.

Don’t cry, he tried to say.

Please listen, she said.

He would, of course he would. How could she think that he wouldn’t?

This felt familiar. Unreal. He had the sense that this had happened before, or would happen, that this was either an echo or its source. If he opened his eyes, the world would double. His skull throbbed. Stones weighted his eyes. He was covered with earth. Thick and loamy and loose. A comfort. It eased the nauseating ache.

Yet there were no stones, no earth. A part of him knew this, the same part that clung to the woman’s voice.

Her voice was breaking apart. He heard it turn horrible. Soon, he realized, she would scream.

“Don’t,” he managed, and opened his eyes, and was sick.

He wondered at it, faintly, her expression: that mix of anguish and relief. Her hands were wholly still for a moment, then instantly busy, lifting a canteen of water to his mouth, trying to worm under his weight and lift. Too heavy. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Arin, you must get up.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Yes. Just to Javelin. Come on.” She was tugging at him—shoulders, arms. He didn’t have the heart to tell her to stop, that the ache in his head was monstrous, that every jostle hurt. He tried to focus, and saw Javelin standing nearby, saw the undulating crush of soldiers and metal. Fear entered him. This little peace that sheltered him and Kestrel couldn’t last long. Impossible, that no one had noticed them, that no one had already brought a sword slicing through her neck as she knelt beside him, and pulled, and begged.

“Go,” he told her.

She recoiled. “No.”

“It’s all right.” He tried to touch her cheek, but either his vision was wrong or his hand was. He fumbled, touched her nose and lips. “I don’t mind.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Ride fast. Far.”