I think… I think I just lie here, blinking against the texture of the darkness above, like thick ribbons of smoke layered on top of each other, and disturbed by the firelight.
The fae cuts into my line of sight.
His face is stone, steeled rage, as he uncorks the tiny jar and, scooping a finger into it, lures out a… a… a smear of moss.
No, I must be slipping more. I must be losing my grip on reality. No matter what that looks like, it can’t be moss that he’s reaching to my wound.
Whatever it is, it stings the moment it touches my torn flesh—but the sting is distant, faraway, like an echo that reaches around me, but doesn’t quite touch me.
He applies that mossy stuff to the knife wound, and he isn’t kind about it, but I don’t know that from sensation, because I don’t really feel anything anymore. I only know because I rock and sway with his harsh handling until there’s a pause, then arippppas he tears a strip from a cloth.
I can hardly make out the face of the warrior beyond a harshness and frosty eyes and a fine nose. It is a fine nose, a perfect stroke of firelight down a straight line, and just beneath, the faint pink of a bowed lip…
It’s the last thing I am aware of before the final drop of my lashes.
I’m sucked into nothingness.
FOUR
I wake to pain—dull throbbings in my head, a crackling ache spreading through my chest, a searing burn burrowing deep, all the way to the bone of my shoulder—and every muscle in me, bound with sagged fatigue.
But the one I suffer the most is dizziness.
With every blink, every squeeze and open of my eyes, it stirs the camp around me, a blended canvas of darkness and warped faces and stretched silhouettes and lashing flames.
The dizziness even confuses the noise of it all into something like a garbled, faraway song.
But not the creaking sound—because that’s right above me.
My head falls back too easily, too violently, like there are no bones or muscles in my neck, like it’s the head and the neck of a doll.
The back of my skull thuds onto something hard and flat.
Exhaustion has me so fucking haggard, I can barely hold my head up.
A wispy moan sighs out of me before I look up at what should be darkness, but is the shadows shed by the light of the campfires.
It’s a blur of pale skin and freckles and brown wooden slats and a black sort of metal.
My frown digs deeper into my face.
I scrunch my eyelids once, twice, until it all starts to come in and out of view.
That hard flatness against my head is plain wood. A waggon of sorts. One of the carts that the dark fae units drag along with them.
I’m propped up against one, barely. But what digs that frown so deep into my face that my mouth puckers—is that the only reason I’m still upright is that I’m tied to the cart.
My wrists are bound with fine, black rope, then hooked to a metal ring that’s bolted into the side of the wooden cart.
The sleeves of my jacket are torn, slipped down to reveal the nasty black and purple bruising on my left wrist—the same one the cold warrior had in his grip as he hauled me through the dark.
I knew his hold on me was tight, but the sight of those bruises, a canvas of spilled milk ruined by deep blues and purples, it’s enough to hesitate me.
I woke to pain… but the same way I woke to the noise of the camp. I woke to layers of it, so many layers that it’s hard to tell them all apart.
The pain and aches throughout my body are so severe, consuming me, that I didn’t even feel a whisper of a bite on my wrist as I drifted awake.
Even now, as I latch my furrowed stare onto the ruined pallor of my flesh, I don’tfeelit. All I feel is that constant swirl of pain echoing down on me, and I think most of it is coming from my head.
