Well. I’d seen stranger things.
Looking around, I counted six of the masked men in green. Half a dozen men who appeared astonishingly similar to one another, now that I took the time to study them more closely. True, there were some obvious differences—one had a hat, one had a bow, one was holding his own leg—but they all were the exact same height and build. They all had hair of the same flame-red hue, cut to the same length, and their complexions were the precise same shade of pale. Six pairs of eyes shared the delicate blue of a forget-me-not. Even the freckles beneath their domino masks speckled their cheeks in roughly similar patterns.
Their looks and speech marked them as Ecossic. They could have been Liam’s identical sextuplet cousins. Why were they here?
Masked men in the woods were usually robbers.
Which meant I couldn’t trust them simply because they’d rescued me. You would not believe the lengths some villains are willing to go in order to get you to lower your guard. Child-eating witches will swear up and down that they are innocent old women who happen to admire the architectural properties of gingerbread. Wolves can make a surprisingly convincing case that they are your grandmother. Well, ordinary wolves can. If they had eight eyes and legs, that would be a bit of a giveaway.
I didn’t have the faintest idea who these people were or whatthey wanted. And if life under my stepmother’s rule had taught me nothing else, it was that I shouldn’t put my faith in anyone without knowing what their motives were first.
“I’m a little scratched up, and so is, uh, the lady here,” Bloody Knee said, indicating me. “I think Sam got the worst of it.”
“I’ll be fine,” Sam murmured, shifting more weight onto me. I grunted, my knees nearly buckling. “I just need…”
I eased Sam onto a fallen log. “Stitches,” I said. “Rather a lot of them.”
Sam mumbled something incoherent in response. His wounds were deep, especially the ones low on his left side. They looked bad—far worse than the shallow cuts on my shoulders or the ones on Bloody Knee’s leg if he was still walking on it without wincing.
“Does anyone have any alcohol?” I asked. “The stronger the better.”
“Aye.” One of them passed me a flask. “We cuid a’ dae wi’ a wee dram efter that.”
I could tell which one that was, at least. “It’s not for drinking.” I took the needle and thread out of my dress pocket. Good thing I’d kept them there rather than storing them in the chest with everything else. Just in case I was ever attacked by wolves. It’s always a good idea to pay attention to my brother-in-law’s cryptic comments.
I used whatever was in the flask to sterilize my sewing tools as well as I was able. It smelled like kerosene. Clem tutted at the waste.
“It lowers the risk of infection,” I said. “Take your shirt off, Sam.”
“No!” Bloody Knee said. “He…needs to keep warm, surely. So he doesn’t go into shock.”
Spare me from the ignorant medical opinions of amateurs.But the whole lower half of Sam’s shirt was so shredded it hardly mattered, so I didn’t bother to argue. Better not to lose the time.
I poured the remaining contents of the flask over Sam’s wounds. He hissed in pain. When they were as clean as I could reasonably get them, I put the needle against his skin.
Push it through at a ninety-degree angle, close to the side of the wound. Don’t go too far in; keep it just above the fat. Rotate clockwise. The needle should come out straight across from the first hole. Make a loose knot, and then tighten it until the flesh just closes.
Sam clenched his jaw when the needle went in but made no further sound. The others crowded close, watching suspiciously, but relaxed when it became apparent I knew what I was doing.
“What a mess.” The man in the bycoket hat shook his head. “I told you we shouldn’t have split up. And we should never have left the others behind.”
“If we hadn’t split up, we might never have found her,” Bloody Knee replied.
The others? What others?Move down a quarter inch, and make the second stitch. And then the third.Were there more of them somewhere? How many identical masked men could therebe?
“Who have we found, come to that?” said the man holding his leg in his arms, hopping forward to get a better look at me. He glanced over my bedraggled, bloodied clothes and the mess of pumpkin entrails in my hair. “That’s a pretty red cloak she’s wearing beneath all the mud, but it’s hardly a silken gown. Is this really the princess?”
“Nah, she isnae,” said Clem.
“She might be,” Sam muttered.
“Why don’t we ask her?” Bloody Knee said, turning to me. “Who are you?”
“Before I answer,” I responded, carefully pulling thread through flesh, “who on earth are you?”
Bloody Knee’s eyebrows crawled up above his mask like two indignant scarlet caterpillars. “We’re the people who just saved your life. It’s a bit ungracious to refuse us your name.”
I tied off a stitch and gestured for his sword. “Help me with this? I didn’t bring scissors.”
