The pain was white-hot and biting as she pressed the cloth to the wound. It flared down his side like a blade had kissed him all over again, but he didn’t flinch.
Instead, he drifted.
Let himself slip out of his body in the way he’d learned long ago, when the only other choice had been screaming. He rode the pain like a wave, distant and dull, just pressure and burn and the occasional, sharper pull when her fingers worked too close to torn muscle.
He could feel her there, though. The warmth of her hands. And without thinking, he glanced down at her. The firelight caught in her copper-red hair, turning it to living flame as she focused on her self-appointed task with single-minded determination.
She was quiet. Steady.
And Ashterion, for all his centuries, could not fathom why.
Her fingers were gentle as they pressed a cloth soaked in healing salve against the wound. The sting of it barely registered, he’d endured far worse. What registered was the care in her movements, the clinical efficiency that spoke of experience. Someone who had tended wounds before. Someone who knew what they were doing.
“Where did you learn this?” he found himself asking.
She didn’t look up, focused on cleaning the inflamed edges of the gash. “You pick up some things fighting in a rebellion.”
“Fighting in a rebellion,” Ashterion repeated.
Something in his mind clicked into place. The way she moved. The confidence. The authority that clung to her like a second skin even here, in captivity. He’d heard whispers. Rumours. A woman, a general, leading forces against the king who seized control of the human lands.
Ashterion’s breath caught. His eyes widened fractionally as he stared down at her bent head, her fingers working methodically at his wound.
“Fighting,” he echoed again. “Or leading?”
He caught it, the twitch in her fingers, the fractional pause in her cleaning.
Then she scoffed. “Who said anything about leading?”
She hadn’t denied it. But Ashterion didn’t press.
Her fingers brushed against his skin again, applying a cooling salve to the wound. The relief was immediate, the burning sensation ebbing away beneath her touch.
Her touch lingered a moment too long at the edge of the wound, and Ashterion’s muscles tensed involuntarily beneath her fingers. Her eyes flitted briefly to his face before returning to her work.
“Sorry,” she murmured, so quiet he almost missed it.
Ashterion said nothing, watching as she applied a thin layer of the salve along the entirety of the wound. The shadows at his feet stirred again, curious, drawn to the careful movements of her hands, to the concentration etched in the line between her brows.
He wondered, distantly, when the last time was that someone had done anything for him without expecting a piece of his soul in return.
Isara’s fingers paused briefly. “How did it happen?”
Ashterion blinked, surprised by the question. Not because it was unexpected, but because of how ordinary she made it sound. As though she weren’t kneeling beside the carved-up flesh of someone she should, by every right, despise.
He considered lying. Brushing it off with something flippant or cruel. That would’ve been easier, more familiar. But the peace in the room, the way her fingers didn’t tremble, the absence of malice in her tone—it disarmed him.
“I don’t remember.”
Isara’s head tilted slightly. “How do you not remember this?”
Ashterion let out a hollow breath that was almost a laugh. “Because I ran out of room to remember them all. It’s not noteworthy.”
“Not noteworthy.” Her eyes narrowed, studying him with an intensity that made his chest tighten uncomfortably. “The fact that you can say that with such casualness is perhaps the most disturbing thing about you.”
Her hands wrapped a clean bandage around his torso, the pressure firm but not painful.
“More disturbing than being the Shadow Drask?” he asked, deliberately light, even as the words were foul in his mouth.
