“Keep going,” Emillie said to her. “There are too many who need your stitches. I will take him.”
She motioned for the unfamiliar dhemon to bring Jakhov to an empty cot nearby. The former nodded his thanks to her before leaving, while the latter glared at her through the haze of pain that had him collapsing onto the small, portable bed.
Without speaking, Emillie began her inspection. It had not been something she was comfortable doing when they first started this endeavor, but as time went on, she learned what to look for: odd eye dilation, too much blood in one area, patients clinging to a certain body part, or doubling up in pain. Each one told a different story, and yet each injury was so vastly different from the last that there was never a singular prescribed remedy.
“Revelie,” Jakhov croaked finally, his throat dry from dehydration.
Well, now, that just was not going to happen. Emillie needed her to continue looking after those who needed stitches, particularly while Phulan was busy trying to keep Ariadne alive.
Following Emillie’s sudden distraction as she looked back at her sister yet again, Jakhov asked, “Yvhaltrinja?”
One of the only dhemon words that Emillie could understand at this point. My Queen. She nodded numbly and turned back to her inspection. The greatest wound Jakhov sported was a stab straight through his thigh, the entry and exit marked by the blood-drenched trousers. Plenty of scrapes and nicks littered the rest of him, a rather nasty cut across his cheek and dangerously close to his eye being one of them. But this explained his inability to walk on his own.
“Alive?” Jakhov asked, then hissed through his teeth as she slid scissors through the leg of his trousers from ankle to hip, opening the clothing so she could properly address the injury there.
Again, Emillie nodded, her throat tightening. “I think so.”
By the gods, Ariadne had better survive. She had lost too many stab wounds in the last few months. First, her father with Loren’s blade straight through his chest, then Alek with a Caersan officer’s sword nearly gutting him on the highway. While those two were long since burned into her memory and chipped off pieces of her heart with them, it was Dahlia’s mostrecent death—the one that she should have been able to prevent—that now haunted her. At least with her father and husband, there was nothing she could have done.
Dahlia’s death was on her hands.
Now her sister lay on a cot not far from her, incapacitated and bleeding far too much as Phulan tried to siphon the salt from her wound before it killed her. The worst part was that the only thing keeping Emillie from believing Ariadne would truly die was that she had survived torture and salt at the hands of Ehrun…she could survive this, too.
Right?
Emillie swiped a clean cloth over Jakhov’s leg, peeling up the blood that had begun to cake there. The dhemon groaned and gripped the sides of the cot, but did not move aside from the involuntary jerk of his leg.
“This will need stitches,” she said as she pulled the basin of water set at each cot closer and dipped another clean cloth in to use to get the dirt, grime, and sweat away from the wound.
At first, Jakhov just responded with a grunt. She had heard it too many times in Algorath and since joining up with the horned fae to not recognize it as a confirmation of sorts. Even her sister had picked up the habit, which had made Emillie laugh at first. If anyone in the Society had heard her make such a sound, there would have been endless berating. Had she ever done it to their father, he would havecorrectedthe behavior by splitting open her lip and demanding she never do such a thing again.
As much as Emillie grieved his death, she did notmissher father. Markus Harlow had been loving in his own right, but he was a cruel man, and the more she thought of his parenting, the more she wished she could remember their mother. Had she been treated the same? Perhaps. After all, her father had killed his first wife.
Then, dragging her back from the rampant questions that could never be answered, Jakhov asked, quieter now, “What stitches?”
“Oh.” Emillie paused her cleaning to look up at him and decide the best way to answer his question. Her basket of supplies was nowhere nearby, so she mimed the motion of a needle through fabric but pointed to his leg. “Thread. Stitches.”
When Jakhov’s brows lowered in confusion, she pointed to Revelie with her needle, which she hooked gently through her current patient’s arm. “That.”
Following her gesture, Jakhov’s face softened again. “Revelie.”
“Yes,” Emillie confirmed. “She will stitch you up. I am not as good as her.”
Jakhov snorted as though this were an obvious statement. “Vampiino…stitch?”
Heat flushed Emillie’s cheeks. “I can stitch just fine, but Revelie is a seamstress. She is much better than I could ever be.”
Back to the confusion as he forced himself to look away from the Caersan woman. “No understand.”
“Seamstress,” Emillie explained, lifting his leg at the knee and draping his calf over her shoulder to get a better look at the exit wound on the back side of his leg. She plucked at his shirt, then mimed the stitching again. “She makes clothing.”
Jakhov hissed in pain again as she began repeating the cleaning process on his leg. A sudden jerk of his body had the fabric of his trousers shifting, uncovering his groin. With her free hand, Emillie quickly dropped a cloth over his exposed penis before refocusing intently on his leg.
A sharp, pained laugh almost barked from Jakhov. “No like,vampii?”
She threw a sour glare at him. “Actually,no. I much prefer women.”
Another grunt, his face screwing up in pain. His jaw flexed as she removed the grit stuck to the wound. Only when he relaxed enough to take a full breath did he gesture to his body and ask, “Revelie like?”
