Honovi tried to breathe through the pain, aware of the dampness seeping into his shirt and kilt. The noise in the room had only gotten louder, but everything felt foggy and removed. “Why would she try to kill me?”
His question went unanswered, their conversation interrupted by a relieved shout from a guard. “Karla is here.”
The diplomatic officer in charge of the consulate’s day-to-day needs rushed into the telegraph room, graying braid falling over one shoulder. Her office was a few floors down, and Honovi wasn’t surprised she was working late, as she saw the midnight hour more than most of them.
“Ambassador,” Karla said, going to her knees beside him. Her dark eyes were wide, lips trembling, but her hand was steady when she raised her wand. She’d been a priestess before she left the Star Order for the diplomatic corps but would always be a magician.
“Can you stop the bleeding?” Blaine demanded.
“Hush, let me concentrate.”
The warmth of magic wasn’t unknown to Honovi, having grown up beneath his mother’s gentle ministrations and prayer. He hissed against the sensation of the aether crawling across his skin, dizzy even while lying prone. The pain didn’t lessen, and neither did the pressure on the entrance and exit wounds.
“He needs to go to the hospital. I can keep him stable, but the wounds need to be tended to by a doctor,” Karla said.
Blaine’s expression twisted as he looked down at Honovi, a particular sort of agony in his eyes. “I can’t go with you.”
Honovi blinked slowly, frayed thoughts finally remembering the warrant he’d dropped after being shot. “I know.”
Blaine looked over his shoulder at something Honovi couldn’t see from his position on the floor. He closed his eyes but opened them again at the frantic tapping of fingers on his cheek. “Stay awake. We’re going to move you.”
He sucked air through his teeth and nodded jerkily. “All right.”
The flurry around him didn’t abate, not until someone cried out in surprise and said, “The ambassador needs to see this.”
“The ambassador is on the way to the damn hospital,” Blaine snapped.
A voice, strained and thready, let out a cry. Siv sounded as if she was dying, but he couldn’t see her, not with Blaine blocking his view. Blaine swore under his breath before reluctantly leaving Honovi’s side to act in his stead and deal with the woman who had laughed with Honovi during dinner and shot him, unprovoked, afterward.
“Oh,” Blaine said some moments later, sounding horrified and panicked in a way that made Honovi try to sit up.
Karla pressed his shoulder to the floor, keeping him in place. “Stay still until we’re ready to move you.”
“I need to see,” Honovi protested.
He couldn’t leave here without knowing what had caused Siv to shoot. She’d been working in the diplomatic corps since before he arrived in Ashion, and her actions made no sense.
The bundles of clothes pressed against the wound on Honovi’s side were kept in place by willing hands. Blaine returned and curled a hand over the nape of Honovi’s neck, helping to sit him up. Pain radiated out from the wound, and he breathed rapidly against it, teeth clenched against the light-headedness that came with being mostly vertical. Blaine looked over his shoulder at the ever-growing crowd of people who had joined them in the telegraph room.
“Bring her here,” Blaine said.
Honovi blinked, and when he opened his eyes again, Siv was on her knees in front of him, arms held tight by two guards. Her blouse was undone, the white fabric stained red from the wound that had torn through her shoulder. Blood flowed from it in a steady trickle that told him an artery might have been nicked. She was white from blood loss, eyes glassy, but it was the vivid vivisection scars crossing her chest beneath her torn bodice that drew Honovi’s eye.
“I don’t know how she stayed alive after wounds like that,” Blaine said, voice tight.
“Revenant?” Karla asked in a strained whisper. “Should we find a warden?”
She held her wand at the ready, clarion crystal tip pointed at Siv. Honovi swallowed, wanting to hunch over, but the hands holding him up and keeping pressure on his wound wouldn’t let him.
“Why did you try to kill me?” Honovi asked.
Siv didn’t answer, too far gone to give up any secrets, but she wasn’t looking at him in that moment. Her fading attention was on Blaine, and Honovi didn’t like that at all.
Honovi breathed through the nausea, looking up at the guards who held Siv in custody. “Grant her a kindness after Karla is done with her mind.”
“Aye,” one of the guards said quietly.
He’d given such orders before, rare though they were. Sometimes accidents happened out on the trade winds, sometimes the dead caught the living, and offering a quick death over a painfully long one was the kinder option. Whatever was done to Siv, he wanted to believe she hadn’t asked for it.
