“No. Doc is checking if he was bitten.”
Blaine tried to lift his head but found that made the world spin dangerously. He squeezed his eyes shut, panting softly as he tried to will his stomach not to rebel. A kick to his ribs meant he lost that battle, and Blaine turned his head to the side to vomit up bile, all that was left in his stomach. It wasn’t much, but it still burned, and he gasped for air afterward.
A shadow fell over his face, and he looked up, blurry vision settling on a man in the brown and dark green uniform of a Daijalan soldier. Blaine didn’t know the man’s name or his rank, but the expression on his face—as if Blaine was an animal to be dissected—left him feeling chilled.
Or perhaps that was the beginnings of the fever.
Fingers tangled in his hair, jerking his head off the ground. Blaine couldn’t stop the moan that left his lips, the fingers of his right hand curling into the dirt beneath him. He couldn’t feel the fingers of his left hand, couldn’t make them move. His hand and forearm were a mangled mess that his gaze skittered away from, not wanting to believe the damage was real. Someone had tied a tourniquet around his forearm just below his elbow, but he couldn’t feel that either.
Blaine knew—distantly—that wasn’t good.
“Are you with us, my lord?” the soldier asked mockingly in the trade tongue.
“Not a lord,” Blaine mumbled, voice coming out in a rasp.
Fingers curled over the torc around his neck, giving it a tug. Panic made him try to jerk away from the touch, but all he ended up doing was choking. “Bounty says otherwise. You’re wanted for treason against the crown.”
Blaine bared his teeth, tongue pressed to the back of them. “Not my queen.”
“That’s what traitorous cogs always say.”
The hold on his torc released, and Blaine slumped back against the ground. The soldier stood, staring down at him with cold eyes. “Someone fetch me the doc.”
“She’s still with the corporal.”
The soldier sighed loudly, the sound very put-upon, before unholstering his pistol and checking for a bullet in the chamber. “I’ll remedy that.”
He walked away, but his absence didn’t make Blaine feel any less afraid. The soldiers standing or sitting around him were simply further proof of his status as a prisoner of war. He rolled carefully onto his side, dragging his damaged arm with the motion and nearly puking from the pain it caused.
A gunshot sounded, loud and echoing in the air. Blaine flinched with his entire body, gasping at the wave of pain that rolled through his left arm. Sweat made his shirt stick to his skin, and he couldn’t tell if he was hot from the summer heat or the creeping claws of a fever.
“The corporal could’ve lived,” an irritated female voice said.
“I’m not wasting time on the wounded other than the one we’re being paid to bring back. Put him under. I won’t have him fighting us while we head for the rendezvous point. The airship is scheduled to leave in an hour, and we better be on it.”
If Blaine had the wherewithal to fight, he would’ve tried. As it was, two soldiers pinned him to the ground by his shoulders and feet while the doctor handled his good arm with steady hands. The prick of a needle entering a vein made him moan in protest, but his ability to think lasted only so long. He blinked, the sunlight smearing across his vision until everything faded away.
He sank into a blackness so complete that he didn’t know he was dreaming, not at first. The stars above looked so real from the roof of the clan home in Glencoe, the constellations bright to his eyes. The expanse of E’ridia’s capital was how Blaine knew it must be a fever dream, for he hadn’t been to Glencoe in years.
“Ah, but you consider that city your home and not Amari,” a vaguely amused voice said from behind him. “It is the place I left you, after all.”
Blaine stiffened, slowly turning around, coming face-to-face with someone he hadn’t seen since he was ten years old. “My lady.”
The Dusk Star smiled at that honorific, her dark hair braided back, a crown of ranking hair adornments glowing from starshine around her head. She wore the fur-lined leather flight jacket of an E’ridian aeronaut, hands resting on her hips, her trousers with their split seams on the side open enough to show the golden Eagle constellation tattooed there on her right thigh.
“Aaralyn can believe what she likes, but you’re still mine, for all that you have Westergard blood flowing through your veins,” Nilsine said.
“I’ve kept to my road.”
“I know. You’ve walked it well, my child. But you must keep walking.”
Blaine wrapped his right hand around his left wrist, squeezing tight around bone that was whole when he knew it should be in pieces, flesh soft and mushy in a way muscle was never meant to be. “It will kill me.”
Nilsine stepped closer, reaching up to cup his face in both her hands, the intensity of her gaze rooting Blaine where he stood in this dreamlike space that felt so real. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. You must have faith to stand witness. You are the only one who can.”
Caris’ name could not be written down in the royal genealogies without a witness to her past. He might not have been there for her birth, but he’d carried her out of the old palace and Amari at the behest of Queen Ophelia. He knew Caris’ truth better than she did.
He knew, too, that he could not deviate from his road.
“Eimarille wants me dead.”
Nilsine kissed his forehead, her lips warm enough to burn, the heat of her touch consuming the city all around him. “Then don’t die.”
Blaine opened his mouth on a scream that felt as if it was ripped from the depths of his bones—raw and unending in the way it shredded his throat as reality set in. He arched against the restraints keeping him strapped to a table, the swaying of nearby gas lamps spinning shadows across a nightmare’s face.
The cloth mask over her mouth moved, but the whine of a steam-powered oscillating bone saw was all Blaine heard, all hefelt, as metal teeth cut into his left arm. The agony was like nothing he’d ever felt before as she carved away at his body, severing the mangled mess of his crushed forearm just below the elbow.
His teeth clacked together, sound forced between them, high and shrill like a cornered, dying animal, tasting blood in his mouth. The pain spiraled deeper, sharper, an incandescent agony he couldn’t escape until a blackness swallowed him whole.
There were no stars to greet him this time as he slipped under.
