His gaze simply glides across the cut and up to meet my own. Something stirs in my chest. A knowing. I push it away.
There is more silence while I fish around in my foot, only finding more ichor. My hands are slick with mud, and my mind slips from the sight of shadow staining my fingertips. My heart clenches, but I take my own pumping viscera as a sign.
A-live, a-live, a-live.
Wrong. But alive. I swallow, throat raw and reedy.
“You’re going to make it worse.” Before I can stop him, Ransom is down on one knee in the mud beside me, pulling a silk handkerchief from a pocket and dabbing at the cut.
I grind my jaw, sucking air between my teeth. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Saving your damned life. You don’t want the blood fever, do you?”
Can’t he see it? The gods’ curse in my veins? But he only wipes away more of the syrupy liquid.
I catch the urge to scratch his eyes out if he gets even another inch closer to me, but all I picture are dark lines crawling up my skin, caged lungs, and death. Just another body buried beneath the bitterbloom. He dragsthe cloth over my skin, each movement sparking agony up my shin, and hurries to the river to rinse the staining blood.
Not a single word spoken over the unholiness of whatever lingers inside me. It sends shivers down my spine and heats my core in a way I cannot explain.
I loose a sigh when icy water passes along the cut and tilt my head up to the sky while the pain subsides. A flock of geese make an arrowhead shape against the clouds. Something sharp stings the sole of my foot. I flash my eyes to Ransom.
There is a needle between his fingers, black thread.
“Stop!” I scrabble at his hand and push him away, rising to unsteady feet. For a moment, it strikes me odd that someone privileged would know his way around a needle and thread.
His brows wrinkle, eyes glinting like polished steel. “What is it?”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demand, a near echo of before.
He raises the needle, the sliver of metal catching the sun. “If you don’t close that cut, it could get infected.”
My knees shake, and I take a step deeper in the mud to steady myself, wincing when pain radiates up my leg. “Are you a healer, Lord Black?” My words drip with mockery.
His eyes go cold. “I’m trying to help you, Adelaide. I don’t understand what is so wrong with that.”
“This!” I grab the bloodied cloth from his hand and shake it. “Are you insane? I have already been caught out-of-doors with hardly a stitch on—”
Ransom flicks his eyes across the skin of my shoulder, where my sweater has slipped. “Yes, it’s rather nice, isn’t it?”
“Shut up.” I pull at the fabric, working to cover my exposed flesh. “Shut up. I’m not going to let you sew my foot back together. Do you even know what this town would do to me if they found us out here? The vicar’s wicked daughter and the lord of Blackbourne Castle?”
Ransom flicks grime out from beneath a fingernail. “I’m not the lord. Not yet anyway.”
I breathe a sigh, chest constricting. “That’s beside the point. You know—”Another streak of pain flares up my leg, and I lower my gaze to the ruined cloth in my hand. “Get up. Get. Up.”
His eyes widen, and for a moment, I wonder if this is the first time anyone has told Ransom Black what to do. He moves, slowly, and I sit, swinging my injured foot up onto the log, decorum tossed to the wind. I ball the soiled handkerchief and whip it at him.
With my fingers, I rip a stretch from my petticoat’s hem and bend to inspect my skin. It is cleaner than it was, I will give him that, and I work quickly to wrap the ripped cloth around the wound, trying to stem the bleeding.
“What did you step on anyway?” he asks, returning the needle and thread to the pouch at his side.
“Nothing.” I wrench a knot tightly across my foot. “Just a piece of rubbish.”
He turns to look at my discarded skirts, boots, and socks. There is no rubbish on the shoreline.
“Do you want your things?” He steps forward.
“Leave them. I can do it myself.”
