I should run. The guards will be here soon, and how am I going to explain stabbing a child in an alleyway when I’m supposed to be getting dressed for dinner in the palace?
But if I leave him, he could die. Judging by the position of the quickly growing patch of blood, I’ve missed his kidney, but I know a wound like this can still kill a man if not treated quickly, let alone a little boy.
Oh gods, what have I done?
“Hold still,” I say. I’ve got to try to stop the bleeding. I can’t cauterize the wound like Adria, but I can slow it down enoughto get him to a nature-born healer or an alchemist. I pull a handkerchief from my pocket and try to press it on him.
“Keep away from me!” he yells. Then he shouts again over my shoulder: “She stabbed me!”
“Quit your yelling, foolish boy, and hold still as she says.”
I jump at the voice. It’s the low, gravelly voice of a grown man, but I hadn’t heard anyone coming.
I really need to learn to watch my back.
I turn to the voice and try to explain. “I didn’t know it was a boy; he had a knife at my—”
“I saw,” he says to me and pushes me out of the way. “What have I told you, boy?”
The boy just whimpers as the man leans down to look at the wound.
It’s clear from the man’s attire he isn’t a guard. He wears a worn tunic as well, though his is much nicer than the boy’s. It’s made of a rich brown fabric and belted, with a sword sheathed at his waist. Its pommel is plain and unpolished, possibly the standard-issue sword of Selaran soldiers.
The man and the boy must know each other. They’re probably in whatever I just stumbled into together.
When the man looks up at me, I nearly gasp.
His entire face has been badly injured. It’s healed now, but a violent slash runs from his left brow all the way across his cheek and his mouth to his chin. He wears a patch covering his left eye, undoubtedly lost to the same wound. His nose has been fractured in at least two places, and the skin on the right side has the melted look of a severe burn.
War wounds, I’m certain of it. There are those among our own people who look like this, who had to make do with battlefield medicine and dwindling elixirs near the end of the fighting. With injuries this severe, he’s lucky to be alive.
“I suppose you’d like this back,” he says, and he gently pulls my dagger from the boy’s stomach.
The boy cries out and squirms in pain.
I take my dagger from the man, wiping the boy’s blood off with my handkerchief, but my eyes are fixed on the boy. He’s bleeding heavily now—removing the dagger was a mistake. I nearly open my mouth to tell the man he’s killing him, but he holds his hands over the bloody wound.
I don’t smell burning, so he must be nature-born, but I’m not sure nature magic, as powerful as it is, could heal a wound like that quickly enough to save his life.
I also wonder why the man, if he has nature magic, didn’t use it to heal himself from his own wounds, although maybe he wasn’t conscious to do so until too late.
“It hurts, it hurts,” moans the boy, but by the time the man removes his hands, the bleeding has stopped.
“Go on, boy. And don’t let me catch you with that knife again.”
To my astonishment, the boy gets right back on his feet. I’ve had wounds healed by a nature-born before, and it’s typically slow and painful. It can take days for an injury to heal without an alchemical elixir to speed the process.
The boy stumbles away from us. He’s favoring his wounded side a bit, but no more than if I’d punched him rather than stabbed him.
“How can he walk?” I ask the man. “The wound went deep.”
“You didn’t hesitate, did you?” says the man, not answering my question. “I’m surprised you’re still here.”
I suppose I’m surprised as well. I should have run ages ago. I should run now.
The man sizes me up, and I do the same. He’s a good bit taller than me, but not enough to tower over me, although that appears to be due to his hunched left shoulder more thananything else. I can’t tell how old he is, but I don’t see any gray in the brown hair that’s visible beneath his flat cap. I’d guess thirty, maybe less.
He doesn’t seem threatening, but I can’t imagine anything good he could have been doing with a child in a darkened alleyway.
