He watched her go to the fireplace, carefully adding kindling and coaxing the few faintly glowing coals back to life until flames appeared. Ahnna tended the fire until it was blazing hot, then muttered, “I’m going to check on the horses. Don’t die.”
Easier said than done.
The fire crackled a few feet away, and he could see the flames licking the logs, bright and alive, but the heat felt impossibly distant. His whole body shook, each tremor painful in its violence, every part of him frozen to the bone.
Hypothermia,he thought, his mind sluggish and heavy, like each thought had to break through a wall of ice. His trousers were soaked, the chill from the lake still clinging to his skin. His arm throbbed where Ahnna had stabbed him, blood forming a small pool next to him.
Is Ahnna telling the truth?
James closed his eyes for a moment, but his own breathing sounded strange, faint and hollow. Part of him knew he needed to keep fighting, to warm up, to do something, but he was so tired—bone-deep, aching tired.Just need to…rest for a second,he told himself, but there was a hollow certainty settling in his chest, a sense that this rest would not be one from which he would wake.
Did Alexandra kill my father?
The fire crackled, pine sap snapping and popping, a few sparks leaping from the stove to singe his skin, but James hardly felt them.
Did I fall for a ruse?
It was hard to think, his consciousness fading.
Stay awake,he thought, but the ice in his mind was thickening, pulling him down, blurring the edges of everything.
Until all was darkness.
19
Ahnna
“You’re an idiot,” Ahnna growled,filling a bucket with snow and putting it in with the horses to melt. “Why didn’t you just let him drown?”
It would have been the intelligent choice, but logic and reason had all disappeared from her skull when James fell beneath the ice. The only thought in her head had been that she couldn’t let him die.
“Too stupid to live.” She kicked at the dirt, grimacing as the wound in her leg screamed. What had changed? James had heard her truth, but had said nothing to indicate that he believed a damned word she’d said. Part of her had howled in frustration that, despite knowing that Alexandra was a schemer of the first order, he refused to see her guilt. Refused to believe Ahnna’s very reasonable explanation of what had happened.
But the wiser part of Ahnna understood that her truth was competing with what James had seen with his own eyes. Alexandra on her knees and wounded, begging for aid, while Ahnna knelt next to her with a bloody knife in hand. It was lunacy to suggest that Alexandra, a woman who’d never held a weapon in all her life, would inflict such awful wounds on herself, and if Ahnna hadn’t watched her do it, she wouldn’t have believed it either. James had what he thought was incontrovertible proof of Ahnna’s guilt, and she had nothing but her own pleas of innocence to convince him otherwise.
“Which is why letting him live was a mistake.” She pressed her face to Dippy’s neck, inhaling his scent to calm herself.
Even if she and Dippy left now, once James was recovered, he’d pursue, and she didn’t think even the threat of crossing Amarid’s border would be enough to stop him. Not when he’d gotten this close to catching her.
Which meant they’d be right back to where they started: the hunter and the prey. The very thought of it made her want to scream.
Instead, she bandaged her multitude of wounds and saddled Dippy. Secured her bags, along with some of James’s weapons and supplies, keeping one eye on his still form in front of the fireplace. She didn’t know how long it would take him to warm up enough to pursue her, which meant she had to hurry.
Going back into the cabin, she added more wood to the fire, always keeping one eye on him.
“James,” she said. “I’m going. Please don’t follow me. Please go back to Harendell and do something to stop Alexandra.”
He didn’t move.
Uneasy, Ahnna checked that his wrists were still secure, then knelt next to him. He was ghostly pale, his breathing shallow, and when she touched his forehead, his skin felt like ice.
“Goddamn it, James,” she muttered, pressing fingers to his throat and finding that his pulse wasn’t half as strong as it should be. Some blood had pooled beneath his arm from where she’d sliced him open, but not enough to threaten his life, which meant that it was the plunge into the water that was to blame.
Leave,pragmatism screamed at her.He betrayed you. Hunted you. Tried to kill you.
Instead, Ahnna retrieved the medical supplies she’d taken from his saddlebags and packed in her own. Moving swiftly, she cleaned, stitched, and bandaged the wound on his arm, James not once stirring. She had the fire roaring, and sweat ran in beads down her face. But James still felt cold to the touch.
You could be escaping. You could be miles from here.
