“Coagulating,” she said with a nod. “Keep them. Might need them once you’re out there.” Then she turned and shuffled away.
She had just given these to me to keep? And what the hell didcoagulatingmean?
I came behind Dorian and knelt. I set the moss and bottle on the edge of the bed.
“I’ll need to cut your jerkin to get to the wound.” My shoulder flared as I reached back and drew out my knife. I flicked it open. “Hold still.”
“She solves fae riddles and now she heals,” Dorian muttered without moving his jaw. As I slid the blade into the torn leather, he grunted. “What else does she do?”
“I’m terrible at riddles,” I said, cutting as gently as I could. Every time I neared one of the slashes across his back, he flinched. “But I wasn’t half bad at battlefield triage. At least in training.”
“Training?”
“Every guard learns how to treat a wound.”
“But had you ever seen a battlefield?”
I paused. “Not until the night you attacked us.” My fingers tightened around the knife.Stitch him, Eury. Don’t stab him.“The nurse who’d been treating me was crushed by a piece of wall bigger than my house.”
Dorian winced again as I resumed cutting. I wondered if that was because of what I’d said or the pain. “Treating you?”
“My nose was broken.”
He turned his head slightly, eyes catching mine. “I remember that. Why?”
He had noticed that my nose was broken?
I focused on the jerkin, slitting another seam. I thought about staying quiet. But then I said, “I couldn’t whistle.”
I peeled away the last of the leather. The wound was worse than I’d feared—deep gashes, deep enough that muscle gleamed through. Blood welled sluggish but steady. He would need stitching.
“Whistling,” Dorian said, almost to himself. “What fucking difference does that make?”
A breath of laughter escaped me—wry, dry. As if that made what came next any easier. “None. None at all.”
A beat passed.
“How bad is it?” he asked.
“Not so bad.”
“You’re a shit liar.”
I exhaled through my nose. “You’ll need stitches.”
“Learned that in training too, did you?”
“Nothing goes together like battlefields and stitches.”
He gave a soft laugh despite himself—then groaned, and his wounds began to seep faster.
“Don’t do that again.” I lifted the moss and uncorked the bottle. One sniff told me it was antiseptic. I pressed the liquid into the fabric. “This will take time.”
“It’s coagulating,” he rasped.
“The antiseptic?”
He didn’t answer. I took that as permission.
