Twenty-Eight
Fear
As soon as she cried out, I’d already been moving.
I crossed the distance to her in two strides and caught her as her leg failed.
She was going down. A knife was in her thigh.
The blade had gone deep. Where had it come from?
There was no immediate enemy threat. The monster was dead. The passage was empty.
But we’d been herded down here for a reason. This was a trap, and fury licked at my chest, seeing her hurt. Whatever was coming to hurt Cara would find death.
Someone took the potion. My fingers had closed on nothing, the flap hanging loose from my belt. Someone had taken it deliberately. Someone who knew where I kept it and what the taking would mean.
I held that thought and set it aside. Later.
“Take it out,” she said.
“No.”
I was already moving, already carrying her, my assessment of the injury and the distance to the exit and the fastest route occurring simultaneously in the part of my mind that processed these things without needing direction. “You’ll bleed out faster. I need to get you to a healer.”
She didn’t argue. Cara, who argued with everything, said nothing.
I carried her through the labyrinth, deeply aware of her: the warm weight, the agony she bit down, her damp face sliding across the leather that covered my chest. I had carried her before, back in the barracks when she was exhausted, and I’d felt a flush of victory to be given her trust.
Around the knife in her thigh, blood welled and then spilled over, soaking her clothes and mine. Rubies and emeralds winked from the hilt. It was not the kitchen knife she’d first carried or the blade I’d replaced it with. Something else entirely, a blade I didn’t recognize.
Cara had no resources but me, my clan, and the allies she had made—actually, she had considerable resources she had knit from nothing. But still, this knife—clearly expensive—was a mystery.
The potion: gone from my belt. Part of the trap set for us down there. But where was the rest of that trap?
The knife: not one I had given her. Carried today, not yesterday or last week.
Her behavior this morning: avoiding me. After the queen.
I had misread her.
The startled realization settled over me, followed by cold, restless pain.
She had come into the Hunt today carrying a knife she’d acquired, and my healing potion was gone from my belt, and she had a wound in her thigh that hadn’t come from anywhere else.
She’d stabbed herself.
She had started looking away when she didn’t want me to read her—she knew how easily that came to me—and she was looking away now.
I shouldered open the door to the healers. There was someone in my way who dove to one side as I crossed the rest of the distance to one of the slabs. I set her on it carefully. Eased my shoulder out from under her. “Healer!”
She was bleeding from a wound that she had meant for me.
Siona ran to us. “What happened to her?”
She was already checking Cara over carefully.
“She was stabbed. As indicated by the knife sticking out of her leg.” I was out of patience.
