Her stomach twisted. He’d left her to die. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been shocked, after all she’d been told about him. But it stung nonetheless.
The tall man was still holding out his hand. He gave a lively twirl of his wrist to get her attention. “Am I to presume that’s a no?”
She took it, only to nearly yank them both over as her leg gave out.
“You’re wounded.”
She nodded, shifting to peel back her ruined breeches. Her thigh was bleeding, but her calf was worse. She could see the bone, her muscles dangling in shorn ribbons. “Shit,” she breathed, the world spinning.
The man crouched beside her. “By Sothis.”
“I need…bandages….” she rasped. Her shirt maybe. She was losing too much blood. She moved to tear the sleeve.
But he shook his head. “No. You need magic.” He closed his eyes. “Frimore tria…” The rest of his strange words were lost to wind, to the roar of blood in Thia’s ears.
White light trickled from his fingers. Slowly, like a drop of syrup, it plopped into her wound, filling up the space. Her flesh stayed open, but the pain receded, her blood slowing. Then he spoke again in that strange tongue, and her muscles rippled, slowly knitting back together.
“Oh my god,” Thia breathed. Her skin tingled, but there was no pain. Then it closed, only a thin scar the length of a knife in its wake. She ran a hand over it, dumbfounded. To have no need for tools, no risk of infection. Just…
Healed. Incredible.
Not without cost, it seemed. The man sagged, somehow appearing even paler, thinner. Like he could blow away in a gust of wind. “Your other wounds are shallow. Forgive me if I leave them for now.”
Thia stared. “You’re a magician,” she said. “Lord…” What had Thran said? “Sagan.”
But the man shook his head, then offered a slight head bow, which he still somehow managed to make elegant in his fatigue. “His apprentice. Archer, at your service, Miss—” He looked at her questioningly.
“Thia.”
“Well met.” He straightened, though continued to sway. “You’ll need rest. It would be our pleasure to host you at Aelfort while you can recover.”
She wondered if she should protest, but her eyelids were already heavy. “My companions,” she managed.
Archer nodded. “They will accompany us.”
So she nodded and let the man help her up.
TWELVE
THIA WAS COCOONED IN WARM BLANKETS. MUSIC DRIFTED FAINTLYfrom somewhere in the distance, and for a moment she thought that she was home in Kansas, that Grandma Winnie was enjoying her Saturday morning vintage rock and would walk through the door at any moment with talk of pancakes.
But the music was gentle, not percussive, composed with what was probably a harp. And Thia’s sheets at home weren’t this scratchy.
She opened her eyes.
She was in a bedroom, resting in a large, canopied bed. A fire crackled in a stone hearth across the room to her, and brightly colored tapestries draped down each oak-paneled wall. She recalled walking across the plains, Archer and Dess half carrying her between them, until horses met them at the behest of Archer’s heralding spark. Next, a short but treacherous ride up a steep hill to Aelfort, the castle of Lord Sagan, and Archer’s command for servants to bathe and house them, before Thia had passed out gratefully in this bed.
The door creaked open on rusted hinges. A woman entered carrying a large tray of what appeared to be clean linens. She wore a long blue dress, her brown hair in a braid. “You’re awake.” She set the tray down on a side table. “How are you feeling?”
“Good,” Thia replied, surprised at the answer. She felt no pain; she examined her thigh and shoulder injuries Archer hadn’t healed on the plains.
They were gone.
“It was lucky milord’s soldiers were patrolling the borderlands. Archer tells me you could’ve lost that leg.” There was warmth in the way she said his name, familiarity in the slopes of their noses and pinkish-white skin. Her son perhaps.
Then she processed the rest of the woman’s sentence.
Lost. Her leg.She didn’t remember that much agony; perhaps adrenaline had kept her from feeling the worst of it, or something numbing in the nÿgen’s bite. She inspected the half-moon ring of scars across her thigh, and the longer, thicker slice along her calf, never loving the soft, dimpled flesh more.
