Page 122 of Beds and Blades

The armor came off. The wounds were significant, the result of sustained contact with something faster and stronger than a human opponent.

The pendant pulsed. The wounds began to close.

I had seen wounds like this before, in the infirmary after the siege. They looked like the wounds of someone who had survived something she had not been supposed to survive.

Varia remained pale. Sweat gathered at her hairline despite the cold room, and her skin had the drained, bloodless quality I had noticed at the gate.

I thought of Varia in the snow. Her voice even, her flask in her hands, telling me what it had felt like when her claimed man joined the dark bond. The warmth had shifted but had not disappeared. Not right away.

I thought of what she had said: I could not say it to myself in the specific privacy of my own mind.

Now it made sense to me.

I was doing the same thing. The data was present, the conclusion was possible, and I was not going to arrive at it yet because arriving at it meant it was true.

Varia had been in a battle. She had been in the cold all night. She had lost blood. She had walked miles alone through the dark.

People looked different after those things.

Pallor was blood loss. Sweating was shock. Exhaustion was exhaustion. These were facts. The conclusion I was not drawing was not yet required by them.

I sat with her until she slept. Deep and immediate, the unconsciousness of complete depletion.

I went to find Skip.

***

I told Skip about the eyes. The skin. I told him what I had observed, what I had not concluded, and what I was asking him to consider.

“She was in a sustained engagement,” he said. “In the open field. In the cold. She lost blood. She walked back from Nema alone. People look different after those things. The body pulls everything inward. The eyes go flat. The color changes.”

“Yes,” I said.

His words said Varia could still be saved. The bond carried no matching certainty.

“Watch her carefully,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

***

I went back to the infirmary late that afternoon.

Caen was no longer there, presumably resting after the effort of healing Varia’s wounds.

Varia was still asleep, her breathing deep and even. Her skin remained unnaturally pale, and she was still sweating.

I stood beside the bed and watched her breathe.

Nothing about it was proof.

That was the problem.

I told Skip what I had seen.

He said the same things. The cold. The blood loss. The body under extreme stress. The strain of healing. He said the words as if he needed them to be true, not as if he believed them.

He agreed to post a single armed soldier at the infirmary door, positioned where he could watch the bed. Varia was freshly healed but still depleted by blood loss. If she woke changed and hostile, one guard should have been enough to kill her before she reached him.