I didn’t think. I moved.
Jasira cursed again, reaching for me, but I slipped through the fray, hands low, breath quick.
The man groaned as I knelt beside him, eyes fluttering open, blood coating his palms. He reached for a dagger, but it slipped from his fingers and landed near my knee.
I picked it up by the hilt—slick, stained, and still warm—and grimaced. The weight of it felt wrong and mean in my hand.
With a shudder, I flung it into the trees. It vanished into the underbrush with a satisfying thud.
“Absolutely not,” I muttered. “You don’t get that back.”
Pressing my hand to the wound, I hissed. “Stay still.”
His skin was cold beneath my touch, but I worked fast, my fingers trembling yet certain.
This kind of bleeding, this rhythm of life slipping away, was familiar to me. I smeared lunethistle pastealong the wound to dull the pain, then packed it with moss and balsamroot, whispering half-formed prayers to any god who might still be listening.
He spat near my foot, but I didn’t flinch.
“You heal your enemies now?” he rasped, his voice rough and bitter. “What kind of fool are you?”
“The kind that doesn’t want another body in the dirt,” I whispered, pressing his hand over the dressing. “You’re still a person, and that matters to me.”
His breath shuddered. But he didn’t fight anymore.
And then, just like that, the battle was over.
The last two mercenaries had fled. Three lay dead among the brambles. The fifth, the one I had saved, remained against the tree, pale and sweaty, but alive.
They argued about what to do with him.
Alaric, arms crossed and eyes sharp, wanted to strip him of weapons and dignity, leave him bleeding in the dirt with a warning in his ear.
Tyren, still raw from the fight, offered to end it quickly. “He’d do the same to any of us,” he said flatly.
But I stepped between them.
“He won’t,” I said, more confidently than I really felt. “Not today.”
Alaric raised an eyebrow. “You think a little mercy will change a man like that?”
“No,” I replied. “But killing him won’t changeuseither.”
They hesitated. The silence stretched.
“If he can walk, he walks away,” I said, voice steady. “We don’t stoop to blood for blood. Not today.”
In the end, Corren left him with a waterskin and some rations. I watched as he crawled to the edge of the clearing, each strained movement a vivid portrait of his suffering. He didn’t thank us. And he didn’t look back.
I stood watching, breath shallow, hands sticky with blood and salve once again.
Then Erindor’s shadow fell over me.
“What the hell were you thinking?”
His voice was low, furious, not like the heat of battle, but colder, sharper, more personal. His eyes blazed down at me, and I turned slowly to face him.
“He was dying,” I insisted, lifting my chin. An act of defiance despite the tremor that rattled my voice. “He’s human.”
