“We had best cut it.”
“I do not want to. I will have naught against the cold.”
He had naught. Because of her.
Savagely, she blinked away the tears that came again.
“Let me.”
Somehow she got the garment off him, at great cost in his pain. Tenderly she laid it aside. Eyed the wound.
Her head went light again.
Blood coursed down his freckled back. The wound was a jagged tear around the iron arrowhead and what was left of the shaft.
Adair swept his hair aside. “Ye saw how I did for Wen. Ye must free the barbs, cut away the flesh around them.”
She had not seen—she’d been holding the hound. Anyway,she could not.
She must.
“Aye. Gi’ me the knife.”
He passed it to her, their fingers brushing.
She rinsed the blade carefully with water. Saw her own fingers move like something in a dream.
Alba, help me.
It got no less dreamlike when she set blade to flesh. As if she watched some other woman from affair, she freed the barbs on the iron head, which she could see. Ignored the blood that flowed. Blood would cleanse the wound.
It took all her strength to withdraw the arrowhead.
Adair made not a sound. But when the ugly thing came free of his flesh, he sank down to lie limp upon the ground, which shattered the spell that held Bradana in its grip.
For one terrible moment she thought he was dead.
“Adair?”
“Clean the wound. Water.” His voice came in a croak.
She did, reaching hard for control. His back rose and fell with his breaths. She did a reasonably neat job of bandaging the wound, but she worried. The knife blade was dirty. The blanket filthy.
How might these two she adored survive?
Chapter Thirty-Two
They spent thenight there in the thorny thicket. Bradana did not stir even to lead the ponies to the stream, though they must want water.
Wen fell into a deep sleep, and Adair into a restless one. Bradana, on guard, did not sleep at all, busy listening or checking her patients one after the other for signs of renewed bleeding or fever.
Wen’s bandage felt hot to her touch and the hound refused to move much. He did not try to stand. If he could not, she feared he would grow weaker and weaker.
She laid her hand across Adair’s forehead often. Clammy and sweaty, but no heat there. Not yet. She could not tell, after a time, whether he slept or had fallen unconscious. Whichever, he stirred often and mumbled words she could not catch.
When dim light began to turn the air from black to gray, she went out again for more water. They could not stay here indefinitely. The ponies would need to graze. Adair and Wen would need food. They had none.
Wen had been their provider.
