No. No.No no no no.
“Get back,” I snarled savagely at them, as if they were my enemies. “Nobody touches her. Nobody touches her but me!”
“Oh, Christ. Oxriel, Zoren. Run and get a healer. Now!” Valeria’s frantic voice was behind me. “Grim, go to the shuttle and get the stretcher. If she has a neck injury, we need to be careful moving her.”
I skidded to my knees. I did not feel the way the rocks bit me.
“She saved me,” Zaria was repeating over and over again as Arton shoved his way into the scene and dragged her up against his chest. Her sight stars were blown with shock and fear. “She saved me. She saved me.”
“Hush now, mate,” Arton murmured. “You are safe now.”
“Because she saved me!”
So much red blood in her beautiful hair. The strands were soaked and shining with it.
“She pushed me out of the way,” Zaria whispered. “She saved me.”
She was breathing. But she did not move and she did not speak.
“Someone give me something!” Something.Anything. Anything that would fix this.
“Here, my Gahn.” That was Linnet behind me now, speaking gravely. She handed me a long, folded band of clean spinner silk, freshly woven, saying something about it “staying dry in the basket.”
My hands shook as I held it.Spinner silk. I remembered Nazreen putting her arms around me for the very first time in the spinner’s cave, and on my knees beside her now, it was as if something vital and vulnerable in my chest became physically punctured. I was bleeding out inside. Without ever having sustained a wound.
I gritted my fangs so hard my jaw crackled and gently pressed the spinner silk to her wound. Things happened in a blur around me then. The only constant for me was Nazreen. Nazreen so pale and still on the ground. Nazreen with Vrika’s blood being dumped upon her by Salina, the closest healer who’d answered the Sea Sand men’s call. Nazreen’s neck being held so still as she was carefully loaded and then strapped onto a bright yellow plank that Grim produced from the skies knew where. The plank had wheels on legs that extended from its flat bottom, but the terrain was far too uneven for that. Grim and I carried her between us.
I should have been able to carry her alone. I should have never let this happen at all.
Zaria’s words echoed in my head.She saved me.
Nazreen had sacrificed herself for one of my people.It should have been me.
For so much of my life, I’d attempted to not feel much of anything at all. But it was as if stopping it all up for so long made everything suddenly all the more explosive now. Grief. Shame. Fury. Fear. Hatred. Longing. Then hatred and hatred and hatred again, aimed solely and squarely at myself. They all lashed me, one after the other, in nauseating succession, until I was certain that, in any other circumstances – circumstances that did not involve carrying the battered body of the woman I loved – I would have been driven to my knees. Just like I had been at the sight of her face-down on the stones.
We made it to the aguir circle outside of my mountain before she stirred. I saw the flicker of her eyelids immediately, heard the stuttered change in her breathing.
“Nazreen,” I hissed, stopping walking and not quite daring to let myself be relieved by this. “I have you. My beautiful one. I have you.”
Valeria rushed in at Grim’s side to see Nazreen’s face.
“Nasrin? It’s Valeria. We’ve got you. We’re going to get you on the shuttle right now and take you to the Sea Sands.”
Nazreen gave a groan then. Then, in a cracking voice, “No.”
“I will go with her.” But of course, as soon as I said the words, I knew I couldn’t. How could I? With this new threat facing my mountain? The borog with wings. It could appear anywhere. At anytime. My people needed their Gahn.
“I don’t think she wants to go,” Tilly said with quiet firmness.
“Well, she has a serious head injury!” Valeria exclaimed. “So maybe someone who isn’t concussed should be making that decision!” She took a calming breath before going on. “The big ship in the Sea Sands has a lot more medical stuff. We could do X-rays. We don’t even know if she has a spinal cord injury or not!”
“But even if the X-ray shows something,” Tilly said in that same quiet voice, “what could we do about it? We have some people with medical training, sure. But it’s not like we’ve got a neurosurgeon on board. Of course, we could dump her in the pools of Lavrika’s blood. But it would take a while to get there even with the shuttle, and if there is damage, it might be too far gone. Like Ark.” She glanced at me then. “Ark is one of Gahn Baldor’s warriors. He lost most of his eyesight in a fight. His tribe’s healers restored some of it, but not all. Once he was part of our settlement, he tried dunking in the pools of Lavrika’s blood, because that’s done some pretty miraculous things for others. But it had no effect after that much time.”
“Fuck,” whispered Valeria, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes. “Let me think.”
“What is it?” I snapped. “Will going back to the Sea Sands help her or not?”
There were few things I wanted less that Nazreen returning to that place.
