“Gods,” she breathes, and then her jaw sets so hard I hear her teeth click. “Who did this?”
I push upright, forcing my posture into something steadier than I feel. “Stay calm.”
Her gaze snaps to mine, furious. “You don’t get to tell me to stay calm when you’re bleeding into the forest.”
“It is not fatal,” I lie.
Her eyes narrow as if she can taste the lie in the air. “Not yet.”
Amelia’s hands move to my shoulder before I can stop her, careful but fast, fingers bracketing the shaft, her magic already reaching into the wound. The poison reacts to her touch, spiking pain through me making my breath punch out.
She doesn’t flinch.
“Hold still,” she orders.
“I am holding still.”
“You are vibrating with stubbornness,” she snaps, and then her focus locks in, brutal and absolute.
Amelia draws her magic inward, not outward, threading it into the wound with a precision that makes my skin prickle. She isn’t trying to burn the poison away. She is listening to it, isolating it, tracing its path through tissue and conduit as if tracking a predator through brush.
Her power shifts, darkening slightly at the edges, blood magic, controlled and deliberate. I feel the sharp point of it like a needle sliding under skin, and I force myself not to recoil. This is not my realm of magic, and I have learned that Purna work demands trust.
Amelia’s voice is low now, almost to herself. “It’s laced. It’s designed to bind to your channels.”
My jaw tightens. “Can you remove it?”
“Yes,” she says, and the word is so steady it almost breaks me. “But you will hate it.”
“I can endure it,” I tell her.
She gives me a look that says she doubts that. Then she braces one hand on my chest, steadying me, and brings the other to her own palm. With a small, efficient motion she slices the skin, just enough for blood to bead bright and red.
I start to protest, and she cuts me off. “Don’t.”
Her blood touches my wound.
The effect is immediate. The poison reacts violently, drawn toward the new source like it recognizes something older than itself. Amelia’s magic becomes a funnel, coaxing the toxin out of my veins and into her blood, where she can trap it. The sensation is brutal, cold dragging through my shoulder, then heat, then a deep ache as the poison is ripped from places it has already begun to invade.
My vision blurs. I grit my teeth and force air into my lungs.
Amelia’s face is set in concentration, sweat beading at her hairline, lips parted with controlled breaths. Her eyes flick to mine once, and the fear there is real, naked for a heartbeat before she buries it under discipline.
“Stay with me,” she says quietly.
The command lands differently than any order I’ve ever taken. I nod once, because it is all I can manage.
She draws again, deeper this time, siphoning the last threads of toxin until the burning fades into a dull throb. When she finally pulls her hand away, the blood in her palm has darkened, almost black at the edges, poison contained within a web of magic.
She exhales hard and closes her fist around it, sealing it away.
For a moment we simply stand there in the quiet forest, her hand still braced on my chest, my heartbeat hammering under her palm. The urge to pull her against me is immediate and fierce. I do not, because she is still shaking, subtly, but unmistakably.
Amelia swallows and lifts her gaze to the arrow shaft. “Don’t touch it,” she says, voice tight. “The warding is… complicated.”
“I noticed,” I mutter.
She huffs a breath that might have been a laugh in any other context. Then her attention shifts to the fletching, the markings burned into the wood near the base, thin symbols arranged in a pattern that is meant to be hidden unless you know what to look for.
