I give him what he asks for too. I pull the arrows from his chest and heal the wounds they leave behind as best I can. Then I heal the hip wound that brought him to the ground.
“Can we afford to take prisoners now, sir?” asks Taran as I help the boy up. “They wouldn’t do the same for us if it had gone the other way.”
I point at a fallen member of the city guard on the ground not a dozen feet away. She’s beyond healing. “He can eat her ration.”
Taran shakes his head at my soft heart as I knew he would, but he doesn’t argue. The healers from the city temples take the field and join me. By the time the sun is overhead, we’ve carried thirty wounded back into Faros, more than half of them Nithyrian.
“Urgent message for you, your majesty,” says a palace servant on my fifth trip back out into the field.
I groan and take the folded note, which can only be bad news. Whatever is inside is almost certainly going to keep me from the rest I so desperately need at this point.
Sighing and squinting at it won’t make it go away, so I open it and face the music.
I was wrong. It isn’t bad news after all.
“Let’s go,” I say to Taran, pushing the elixir I’m carrying into the arms of a nearby healer.
“What’s happened?” he asks, following close behind.
“Quinn’s awake.”
Chapter Seven
Ronan
By the time we make it back to the palace, a small crowd has gathered in Quinn’s chambers to welcome her back.
Or rather, outside of her chambers. Because as they’re all being informed by a harried-looking healer, she isn’t accepting visitors.
“Make way,” I say, and the crowd parts for me. The healer bows and backs away from the door to let me pass.
“Go the fuck away!” yells Quinn as I open the door. An empty wooden bowl flies through the air, impacting the wall inches from my head. “Oh fuck, sorry Ronan. I thought you were that damn healer again.”
Quinn is propped up on a stack of pillows, her short, red hair freshly washed and mostly concealed by a towel. Her skin is still pale and her eyes are hollow, but she otherwise looks unharmed. The healer’s magic did its job, thank the gods.
“Have you been throwing things at the healers?” I ask. “They kept you alive, you know.”
“Barely. I’m kicking my left leg right now. Can you see it?”
There’s no movement beneath the white sheets.
“And look. Here comes the right one.”
Nothing.
Behind me, Taran lets out a low whistle.
“Exactly,” says Quinn. “I can’t fucking move, Ronan. This is what the healers did for me. They trapped me in this damn body.”
That’s obviously unfair of her to say. Without the healers keeping her breathing since the fight in the throne room two days ago, she’d be dead. And there are many wounded who lose the use of their legs but go on to live full lives—I treated a young woman just today with an injury to her back that will likely result in the same fate. Even magic has its limits.
But it won’t help Quinn to tell her this, not now. “Did they say whether you might recover?” I know from experience that sometimes these injuries improve in the first few weeks or months.
“I don’t fucking know. You ask them. They were all very excited because I screamed when they stabbed me in the right hip with a fucking needle. I asked if that meant I would walk again, and they told me it’s too early to say.”
Considering Quinn’s tendency to throw things at people who give her answers she doesn’t like, I don’t blame them for refusing to get her hopes up. I’ll speak to the head healer myself before I leave to get a better answer.
“How are you feeling, though?” I take a seat on the edge of the bed, close but not too close. Taran sits in a chair opposite me at a safe distance.
