Page 258 of The Sun He Buried

The bond says the rest. He’d have kept coming until the road ended or he did.

Baldr stands a few paces away.

Blood darkens his coat and sword. A shallow cut crosses his forearm. His amber eye’s stopped glowing.

He watches Eirik’s hand move to the back of my head before I wince. Watches him turn my face toward the light before I tell him where the blow fell.

The hurt crosses his face.

He lowers his sword.

I reach one hand toward him.

Baldr takes it.

His palm’s warm and rough. He squeezes once, then lets me keep the space between us.

Eirik doesn’t release me.

Baldr doesn’t ask him to.

Snowpetal purrs against both their blood.

Beyond the open door, red covers the clearing. Bodies lie between the black pines. Fine vein-silver mesh spills from one broken crate, and eight stolen bars rest beneath it.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Varrik’s blood takes three bowls of water to remove.

The first turns red. The second stays pink around my fingers. By the third, the skin across my knuckles has closed and the water remains clear.

I wash them again.

Solveih sits in the chair beside my hearth with her left ankle wrapped, both wrists bandaged, and a narrow strip of linen crossing the cut near her temple. Asta finished cleaning the blood from her hair twenty minutes ago. The curls are still damp against her neck.

Snowpetal sleeps in her lap.

The healer cut away the fur around the wound in the Sanguir’s side, stitched it, and wrapped her front leg. Snowpetal objected to every part. She bit through one leather glove, broke a stool with her tail, and accepted the indignity only when Solveih put both hands around her face.

Now she’s asleep with Varrik’s man still dark around the base of her horns.

The healer declined to try a fourth cloth.

Wise woman.

Solveih watches me scrub clean hands.

I reach for the soap again.

“They’re clean,” she says.

“Not yet.”

“I watched you wash them.”

“Your head was struck.”

“It still works.”