Page 108 of Winter Gods & Serpents

“I need you to pull this one down too.”

“Can’t you just put it on top and call it a day?”

“No, I need to clean it and stop the bleeding.” I pulled her face to me. “Do I need to undress you too?”

She snatched her face away from my hands and blew a heavy breath of annoyance before letting the straps fall down revealing her back, while she crossed her hands over her chest.

I froze, not from the gnarly sight of the fresh slash but at old scars that stretched in thin lines and gashes everywhere across her back. I could not help but run my fingers over them, and she flinched.

“What?” she asked, turning her head back to inspect my touch. “Is it that bad? Just put some snow over and be done with it.”

“Who has done those to you?” My fingers roaming and curving around every scar. So many of them; so much pain. Her father? Her uncle? Murdoc? My people? Heavens, why? Pulse beating heavy on my ears at each name.

She went still before coldly answering, “You’re a soldier Kilian, I expect you to be familiar with scars, don’t be so disgusted.”

“Who has done those to you, I asked.” Who would dare hurt her? How—

She turned half way to me, studying my face and her brows furrowed in. “Can’t remember, it was too long ago, now the wound.”

Lie.

“How long ago?”

They were thin, some faded in places, she had to have been very young—too young. Too cruel. To. Terribly. Cruel.

She shifted where she sat. “Heavens, let it go would you. What it is to you anyway?”

Nothing, it was nothing to me, yet I demanded, “How long ago?”

She groaned frustrated. “Long. Long enough I can’t even remember when I got few of them.”

A build-up of primal anger rippled through me as I dared ask, “Your father?”

“My gods, I am freezing and no,” she groaned. “He doesn’t get his own hands dirty.”

“Why?”

“Because I was not shitting magic,” she said, hesitating before muttering under her breath, “A few because of attitude issues.”

“He thought he could beat them out of you?”

“He did more than beat, now if you wish to converse with a frozen corpse I suggest enough with the questioning.”

I noticed her skin prickled and her breath growing in heavy white mist. I could not believe my eyes or my ears. How had anyone allowed for her to be abused of this sort?

I cautiously cleaned her wound, another that would become a scar. She had not healed them, why had she kept all of them? Not even soldiers kept them.

Putting snow atop to moisten the cloth, it made her hiss and arch her back pulling the rest of the shirt lower, revealing the rest of her back. A dark branch patterned tattoo took most of her lower back, curving around her hips and her lower stomach.

“A tattoo?”

“What about it?” she asked, straightening and pulling the shirt over it to cover the strange design.

“Unusual, it’s either magic or I am recruiting the wrong people as soldiers. I have seen trained grown men and women cry from a small line. You have a back full of them.” I said, pulling her shirt down again to have a closer look, refraining myself from running my fingers over them too. Her fair skin pristine around the black ink. “Pretty.”

She turned to me abruptly. “Pretty? I’d never heard that from men before. It’s usually, ‘why would you taint your flesh’, ‘aren’t the scars not enough ruin to your pretty flesh’ and many of the sort.”

What idiot would say that? “You don’t have the best decision-making skills, your taste in men quite the same apparently.”