Page 24 of Bite Bonded Bride

The perimeter has been breached.

Warriors move in organized chaos, shouting coordinates in Vrakken I only half-understand. Someone is carrying someone who is no longer moving. A child sits against a far wall clutching something to her chest, staring at nothing.

I don't wait for directions. I don't actually know what to make of a dying kingdom, but I know how to meet a crisis.

Zareth pulls me back. His hand finds the back of my neck, his thumb presses against the base of my skull like a signature.

"Stay inside the citadel walls," he says.

"I always do," I lie.

A smile twitches at the corner of his mouth. Then he nods in acceptance, drops his hand and walks toward the chaos, and the crowd parts for him without being asked, warriors straightening instinctively as he passes, and I watch him disappear into the noise of his dying kingdom like he was made to stand amidst it.

Maybe he was.

I turn away before I do something embarrassing, like keep watching.

I find Seralya at the infirmary—herbal compounds and alchemical ink and blood, all of it concentrated in a wide chamber off the main corridor that's been converted into something desperate. She's moving between pallets with the efficiency of someone who gave up sleeping three days ago.

"What do you need?" I say.

She looks up. Then past me, looking for Zareth, then back to me.

"Can you pack a wound?" she asks.

"Yes."

"Can you set a pressure splint without magic?"

"I was surveying unstable mines before I could grow a beard. Yes."

She hands me a roll of linen and points.

I work. I don't think about what I'm working on, not the species, not the politics, not the fact that every patient in this room would have been ordered to kill me four days ago. I think about the wound in my sight. I think about whether the linen is tight enough, whether the bleeding is slowing, whether the breath coming out of this warrior's chest sounds like fluid or just fear.

It sounds like fear. That I understand universally.

I am tying off a splint on a guard's shattered forearm when I become aware of being watched.

The elder is small, hunched and gaunt, her white eyes nearly opaque, skin so marked with magical corruption she looks like cracked marble. She has been sitting propped against the far wall for however long I've been here, and I assumed she was unconscious.

She isn't.

She is watching my hands.

Not with hunger nor suspicion. With something slower, the particular attention of someone cataloguing an answer to a question they've held for a long time. When I finish with the guard and sit back on my heels, she inclines her head. Barely. The smallest possible movement.

I don't know the Vrakken word for thank you. I'm not sure there is one. I nod back.

Seralya appears at my shoulder.

"She lost her granddaughter to the last breach," she says quietly, not looking up from the poultice she's preparing. "She hasn't spoken since."

I watch the elder's closed eyes. The slow rise and fall of her chest.

Inside me, a knot tightly woven loosens a thread.

I came here for money. For Edrin's wellbeing, for the apothecary's patience, for the luxury of not watching my brother ration his remedies by counting drops. I wonder if he’s okay, if he thinks I’m dead. I told myself this was a contract. A job. A line I would draw around myself and not cross.