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“Then you aren’t really his pup,” Lefric said. “Not yet, at least. Unless he’s already fucked you.”
I shook my head.
That was a terrible idea, since the second I did, my head swam and I stumbled.
Magnus, of all people, lunged toward me and stopped me from falling. He caught me with one arm, then winced. “Lefric.”
Lefric rushed over to take me from Magnus.
“On the boat,” Magnus ordered us. “Everyone.” He glared at Dmitri. “Throw him in one of the empty cabins and keep it guarded until I decide what to do with him.”
“Yes, sir,” Jace said, shoving Dmitri toward the gangplank with the help of Magnus’s aide.
“Do you need the healer as well?” Magnus asked me as the two of us and Lefric followed them to the gangplank and across to the ship, a few of Magnus’s men who had hung back at the edge of the confrontation taking up the rear. They hauled the gangplank onto the boat once we were aboard.
I shook my head, then looked at my hands. “Maybe for my hands.”
“He needs something to drink,” Lefric said. “Water. And probably something to eat. And a bath. And clean clothes. Fuck, was there anything in that boat that you needed?”
I shook my head as I stumbled into Magnus’s massive boat. Now that I’d reached relative safety, everything that had been pressing on me seemed so heavy that I could barely stand anymore, let alone walk.
Magnus sensed as much and slipped his arm around my shoulders. Together with Lefric, he led me toward a sitting area near the front of the boat that consisted of crates and barrels arranged in a half circle, as well a as a few folding chairs. Ludvig had been taken there as well and laid on the deck. The soldier healer crouched beside him, unbuckling this breastplate and arm guards so that he could move more deftly as he treated Ludvig, or so I assumed.
I was somewhat surprised to find Gennadi and a young man with white-blond hair standing anxiously together near the side of the sitting area.
“Gennadi, Avenel, fetch water and bread for Anton,” Magnus snapped.
Both men jumped to do as they were ordered.
“What is the nature of this man’s injuries?” the healer asked me as he leaned over Ludvig, carefully moving his bandaged arm. “And is there a healer’s kit on board?”
One of the men I didn’t know rushed away, hopefully to fetch the kit.
Magnus and Lefric helped me to sit on the deck not far from Ludvig. I thought it was strange that they didn’t seat me on a barrel or a crate, but when I realized how much effort it took for me just to sit up, I thought it was a good idea. I’d fall off anything I was made to sit on.
“He was stabbed in the side with a short sword several days ago,” I said, both trying to remember the specifics and to forget everything that had led up to our capture. “He received more than a few blunt blows in the fight before he was stabbed, and he has a cut on his arm, but it isn’t very deep.”
The healer nodded. “And what about the other one?” He glanced to the hatch Jace and the aide had dragged Dmitri down through.
“Worry about that dead man later,” Magnus said in a cold voice. “Ludvig is the one who needs to live. Whatever it takes, whatever you need, he has to live.”
The irony of Magnus wishing death on one man and all but begging for another to be saved wasn’t lost on me. If I were honest, I’d have to admit I felt the same way.
“I stopped the bleeding once we were thrown into the study in Seymchan’s palace after the fight,” I said, trying to recall details as my brain grew foggy. “Seymchan’s palace doesn’t have a dungeon, so they had to put us in whatever room was empty and have it guarded. That might be what saved our lives.”
Magnus nodded patiently, resting his hand on my shoulder again. “I am eager to hear your story, to hear how you ended up in Seymchan and what has happened in the eastern forest. But Ludvig is our first priority now.”
I knew he was right, but it took every power of concentration I had to think about what was most important for the people around me to know. I scrubbed my dirty face with my hands before remembering how blistered they were. The pain that jolted through me brought a bit of clarity with it.
“I’m not sure if the stab wound is infected or not,” I said, gesturing to Ludvig’s ripped shirt and the makeshift bandage I’d wrapped around his middle. The bandage had been part of the lining of the curtains in the room we’d been locked in. “There was a lot of blood, but only blood. I didn’t see any guts or bile or anything else like that. I think the soldier missed everything important.”
“You may be right,” the healer said as he peeled back Ludvig’s filthy shirt and the slightly cleaner bandage under it.
As soon as he exposed Ludvig’s wound, it started to ooze blood again. The edges of the wound were red, but there was no pus.
Magnus sucked in a breath at the sight anyhow. I wasn’t sure if he was aware of it, but he shrugged his right shoulder slightly, the shoulder he’d been stabbed in when Edik tried to kill him in the spring. I knew he was fond of Ludvig—Ludvig was his first beloved’s brother, after all, and they’d known each other before any of them had left the Old Realm for the frontier—but seeing the genuine distress in Magnus’s eyes was confirmation of just how much.
We both watched as the healer pushed Ludvig’s tattered shirt and the bandage as far back from the wound as he could, his expression grim. “It needs to be cleaned,” he said, “but I’ve seen worse. You’ve done a good job under what I can only imagine are difficult circumstances.”
