AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I hurried back to Siegfried and rooted in amongst Devon’s few belongings was the cloth bag that had been taken along with all my property when the mercenaries had kidnapped me, all those days ago. Thank the gods they hadn’t thrown it away, and that it was Devon who’d taken it, not one of the others. I had a hunch that Vorst or Bronson wouldn’t have kept hold of a bag of herbs and powders, but Devon was a little more thoughtful. All Aunt Leah’s warriors carried such bags with them, the contents especially important for battle. The oils and herbs could only do so much, but they helped stem the flow of blood, they disinfected, they aided sleep, and they could take away some portion of the pain.
Devon grimaced as I applied dried leaves around the cut, numbing the area a little before I attempted to pull the arrow out.
“Sorry.” Reaching back into the bag, I took out a small packet of powder, wrapped in greased paper. I took a portion of it and spread it along my finger.
“Sniff this. It will help.”
The powder didn’t actually take away the pain, but it took you someplace else. Aunt Leah, who was an amateur doctor as much as a warrior and philosopher, had explained to me that pain was not real, it was not a ‘thing’, it only existed in the mind, so if you could give the brain something else to do, then you felt it less. The powder, which the other girls called ‘dream dust’, did nothing to numb the senses, but it gave you something else to think about.
“Ohhh…” Devon’s eyes dilated as the powder took swift effect. He looked at me, his focus uncertain. “Why am I lying down? Let’s go for a run—no, let’s fly.”
Of course, that was the problem with dream dust: it stopped you from thinking you were hurting and encouraged you to do other things which ended up making your injuries worse.
“Let’s just lie still,” I suggested.
“Okay.” He looked at me again. “By the gods, you are beautiful. Why have I never said as much to you before? Or have I?”
“No, you haven’t.”
He nodded. “I’ve always thought it, Selena, but I never said it.” He looked down at himself then. “Why am I naked?”
“I wish I knew.”
It was just rambling—the words of a man out of his mind. It didn’t mean anything. He was looking at me, but he could have been seeing a two-headed unicorn with stars for eyes and fabulous breasts for all I knew. You couldn’t rely on what people said on dream dust.
Anyway, I needed to work fast now, the effects of the dream dust didn’t last long, and giving people a second hit could lead those happy dreams to become ugly and terrifying—I’d seen girls shrieking in horror, their bodies convulsing. You could even suffer a heart attack as the dust drove you too far.
I gripped the arrow’s shaft where it had entered Devon’s body and heard the slight gasp that told me the pain was still there behind the delusions.
“There’s nothing I can do to stop this from hurting.”
“If there’s nothing you can do, there’s nothing you can do,” drawled Devon. “If it’s going to hurt, it’s going to hurt. And it’ll hurt. But it hurts now—doesn’t it? I can’t tell—so it may as well hurt then as well. Hey… that rhymes.”
“It’s going to hurt worse.” Probing around the entrance, I tried to ascertain how the arrow head was oriented so I could take it out through the existing wound rather than tearing his flesh further.
But there was only so much I could spare.
“Bite down on this.” I placed a stick between his teeth and, for a second, it seemed that reality found its way through the dream dust, and Devon gave me a curt nod;do it.
I wouldn’t quickly forget the sound that issued from Devon’s throat as I pulled the arrow out of him. He didn’t scream, but the sound of the scream caught in his throat was almost as bad. The tendons in his neck stood out, his face a rictus of agony, eyes screwed up, jaw clamped so tight on the stick that I thought he might bite through it.
Arrows are designed to be hard to remove, to go as deep as they can on the way in, and do as much damage as they can on the way out. It wasn’t as easy or as quick as I would have liked, and I had to steel myself and block out the noises Devon made as the pain burst through the dream dust fantasy.
Finally, the head of the arrow came out, cruelly serrated, not the sort of arrow you used on a human at all. Perhaps someone had mistaken him for a wild dog poaching sheep.
Devon collapsed back down to the ground, his body heaving, bathed in sweat so he glowed in the firelight. The knife’s blade in the fire was also glowing.
No time to waste, no time to let him relax and get his senses back. The dream dust’s effect was already receding, so better to get the rest of it over with. I wrapped my hand in my blouse to hold the hot handle of the glowing blade as I drew it from the flames.
“I’m so sorry.” I couldn’t even be sure he heard me.
This time, he did scream, an animal howl, echoing into the night. Try as I might, I couldn’t block out the sound, nor the smell of burned flesh in the air. Such terrible pain, and it all might be for nothing—there were no guarantees that any of this would be enough to save him.
I’d expected him to pass out from the pain, but somehow Devon remained conscious. He seemed to be forcing himself to do so, and I wondered what it was inside him that drove him so relentlessly to do the things he did. As ever, Devon seemed to me a mass of contradictions; so casual about everything, and yet at times so focused and unwilling to let anything go. He had a reason, I was sure of that. And it wasn’t money. Something made Devon do the things he did, whether that was kidnapping Uther and me or resisting unconsciousness now, something wouldn’t let him off.
Though he stayed awake, he was clearly exhausted. His body had gone limp after being held in tension for so long, and the sweat now ran down his sides in rivulets, across the muscular contours of his body.
Stupidly, I suddenly felt embarrassed by his nudity, which, now that the crisis was over, suddenly seemed so much more obvious. I felt as if I kept staring at… it. And the more I tried to stop myself staring, the more I seemed to end up looking, until I took my blanket and put it across him.
