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The lynx kept its glowing gaze on me as I obeyed, clamping my palm down, hiding my wince.
“I’m going to tie it tight.” The girl flinched. “It needs pressure to stop bleeding.”
I nodded. Whatever she wanted to do was fine. Life had lost its cruelty, leaving me woozy and weak. Whatever sickness lived within me hadn’t been washed away, and as she wrapped dried sinew around my arm, crossing over the fur, and knotting it tight by my wrist, I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to fight the heavy, sluggish urge to rest.
Dropping her hands, she studied me. Worry etched her brow as urgency filled her. “Come on. We need to get you to a healer.”
I merely nodded.
Too numb with pain to argue.
The lynx padded before us, darting up the short embankment, watching us from the ridge. It seemed so high, so hard.
It’s just a small incline.
I’d climbed mountains while I’d been searching for this girl.
This was nothing.
I followed the lynx and the girl as they made short work of the hill. I almost fell to my knees as I climbed after her. Sweat broke out down my back, colder than the river yet somehow making me burn and shiver at the same time.
By the time I traded the tree-lined shadows of the water for the moon-glowing grasslands stretching far ahead, I panted far too fast. The edges of my vision danced with grey, and I jerked as something soft and wonderful pressed against me.
“Here.” Her arm twined around my waist.
I moaned and buried my nose in her hair, tripping into her.
“I’ll help you,” she breathed. “Just lean on me. We’ll get back to camp, then you can rest.”
I nodded, never taking my face out of her river-sweet hair. The lynx padded beside us, a friend for now, and I fell into a lullaby of step, step, step.
Doing my best to stay awake, I raised my head and studied the horizon. Silver glinting seedheads swayed in the night breeze, and the steady plume of smoke from their eternal fire showed us the way.
Crickets sang.
Bats flitted and dived.
And two silhouettes appeared suddenly before us.
Chapter Fifteen
. Girl .
MY EYES FLASHED TO THE man beside me as he sucked in a breath and stiffened.
He didn’t look down at me; his attention locked on the sea of grass before us. Syn grumbled once, then broke into a run, vanishing into the thickets as a male voice whipped my head forward.
Oh, no...
“We thought you came this way.” Aktor’s ash-tattooed chest gleamed in the moonlight. The furs draping over his thighs still glittered with the decorative beads and knotted strings that he’d worn to his baby brother’s naming ceremony, swinging with every step.
He and Kivva strode toward us, cutting through the tall grass with power.
The closer they came, the more I wanted to run back to the river.
Aktor’s black, intense gaze narrowed on the man standing beside me. “I thought we’d find you alone, Girl...yet you’re with someone.” His teeth bared. “Someone who isn’t one of us.” He stepped closer, his knuckles whitening around the fire-hardened spear he held. A spear that I’d often seen stained with blood after a successful hunt.
Lowering the tip just a little, he growled, “Who are you?”
The stranger removed his arm from around me slowly. The fur I’d wrapped around his wounded forearm seemed odd with the rest of him bare. Whatever weakness he’d suffered while I’d cleaned his wound was gone—hidden beneath rage as he glowered at the two men.
“Who are you?” he shot back, refusing to answer Aktor’s simple question, replying in Firenese and not the language we used when alone.
Aktor shot a look at Kivva who stood silent and still beside him. While Aktor shaved his hair on the sides and kept the rest in a rope down his back, Kivva had braided his sun-faded brown strands into a hundred small plaits, binding each with a small bead at the end that clinked and tinkled when he moved.
The two Nhil men shared a look I didn’t like. A look that held history of hunting together, growing up together, and a friendship bound by ferocity.
Laughing under his breath, Aktor rolled his eyes as if he couldn’t believe the stranger had dared ask such a thing. “You don’t know who I am? Girl didn’t tell you about me?” He licked his lips, his eyes dragging over my bare chest. “Pity. She’s about to know me a lot better than she already does.”
I shivered, wishing I had something to cover myself with. Before, I’d cursed the bison fur around my hips as it dripped wet from wearing it in the river. But now...now I’d give anything for another strip. Another way to hide a part of my body that these two men kept studying far too intently.
“I watched you,” the stranger next to me snapped. “I watched you with your people tonight, and I suggest you return to them.”
