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‘Here,’ he heard himself say, and reached for the needle.
‘I can do it.’
‘Yes, but I’ll show you how, lest you butcher it and sew your arm to your body or something.’
A half-laugh escaped her. ‘That’s something Kipp would do.’
Wilder merely grunted and accepted the needle from her. ‘I’m assuming you cleaned the wound and your tools?’
‘Obviously. Though I didn’t see you washing your hands…’
Wilder baulked. She was right. Gods, she got his head so twisted that the most basic of tasks seemed difficult.
After he’d washed his hands as best he could with one of their canteens, he returned to her. ‘You need to line up the edges of the wound,’ he told her, moving her hand to hold her flesh in place. ‘Then you want to push the needle through the skin at about a ninety-degree angle, so that you’re not pushing it into the fat.’
Thea cursed as he pushed the needle through her skin. ‘Hurts more than the fucking cut.’
‘You’ll get used to it.’
‘Wonderful.’
‘You twist your hand like this, and pull it through.’ He showed her. ‘So the needle comes out the other side of the wound. You want it directly across from the first puncture.’
He expected her to turn away, but Thea was studying the way his fingers manipulated the needle through her skin, as though she had disassociated from the pain and was now memorising the lesson.
‘You try.’ He passed her the needle. ‘There will come a time where you have to do this alone.’
With a furrowed brow, Thea did as he bid, piercing her flesh with the needle, cursing quietly as she worked.
‘You want the edges of the wound just touching, not too tight. The knot should be lying flat.’ Wilder reached for the flask at her feet and took a swig of fire extract, relishing the burn of the liquor down his throat.
‘That was for medicinal purposes,’ Thea muttered, biting her lip as she reached the end of the wound.
Wilder simply drank again. ‘You know how to tie it off?’
‘In theory. It’s different when it’s your own injury. I can’t use this arm —’
‘It won’t be perfect, but it’ll do the job.’ He showed her how to wrap the thread around the needle to create a path for a knot before offering his dagger for her to sever the remaining thread.
When she did, she sagged on the edge of the fountain with a moan. ‘That was deeply unpleasant.’
‘You need to clean it again, bandage it.’
‘In a minute, Warsword. Let me catch my breath.’
Her hair had fallen in her eyes and he wanted nothing more than to reach across and tuck it behind her ear. He did no such thing. ‘There’s no catching your breath in the heart of a battle, or on the road with no supplies.’
‘How did you learn?’
‘On the road with no supplies.’
‘Figures.’ She scooped up her blood-stained shirt, tearing a strip from its hem with her good hand and her teeth before dousing it in fire extract and applying it to the newly sutured wound with a stream of colourful curses.
‘Thought you didn’t clean wounds that way?’ he said, recalling her reprimands when he’d been injured in the previous battle against the reapers.
‘I learnt from the best, apparently.’
Wilder had no retort for that. He passed a hand over his face, feeling too raw from the reaper’s mind whipping, from seeing Thea hurting, from not being able to treat her as he wanted to. ‘Don’t let it get infected,’ he muttered.
