“Get better armour,” she said. “They’re rusted.” Then she splashed whatever was in the bottle she brought from the bar into the wound and he was on fire. It felt like she rammed a white hot poker into his guts.
“Sticking cunt bitch whore,” he said between clenched teeth and she shushed him again.
He whimpered as she sewed, cursed her family for a dozen generations each time she tugged rough thread through tender flesh. He swore she’d serve in the Afterdeath when she tied the thread tight, and screamed when she finished by emptying the rest of the bottle over the ragged wound.
It was the worse sewing job he’d ever seen.
“Remind me not to let you fix my pants,” he said, breathing in shallow gasps.
She ignored him, sat staring into her mirror. “Did it work?” she asked whatever she saw in its surface. Her face crumpled in misery. He didn’t need to ask.
I don’t want to die.
Zukunft returned her attention to Bedeckt. She laid one hand upon his chest as if she meant to stop him from rising. “You will never touch me, will you?”
He stared at her in confusion. She couldn’t possibly want that. Could she?
She leaned close, hovering over him, her hair falling about his face like a sodden curtain, blocking out the rest of the world. Reality was gone. Only Zukunft remained. There was nowhere else to look but into her desolate face. Her eyes, welling with tears, were filled with dread.
Bedeckt, head spinning, his own eyes watering from the agony searing his side, had no idea how to answer. He wanted to tell her she was a damned child and that he didn’t hurt children. No matter how much of a shite human he might be, there were a few things he would not do. But he knew himself and she was painfully beautiful.
Get a grip, old man. Still he hesitated.
What did she want to hear? Why the hells did he care?
“You can,” she said, blinking back tears. “Just reach up, right now.” A bead of water hung from the tip of her perfect nose and then fell to land on the crushed ruin of his.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Women. If Stehlen was impossible to understand, Zukunft was something else altogether.
“I’m stained,” he said. “Spoiled. Ruined. Broken. Shite, think of every word you can to describe an awful man and that’s me.”
“You have your list.”
“Stick the list.”
“Then touch me.”
“No.”
She gave him a smile of gut wrenching misery and tears fell. He tasted salt. She leaned in and kissed him, her mouth open, tongue touching his lips. She pulled away to look him in the eye when he refused to return the kiss.
“I’ll live?” he asked, having already seen the answer in her face but desperate for a distraction.
Zukunft cried harder, sorrow distorting her features, tears raining down upon Bedeckt’s upturned face.
“Find the innkeeper,” said Bedeckt. “Maybe—”
“Long enough,” she said.
Long enough? Long enough for what?
“We have to leave,” she said. “There’s a farmhouse.”
“A couple of days, and then we’ll…”
Zukunft shook her head, eyes pleading. “We have to leave now.”
“I can’t,” said Bedeckt. “I can’t ride. It’ll kill—”
“You have to.”
“Why?”
She stared down into his face, shaking her head enough to move her hair against his face. She doesn’t want to tell me and hates herself for what she’s asking.
“If we don’t leave now,” she said, “you’ll be dead before we reach the farmhouse.”
“If we leave now I’ll—”
“What you want—your means of stopping Morgen—it’s there.”
How badly did he want that? What did he want more, redemption, or a few more years of life?
You’ll be dead before we reach the farmhouse.
Dead. She stanched your wounds with filthy bar rags, sewed you shut with string from gods knows where, splashed strange alcohol in the wound; what the hells did you think would happen?
She was wrong. Her damned mirror and whoever she thought was in there was wrong. “If I rest here,” said Bedeckt. “A few days.”
Zukunft lay her face upon his chest and shook with sobbing anguish. “I’m sorry.”
I’m dying? No. Not again. Not so soon. “What’s at the farmhouse?”
“Your friends.”
“I don’t have—”
“And me.”
“Your mirror lied about the boy. We never could have saved him. It’s lying again.”
“She knew this would happen. All of it.”
“She?”
“My little sister,” Zukunft said into his chest. “This is why she wanted us to come here.”
“So I could die?”
“She wants to teach me a lesson.”
What the hells is my death going to teach Zukunft?