A lip of limestone was the first spot she discovered, and with the remains of a fire left behind, she deemed it as good enough as any for a campsite. Just in time too, for rain was slicing under the overhang, feeding the moss and vines that had crept inside the tiny shelter. Every few minutes, lightning cracked. Flashed over the washed-out campfire that Iseult now coaxed to life.
Iseult cooked a grayling, her eyes unfocused as she watched the skin blacken. It wasn’t until she eased the fish off the fragile flame that she realized she’d lost her coins. For three cracks of lightning, she debated what to do.
She could leave them wherever they might be. Except Mathew’s words whispered, There’s no predicting what might come, and money is a language all men speak.
Fine. Back she would have to go. First, though, she would eat her grayling. Moist, delicious, fresh, she devoured it in seconds. Then she cooked and ate the second fish with a bit more care, a bit more attention to pleasure.
Eventually, the rain eased to a drizzle, so after cooking the remaining two fish—for later consumption—she doused the fire and retraced her steps. All the way back to the bear traps.
All the way back to the Bloodwitch.
For several long minutes, Iseult examined him. He was clearly unconscious, stretched flat across the mud. His clothes were sodden and bloodied. His leg was a shredded mess.
A thousand questions scurried through Iseult’s mind. Yet none were so bright as the command: Run.
She didn’t move, though. Didn’t even breathe, and without Safi there to guide her, without Safi’s Threads to show her what she should feel, Iseult could only wonder why her lungs bulged against her ribs. Why her heart hammered so fast.
The sack of coins waited at the clearing’s heart. Even with the rain having washed away parts of the scene, Iseult could make out what steps the Bloodwitch had taken. She saw tracks where he’d stumbled into the clearing from the west. Then came longer, deeper steps, where he had darted straight for the coins.
He is tracking the silver, Iseult guessed, and though the why and the how of it eluded her, she couldn’t stop the certainty prickling down her spine. The silver talers were important; the Bloodwitch wanted them.
As Habim always said, Use every resource available.
Cautiously, Iseult entered the clearing. When the Bloodwitch didn’t stir, even with the soft squelch of earth beneath her feet, she walked more boldly. Upon reaching her sack of coins, she peered inside. They glinted up at her, just as she remembered, their double-headed eagles dusted with brown. Coated in blood.
He must have tracked the blood.
Next, Iseult turned to the Bloodwitch. A stained bear trap sat within arm’s reach, buzzing with flies. Hanks of skin and sinew clung to its closed claws. The Bloodwitch had stepped right into it, and now he was healing.
Dirt and dead flesh flowed from the furrows of his ruined muscle. It made an audible crunching and sucking sound atop the rain.
It was incredible to watch. Inhuman, really, this gift to heal one’s body. The power of the Void. The power of a demon.
Yet when Iseult glanced at the Bloodwitch’s sleeping, dirt-streaked face, she didn’t see a demon lying limp before her.
She swallowed.
Despite having faced Aeduan thrice now, this was the first time she was able to look at him. To see him.
It was not what she expected.
Perhaps because in sleep, there was no tension of muscles about to attack. No disdainful nose in the air. No predatory awareness to cloak his eyes.
His face seemed peaceful, with his head tipped sideways and the lines of his neck stretched long. With his pale lips slightly open and his long, thick eyelashes fluttering on each breath.
He was younger than Iseult had imagined. No older than twenty, if she had to guess. Yet he felt old, with his voice so gruff. His language so formal.
It was in the way he carried himself too, as if he’d walked for a thousand years and planned to walk a thousand more.
This young man had stalked Iseult through Ve?aza City. Had smiled cruelly at her, his crystal eyes swirling red. Then he had saved her too, in Lejna. With a salamander cloak and a single phrase: Mhe varujta. Trust me as if my soul were yours.
At the time, Iseult had wondered how he had known those words. How he had spoken Nomatsi like a native.
But now … now she could see. With his rain-sodden clothes plastered to a chest that rose and fell, there was no missing the lean shape of him. He was muscled, yes, but not bulky. This was a frame built for speed.
It was also a Nomatsi frame, just as the skin revealed through the tears in his breeches was Nomatsi skin. Pale as the moon.
Mhe varujta.
He wasn’t a full tribesman, though. His eyes were not folded as deeply as Iseult’s, his hair was not black as the night sky.
With more care and quiet than Iseult had known herself capable of, she knelt beside the Bloodwitch. His baldric glistened in the rain, the knife hilts rising and dropping in time to his breath. Iseult’s fingers moved to the fat iron buckle resting in the groove between his chest and his shoulder. To unfasten it, she would have to touch bare skin, for the buckle had snagged in his shirt and torn the cotton wide.
Bare skin. Pale, Nomatsi skin.