Page 43 of The Girl the Sea Gave Back
I wondered if the healer who’d made the medicine had gone to Möor or stayed in Utan, but I knew the answer. The healer wouldn’t have left the people if a fight was coming. “Thank you.” I nodded, turning it over in my hand.
Asmund helped Bard to the water and he pulled the saddlebag from his horse to stitch him up. I pried off the lid of the tin to smell the sweet scent of honey and pine sap. Smells that reminded me of my mother and the sting of memory burned in the center of my chest.
Kjeld pulled up the sleeve of his tunic, eyeing a deep cut at the back of his arm and setting a piece of dry linen over it.
“You know her, don’t you?” I said.
He tied off the bandage. “What?”
“The girl with the Svell. How do you know her?”
He tore another cloth with his teeth. “I didn’t say I knew her.”
“You didn’t have to.” I waited for an answer, but he ignored me, pulling the sleeve of his tunic back down. “Why did she help us? She could have called out. She could have screamed, but she told us to run.”
Asmund looked between us from where he worked over Bard’s leg.
Again, I waited for Kjeld to answer. But he looked straight at me, his gaze level. Whatever he knew, he wasn’t going to tell us.
I unclasped my vest, pulling it over my head with my tunic, and walked straight out into the freezing water until I was waist deep, cupping handfuls of it up to scrub my face and pinching my eyes closed against the sting it shot beneath my skin. It was a welcome pain. It was better than the memory of the woman and her child lying in the open doorway. Anything was better than that.
I sank down beneath the surface and let the hum of the current drown out everything else. The sunlight cast the water into a jeweled blue and I let the air burn in my chest, my heart beating in my ears. The sound of Aghi’s voice returned to me, the deep rasp of it like a fire. His clear eyes and auburn beard streaked with silver.
War is easy.
The moment we walked through Hylli’s gate, the Nadhirwould look to me. But only I knew what Espen and Aghi and the others had failed to see.
They’d chosen me for peace, not war.
The aging leaders of the villages had placed their faith in me for the wrong fate. And as soon as the Svell arrived, ready and able to take everything we had, they’d know it, too.
When my lungs couldn’t take any more, I shot up out of the water with a gasp. The sun was warm, the smell of winter no longer on the wind. Spring was coming. The ice was melting. And there was nothing to slow the Svell from the battle they wanted.
“We should sleep an hour.” Asmund sank down at the river’s edge to take a drink. He arched an eyebrow at me when I didn’t answer. “You’d rather fall off your horse?”
His eyes dropped to the covered wound at my side. If I didn’t clean it, I’d be half dead before the Svell arrived at the edge of our forest. But I wasn’t the only one Asmund was thinking of. Bard’s face was painted a pale white from the blood he’d lost. He needed rest if he was going to have a chance at making it to the fjord.
“One hour. That’s it,” I said.
I unwrapped the bandage beneath my armor vest carefully, wincing as I pulled the last of it back from where it was stuck to the raw, open skin. It hadn’t even begun to heal, the flesh around the opening inflamed and swollen where it had torn.
Asmund pulled Bard’s saddle down and dropped it in the dirt before his own and he came to sit beside me,reaching into his vest for a bundle of dried venison. Dark blood streaked two deep cuts carved into the back of his hand.
“You’re hurt,” I said, holding the tin of salve out to him.
“It’s fine.” He didn’t take it, looking down at his hand as if he’d forgotten it was there. He tore a piece of the venison in two and put it in his mouth. Behind him, Bard lay back onto the saddle and closed his eyes.
He let out a long breath, chewing. “What will happen? When you get to Hylli?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. I’d been careful not to think about it.
“They’ll initiate you, won’t they? As chieftain of the Nadhir?”
I leaned my elbows onto my knees, staring into the dirt. “I don’t know if he’ll accept me.”
“Who?” Asmund’s brow pulled.
“Latham.”
