Page 97 of The Winner's Kiss
“You’re not hurt?”
“Left leg.”
He came around the horse, saw, and went quiet. “All right,” he said finally. “Come on.” He helped her down. “I can carry you.”
She heard the question in his tone. “No. Roshar will see. He’ll tease us mercilessly about it.” She smiled, because she wanted Arin to smile. She didn’t like the way he looked: the drawn lines around his mouth, eyes hooded with worry.
He didn’t smile. He cupped her face with both hands. An emotion tugged at his expression, a dark awe, the kind saved for a wild storm that rends the sky but doesn’t ravage your existence, doesn’t destroy every thing you love. The one that lets you feel saved.
Nervousness rose within her. It simmered, sickened.
Unreasonable. She knew that she could lift her parched lips to his and taste the truth of his love on his tongue. Still, she couldn’t say what she wasn’t sure she felt.
Her thigh throbbed. “No carrying,” she said lightly. “But I’ll let you help me up the hill.”
Leading the horse behind them, they moved slowly through the camp, Arin’s arm under Kestrel’s shoulders. He brought her to his tent.
“I think—” He hesitated. “Inside. You could stay outside. But.” He glanced down at her bloody thigh. “The trousers need to come off. I can fetch someone else—”
“No. You.”
His eyes flicked to hers, then away.
She went inside the tent. There was no canvas floor, only grass and a bedroll. She sat on the ground.
Arin glanced at her dry mouth. “You’re thirsty,” he said, and left.
He returned with a canteen, a bowl of water, a small pot, and clean gauze.
She drank. The water seemed to fall down a long way inside her. She thought about the water, how amazing it felt to drink. She thought about that and not him.
Arin knelt beside her. She set the canteen aside. The cut was a dull pain: almost nothing in the wake of her heightening awareness of him, her rapid heart. Outside the tent, cicadas sang.
He unbuckled her armor and lifted it gently away. “Nowhere else?”
“Just my leg.” It was a relief, at first, to be out of armor, yet once it was gone she felt exposed and too soft.
Arin didn’t move. She knew what she was supposed to do next. Her fingers fumbled as she reached to unfasten the fall of her trousers.
“Wait,” Arin said. “Just.” He stopped, then continued, “Leave them on.”
He reached into the rent in the left trouser leg and ripped it open, carefully forcing the path of the rip to circle her thigh. Soon the cloth was almost entirely detached, save for the flap still stuck to the wound. He tipped water onto it to soften the fabric. “This will hurt.”
“Do it.”
He peeled the flap from the wound. She sucked in air as blood ran. He pulled the cloth free, leaving her left leg almost entirely bare.
He rinsed the wound. “Ah.”
“What?”
Arin lifted his dark head and smiled. “It’s not so bad.”
She glanced down at the blood.
“I mean,” he hastened to say, “that you don’t need stitches. Which is good. Not that it’s not bad, for you, or that it doesn’t hurt, or—”
She laughed. “Arin, I’m glad, too, that it’s not worse.”
