A Stroke of Midnight (Merry Gentry #4)(37)

We eased him onto his back, and when his body settled against the blood-slick floor, there was a fresh gush of blood from his leg. I crawled to his legs, and found the third wound, high up on the thigh. They’d cut his femoral artery. A human could bleed out in twenty minutes. The blood should have been spurting out. The fact that it was only seeping meant that he had lost most of the blood in his body. Which meant that even if someone could close the wounds immediately, he might not recover. The sidhe can take a lot of wounds, a lot of blood loss, but there has to be enough blood left to keep the body running, the heart pumping. 
Frost had remained standing in front of me during all of it, guarding me. I couldn’t argue with his division of labor, not with Galen lying limp and pale on the floor. I was a great deal easier to kill than Galen.
But Frost had watched as we found the wounds. “Where is the healer that you sent for?”
Adair shook his head. “I do not know.”
“We’re running out of time,” I said. “We have to close the wounds and keep what little blood he has left inside him.”
“I can close his wounds,” a woman’s voice said. We looked to find one of the kneeling prisoners smiling at us. Her hair was the color of yellow corn silk, her eyes triple colors of blue, silver, with an inner circle of light, if light had a single color. I’d never known what to call the final color of Hafwyn’s eyes.
The other women said, “No . . . You cannot help them. You betray our master . . .” and other less complimentary things.
Hafwyn shrugged with her hands still bound behind her. “We are captured, and our master is still imprisoned. I think it would not be a mistake to have some favor on other shores.”
She raised one of her dark eyebrows. With her very blond hair, in a human I would have thought dye, but in a race where your eyes could be three different colors, what was black eyebrows and blond hair?
“You are a traitor to your oath if you do this,” Melangell said. There was blood running down her face from a wound that had split the side of her helmet. If she’d been human, her brains would have spilled out, but she was barely bleeding.
“I never made an oath to Prince Cel,” Hafwyn said. “It was Prince Essus I vowed to serve. When he died, no one asked if we would serve Cel, we were simply given to him. No one living has my oath of loyalty.” She looked at me as she said it, and there was something in her face, some need, some message.
“Can she really heal him?” I asked.
“She can close his wounds,” Adair said, “but that’s all.”
“It is more than any of the rest of us can do for him,” said Hawthorne. “Though, in truth, it never occurred to me to ask Galen’s assassins if they could help heal him.” I searched his face for the irony that should have gone with those words, but he simply looked as if he were stating a fact.
“Do we trust her?” Nicca asked.
I laid a hand against Galen’s cooling skin. “No,” I said, “but untie her anyway.” Earlier that day I had been ready to give Galen up to an unknown lover. But that was different from losing him to death. I could live with his smile being for someone else if I knew he was happy. But to never see that smile again, to never feel his hand warm in mine again . . . I couldn’t stand that.
Frost touched my shoulder, made me look up at him. “You must move away before I will allow Hafwyn to touch him.”
I started to protest, but he touched my face and shook his head. “This could be a ruse to get close to you. I will not risk you to save him.” His hand went around my arm, and I had little choice but to go with him, though I was still reluctant to stop touching Galen. If we couldn’t save him, these would be my last moments to touch him while he felt . . . alive.
Hafwyn knelt in the drying blood in her leather armor. She took off the leather gauntlets and tucked them into her sword belt. She settled her short sword more solidly at her hip, and I fought the urge to scream for her to hurry. She was entirely too calm, but then she had helped kill him. Why should she truly want to save him? Was this just a play effort on her part? She would do us a favor, but it would not work, so she could curry favor with us yet lose no favor with Cel and his people. Goddess help me, there were moments when I wished I did not see so many motives for the people around me. It was not a comforting way of looking at the world.I cuddled in against Frost’s body, my arms clinging around his waist, my cheek pressed so hard against him that I heard his heartbeat. He wrapped his arms around me, though it meant he would have to move me to draw almost any of his weapons. As a bodyguard he should have moved me to the side, left himself some room to maneuver, but as my lover, my friend, and Galen’s friend, I knew that he wasn’t clinging to me just for my comfort. It was impossible not to like Galen. It was his gift to make people like him. The tension in Frost’s body as he held me told me more clearly than any words that I wasn’t the only one who would miss Galen. It said something about our Galen that he had melted the Killing Frost.
Hafwyn pressed her hands over the wound in his thigh. She was at least starting with the more life-threatening wound. Her skin had looked white, but it was gold the way that Galen’s was green, so pale that something had to make you see that other color. Her magic turned her skin a pale solid gold, as she glowed. Strands of her hair struggled to escape the knot that she had it in, her hair moving in the wind of her own magic.
“She’s a healer,” Hawthorne said. “Why is she being wasted behind a sword?”
We had expected Hafwyn to have some small healing ability, but what was glowing and dancing along our skin was not small. All the healers with this much magic were not allowed to be warriors, not in the front lines anyway. Their talents were too valuable, and too rare among us now, to risk them.
Watching her shining hands rise from his body, I began to hope. Her voice echoed with magic as she asked, “Can someone turn him over so that I do not waste the healing on smaller things? It has been so long since I have been allowed to use my powers to their full benefit, I am a little out of practice.”
Hawthorne and Adair rolled Galen over for her, Hawthorne cradling his head and shoulders so Galen’s face did not touch the blood. I would remember that little extra care he took with Galen, and it would earn Hawthorne something.
Hafwyn laid her hands on Galen’s back, and my skin prickled with the effort she put into him. She could have closed his wounds, but simply from the sensations her healing chased across my skin, I thought she was doing more.
“NO!” shouted one of the other female guards, still kneeling, still bound. “You are saving him.” Aisling placed his sword tip at her throat. She had to stop talking or risk piercing her own skin against Aisling’s sword point.
“Siobhan will see you dead for this,” said Melangell.
Siobhan had been Cel’s captain of the guard. She and a handful of others had also attacked me overtly. I had killed two of the attackers, more by accident than on purpose, and she had surrendered. I had assumed she was dead. She’d tried to kill a royal heir. She should have been dead. When we weren’t in front of so many hostile ears, I would ask someone. 
Hafwyn leaned back from Galen, a smile on her face. “Siobhan is still locked in a cell in the Hallway of Mortality. She won’t be killing anyone for a while yet.”
Galen shuddered in Hawthorne’s arms. The first breath he took was loud and gasping, and he thrust himself up off the floor, eyes wild. He collapsed almost immediately, and only Hawthorne’s arms kept him from falling flat to the floor.
“You are safe,” Hawthorne said. “You are safe.”
Frost let me go to him. I don’t know if he trusted Hafwyn now, or if he knew he couldn’t have stopped me without a fight. I did have enough sense left to go on the far side of Galen’s body, closer to the wall than to Hafwyn.
Hawthorne spilled Galen’s upper body into my lap. I cradled him against me, looking into those green eyes, that face, that smile. Tears streamed down my face, though I was laughing. I had so many emotions that I felt drunk.
“I have not been allowed to heal anyone in decades. It felt so good.”
I looked up at the woman who was still kneeling in all that blood. She was crying, too, and I didn’t know why.
“Why would anyone forbid you to use your powers?” I asked.
“It is a secret, and I would not go back to Ezekiel’s tender care for anything or anyone, but I can say this: I tried to heal someone that Prince Cel did not want healed. I went against his express orders. He told me I would be a bringer of death until he told me I could heal again.”
“That is a waste of power,” Hawthorne said.
She glanced at him, but her attention was all for me. “But today, for you, I have gone against that order.”
“He will see you raped and skinned for it,” said one of her fellow guards.
Neither Hafwyn nor I even bothered looking at the other woman. “Why would you risk that for me?” I asked. “You just tried to kill Galen, why heal him?”
“Because I am a healer, it is what I am, and I do not want to be this anymore.” She touched her sword. “Does saving him buy me anything from you?”
I nodded. “I would not promise until I hear what you want, not even for Galen, but yes, it buys you something.”