He remembered them.
And remembered that Ashul had jumped forward, alone, to head them off.
She lay in the sopping filth behind one hut. On her back. Dark hair splayed out around her head in a ragged, mud-soaked fan. She breathed in fits and painful gasps, and a trickle of rich, red blood seeped out from the corner of her mouth. Fathomless blue eyes stared up into the gray overcast. Vacant. Unseeing.
Desagrena knelt by Ashul’s left shoulder, hands balled into impotent fists as she hammered at her own legs. Kern slid down beside her, leaning in close. Saw the dark stain spread across Ashul’s side, soaking the leather kirtle she favored. Her right hand reached out to rake up fistfuls of cloying earth. As if digging. Searching. The other, broken and useless, lay at her side, splinters of bone sticking out through skin, and the long sleeve on her cotton shift.
“W-ull ...” Her breath came ragged and shallow. “W-wwu ...”
“Hot iron!” he yelled over at Reave.
The large man rested against the mud wall of a nearby hut, face clenched in pain and staring up into the gray, swollen skies. Garret hunkered down next to him. It would have been a moment’s task, running to the burning lodge hall, digging the blade of a knife down into some hot coals. Pulling it out with a wrap of leather around the hilt. They could slap it into the wound. Painful, but fast.
Neither man moved. And a cold hand fisted inside Kern’s guts.
Then Aodh was there. Grief in his eyes. His mouth pulled into a fierce line beneath his salt-and-pepper moustache. Kern remembered seeing his kinsman spend time with the Taurian woman. Friendly moments. Obviously Desa knew it had been more than that. She slid aside, making room for him as he crouched over Ashul’s head, cradling it with two large hands.
“We’ll seal the bleeding,” he promised her, whispering softly. Though still no one had run for a fired blade. He wiped at a blood spot on her cheek, and merely smeared it over with mud from his own hands. “You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.”
And do what for her arm? It was smashed into pulp and splinters. Mayhap the Callaughnan shaman would have had an answer, but nothing Kern or the others might do with Vanir war hosts chasing down on them.
It was wishful thinking. Reave and Desa had already known the wound in her side was beyond fire and steel. Beyond any kind of fancy stitching. Kern smelled it now as well. A latrine stench. Sharp and acrid. The Vanir blade had stabbed too deep. Into her bowels. The wound was already fouled, and certainly her insides were filling up with blood. Every heartbeat. Every breath.
Kern set his face in a tight mask, shook his head as Ossian trotted up, and Valerus and Nahud’r, and Brig Tall-Wood behind them. Hydallan, helping Daol. Danon and Mogh.
“Woool-p-ph . . .”
Whatever she was trying to say, she didn’t have the strength left. Her back arched violently, her body wracked with pain. Her good arm spasmed out to her side. Ossian crouched and tried to grasp at her free hand, but she yanked it aside and flailed again at the ground. Straining to reach, digging at the soft, sour muck, wanting to take up . . .
“Sword,” Kern said in a hushed breath. “Bring her her sword.”
He glanced around. Found it an arm’s length behind on his side, not Ossian’s. Crabbed over to snatch it from the clinging ground.
Saw the severed hand still holding a northern war sword, lying just beyond it amid a pool of fresh, dark blood.
He edged back as Wallach helped Ehmish join the growing circle. And Old Finn hobbled up.
“Took his hand,” he said, leaning over Ashul again. Bringing the blade up hilt first and laying it down the length of her body.
Ossian helped her bring her hand up to find it. She grasped it. Held it hard against her chest.
Kern nodded. “Took his hand even after he’d killed you.”
And then the raider with the warhammer had bashed in her side. Left her for dead.
But hearing his voice. Hearing him speak about that last, terrible moment, perhaps, Ashul blinked back the vacant film for a moment. She offered Aodh a pain-filled grimace. Then her gaze shifted, finding Kern.
“Wolf-f,” she spat out, blood flecking her lips.
Wolf-Eye. Yea, he was there. He saw. His golden eyes held hers for a moment. Watched as Ashul rallied what little strength she had left to her. She tipped her head up, out of the mud, and muck. Her face was a carved mask of pain and determination both.
“Whu . . . One ...”
Her breathing hitched and she coughed, spitting out tiny droplets of blood. Aodh wiped at these too, smearing them with grime. But she fought his urges to lay back. Rest.
“One of . . .” she managed. Gritted her teeth together. “One . . .”
One of them.