Her throat ached and her eyes stung from a fierce need to weep. It made no sense that such feelings plagued her, but they did. Malachus had been kind to her, but most important, he’d defended Asil and turned her tears to smiles. He shouldn’t have died this way.
The two mercenary traders looked lifeless, but she wanted to check for herself. No pulse beat under her fingers when she pressed them to their necks, nor did a breath tease her hand when she held it under their noses.
She hesitated in front of Malachus, that odd grief at his death weighing heavy on her. She should be relieved. Every instinct had warned her he was trouble. She’d known it from the first moment he’d spoken to her.
Both Kursak and Seydom reached to pull her away at her sudden inhalation. She shrugged off their touch, attention centered on the ground and the weak, thready song of earth magic playing there. Halani recognized the melody, unique to the man who’d come to her mother’s aid.
“Wait.” Her sorrow wavered toward hope as she pressed her fingers to Malachus’s throat. A faint pulse knocked against her fingertips. “He’s alive,” she announced.
“What’s happening?” Marata called out from where he and the others stood nearby, their view obstructed by the tall grass. Seydom waved them over, and soon they all huddled around the trio.
“Oh no, Malachus!” Asil dropped to her knees beside Halani and grabbed Malachus’s limp hand. “It’s Malachus, Hali.” She turned a beseeching gaze on her daughter as if asking her to fix what was wrong with him.
“I know, Mama.” Halani patted her shoulder and stared at Kursak, who stared back. “We can’t just leave him here.”
“This is the man Asil’s been praising to the heavens all day?”
Halani nodded. “He did Mama and me a true kindness, especially Mama.”
Kursak’s cheeks puffed out on a hard exhale. “He’s crow bait, Halani. If he isn’t dead yet, he will be the moment we try to move him.” He glanced at Asil still gripping Malachus’s hand. “I’m sorry, Asil.”
“Leaving him here for scavengers to gnaw on is no way to repay that kindness. And he still lives. We owe it to him to try and save him,” Halani argued.
Hamod’s fury would know no bounds if they brought Malachus into their camp, especially after his tirade regarding Azarion and Gilene, but Halani was willing to incur his wrath. She refused to leave an injured man to die in a field just to protect her uncle’s questionable acquisitions.
Marata joined their conversation. “We’re not far from the camp, and there are enough of us here to carry him.” The camp cook was a big man and could easily carry Malachus by himself if they didn’t have arrow shafts and injuries with which to contend.
Kursak shook his head. “That soft heart of yours will get you into trouble one day, Halani.”
It already has, she was tempted to reply but stayed silent as Kursak rose and began relaying instructions for how to lift and carry Malachus.
“What about the dead ones?” Marata’s wife, Talen, nudged the archer with her foot.
Compassion only extended so far to trump cold-blooded practicality.
“Strip them of any weaponry and valuables,” Kursak said. “They won’t be of any use to them now. We’ll drag the bodies farther away from camp and leave them to the carrion eaters.” He eyed Halani, one eyebrow raised. “Any objections?”
She shook her head. “None.” Whatever feud there had been between Malachus and the two men, they’d taken him unawares and attacked from afar. This was no honorable conflict but the work of sell-swords. They didn’t deserve a burial.
Assured by Kursak that he and the men drafted to help him would be careful with her newly acquired patient, Halani confiscated one of the torches and raced with Asil back to the camp to prepare one of the provender wagons as a sickbed.
Dawn was cresting the horizon, and those who’d stayed behind to guard the caravan while the rest attended the Savatar celebration waited beside Halani and Asil as Kursak, Marata, and two others carried Malachus into camp.
“Which wagon do you want him in, Halani?” Sweat dotted Kursak’s face as he and the other men supported Malachus’s weight between them. White as bleached bone and gray around the mouth, the injured man hung limp in their hold.
Halani wondered how he’d managed to survive this long. If she guessed right, those were broadhead arrowheads embedded in his flesh. The wounds didn’t visibly bleed much, but inside, arteries sliced open by such arrows bled rivers into the body.
She pointed to the provender wagon behind her. “There. I’ve put down bedding inside and cleared space to tend him.” They lumbered toward the wagon, grumbling when she harangued them: “Be gentle! He isn’t a sack of potatoes.”
Getting the man inside presented the trickiest part of their journey. It was a mercy he remained unconscious as the men practically wrestled him into the wagon. Once done, they retreated outside. Halani scampered up the steps and knee-walked down the aisle between Malachus’s prone body and the wall. The bedding she’d laid down covered the rough floorboards, and she and Asil had cleared the wagon of everything stored in it to create enough room for her and an assistant or two to work.
“Is that all you’ll be needing, Halani?” Seydom hovered at the wagon’s entrance. “If you need him moved again, call one of us. He’s a lot heavier than he looks.”
Halani partially unlaced the man’s tunic for a closer look at the entrance wound on his chest. An odd but recognizable whiff of something made her rear back with a frown. “Tell Mama to bring my small medicine chest. She knows which one.”
Seydom bounded off the threshold to do her bidding, and she returned her attention to Malachus, pressing her fingers to his neck once more to feel the stuttering pulse there. Assured his heart still beat, she inspected his wounds.
The arrowheads had penetrated deep and were surrounded by swollen, bloodied flesh. Before trying to remove them, she’d have to chop the shafts short with a hatchet. The initial wounding hadn’t killed him outright, but if her nose was right, those arrowheads had been dipped in a lethal poison, which should have killed him even faster than the bloodletting.
Coin-size bloodstains marred his tunic and breeches where the arrowheads were lodged. The hip wound was the least grievous of the three. The one below his collarbone and the one in his side, far worse. Even if they managed to miss a vital organ, he might well bleed to death before Asil arrived with the medicine chest. Her mother climbed into the wagon, a small, intricately engraved chest tucked under one arm, a satchel stuffed with towels draped over her other arm. She shrugged off the satchel, dropping it at Halani’s feet, and set the chest down nearby.
“I brought towels, Hali. Do you want me to boil water?” Asil was a precocious child trapped in an aging woman’s body, but that arrested maturity didn’t mean she was stupid, and she often acted as Halani’s assistant when she cared for a sick or injured person.
“Thank you, Mama. You always know what to get even before I ask.” The older woman preened under Halani’s praise. “I’ll need the towels and the hot water. And see if you can borrow Marata’s sharpest hatchet and one of his blocks. These arrow shafts are made of bone. They’re too tough to break by hand.” She couldn’t do anything about the poison but try to help his body overcome its effects. Had he imbibed a lethal elixir, she would have administered a purge, but this ran through the bloodstream instead of the belly. Asil wasn’t gone long before Talen tapped on the doorframe to announce her presence and lifted an armload of linen for Halani to see. “I thought you could use some extra bedding and blankets.”
Halani descended the steps to relieve Talen of some of her burden. “Thank you. Did Mama ask for a hatchet?”
The other woman nodded. “She’s arguing with Marata right now over which is the sharpest to use.” She peered into the wagon. “Do you have enough room in there for an extra person or do you want me to stay out here and pass the bedding to you?”
Halani motioned for Talen to follow her as she climbed back into the wagon. She dropped the bedding next to Malachus. “He’s heavy, so I can use the help getting his clothes off. Seydom said to call him or one of the other men, but we’ll manage fine between the two of us.”
They knelt on either side of the unconscious man. Talen whistled her admiration. “He’s handsome enough, even nearly dead. I wonder why someone tried to kill him.”
Because they feared him. She kept the thought behind her teeth, but the idea refused to let Halani go.
She agreed with Talen’s praise, but his looks were neither here nor there. Her task was to keep him alive. She slid her hands under his shoulders. “Here, help me lift him so I can get half his tunic off. I’ll have to cut it away from the arrow shaft.”
The two women gently lifted him into a partially reclined position. His head dropped forward, chin resting next to where the arrow shaft protruded from his chest just below his collarbone. Talen braced him against her knees while Halani cut away the fabric surrounding the wound. They eased the tunic off him, leaving his torso bare.
“Very handsome,” Talen repeated, gaze lingering on his lean body.
Halani snorted. “Not too loud, Talen. I don’t need Marata turning my patient into stew meat with the hatchet just because his wife can’t peel her eyes off him.” Halani’s humor soon evaporated as she got a closer look at two of the three wounds. One might require her to pull the arrow from bone, a bloody task requiring brute force, but not nearly as risky as removing one embedded in an internal organ, which she feared might be the case with the second arrow, in his side.
“If the poison those arrows were dipped in doesn’t kill him, me trying to fish them out will probably do the trick.” She changed positions, scooting down to his feet. “Boots off. Then his breeches.”
They stripped him, tossing his garb into a corner before readjusting the bedding, which had twisted beneath him with their efforts.