Page 12

The river!

Fuck.

The attack!

All the gaps in his memory rushed through him as if a dam had opened.

He tried to move, like an idiot, pain shooting through him once more.

Tarley pressed him back into the bedroll with her hands on his shoulders. “You need to stay right where you are. You weren’t far from the stars. Let your body heal.” She frowned.

“My horse?”

“Ollie–”

“Is everyone gone?” He closed his eyes and shook his head. He wasn’t Ollie, even if he’d been playing at it, but in his mind, he saw Ollie rear away from him. He remembered the arrows, the chaos, the attack, Captain Johesha shouting at him as Goldie rushed through the woods.

Lachlan opened his own eyes, now, and they clashed with hers. He felt a little wild, while her gray eyes were calm and serene.

“Take a deep breath. There wasn’t anyone else. Just you.”

“Did you say Sevens?” he asked.

She hummed an answer that told him yes. “It was just you and your horse. I’m sorry about her. She was beautiful.”

It all came rushing back. Sliding over the cliff. The cold and pain when they hit the water. The pressure of needing to take a breath under water. The fear that he was going to die. Goldie. The rush of the current dragging them downstream. Holding onto his dead horse as they drifted. The loss of feeling in his limbs. He’d finally succumbed to the numbness of sleep, one hand wrapped tightly in Goldie’s mane, the other gripping her saddle. The fates had intervened to get him closer to Sevens, exactly where he was supposed to be.

“This is Sevens?”

She tilted her head. “No. We’re quite a hike from the village. I found you almost three days ago and brought you here. There wasn’t any way I could have made the hike back to Sevens with you.”

“How did you get me here?”

“A sledge. Dragged you here from the river.”

“You? By yourself?” The shock hit him squarely in the chest. This woman had found him. She could have left him for dead and hadn’t. “You saved me?”

“Not yet, I haven’t.” She straightened, looking at his hands folded over the blanket before her gray eyes jumped to his. “You still have a fever. We need to get that under control, and we’ll have to watch for infection in your lungs over the next day or so.” She tucked the blanket in at his sides, then added another.

Lachlan noted she drifted around him with efficiency.

“We’re still immersed in the woods in more ways than one.”

Lachlan blinked, exhaustion grabbing ahold of him again. “You’re a healer then?”

She paused, then said, “At the moment, I’m what you’ve got.”

Lachlan shut his eyes and nodded. “Thank you.”

“Rest,” she whispered.

With his eyes closed, he wondered if Ollie and the rest of the party were alive? Had they made it down the mountain to Sevens, or had they turned around to return to Jast? If he was alive, Captain Johesha would come to look for him. Jast would need confirmation he’d perished to ascend his brother Lome as Crown Prince.

But what if Johesha was dead. And Ollie.

Then it hit him like an arrow. Someone had tried to assassinate him.

“Why did you help me?” he asked, his eyes still closed, a horrible uncertainty weaving its way between him and the woman who’d saved him, wondering if perhaps she could be part of the assassination attempt.