Page 5

Or maybe... I’d finally lost it.

Bang, bang, bang!

I startled again, this time rushing towards the sound.

“Hello?” a desperate male voice called through the thick wood. “If there’s anyone in there, please help us.”

Us? There was more than one person out there? How? Who?

“Please!” the voice pleaded again, spurring me into action.

I scurried through the ballroom, reaching for the door handle and then hesitating. If I opened this door and there was no one there, I would know I’d finally gone mad. That would be the beginning of the end.

But if there was...

Before I could spiral into a vortex of hope and horror, I turned the bolt and pulled open the door—and my eyes widened in shock.

Standing on the doorstep were two men bathed in sunlight. One was unconscious and being supported by an arm over the shoulders of the other. Both were injured and bleeding in several places. And both were completely naked.

I just stood there, staring like a moron, for several seconds too long.

The conscious man tilted his head at me and blinked in confusion. “C-can you please help us?” he hedged, talking to me like I was crazy.

And maybe I was. Maybe this was some solitude-induced hallucination, but I doubted that my mind could fabricate such a convoluted image. If I was going to imagine two naked men, they certainly wouldn’t be injured and banging on my door in the middle of the night.

I snapped out of my stupor and decided to just play along until I knew if this was real or not. After all, if there really were two wounded men in my castle, shouldn’t I help them?

“Er, yeah, sorry, come in,” I stammered, stepping aside so he could carry his fallen friend inside.

I quickly closed the door behind them and ran to offer support beneath the unconscious man’s other arm. He felt real. And warm. And muscular!

“Over there,” I huffed through the effort of carrying him, gesturing toward the couch.

Together, we carried his friend to my favorite couch and hefted him onto it. In the light of the fire, I could see that this man’s body was covered in deep scratches, the most prominent one a gouge in his abdomen, which was oozing deep crimson blood.

My hands shook as they fluttered frantically over the wound. I had helped the staff with the sick in the castle, had tended to the plague blisters and festering sores as my parents lay dying, but this injury was so much more urgent and fatal. I was completely out of my depth.

I tore a strip of fabric from the bottom of my slip, bundled it up, and pressed it to the oozing cut.

“Hold this firmly against the wound,” I instructed the other man, who was kneeling beside me. “I need to get some supplies.”

With a fervent nod, his hand replaced mine over the cloth. In the brief exchange, the contact of his skin on mine sent a strange zing through me, almost like a shock of static electricity, but warmer, and almost...comforting.

I shook myself from the abrupt surprise of everything that was happening and ran to the kitchen, rifling through drawers and cabinets to collect the necessary items into an empty basket. Then I filled a bucket with clean water and dropped a clean rag into it before carrying everything hastily back into the den.

I dropped to my knees beside my strange visitors and got to work, cleaning the wound with the rag and bucket.

“What happened?” I asked, my voice shaky.

“We were on our way to...Rodak,” he sputtered, his eyes darting from side to side. “A group of cusith attacked us in the forest. Can you save him?”

Cusith? What the hell was that?

“I don’t know,” I said. “This wound is deep, and without better resources, I can’t tell if any vital organs have been damaged.”

His admittedly handsome face puckered in sorrow, forcing memories of my dying parents to the surface. The desperation I’d felt knowing I couldn’t do anything to save them.

“But I’m going to do the best I can,” I reassured him. “Hand me that needle and thread.”