Page 20 of The Sorcerer's Alpha

Marut cautiously removed the saddle pad and two blankets from the stack atop the wizard. Lack of sleep over the past days was catching up with him, and he had nothing better to do, anyway. He put one blanket beneath him and one blanket over him, tucked a saddlebag beneath his head, and immediately fell asleep.

He woke freezing cold in the darkness. The tip of his nose was numb. He pulled the blanket over his head and curled into a tight ball, trying to warm himself. It didn’t help. He was too cold to fall back asleep. And if he was cold, how was Sycamore?

The tent wasn’t large. They were side by side already. Marut left his blankets only long enough to shift his saddle pad a few inches to the right. Then he lifted Sycamore’s blankets and tucked himself underneath, pressing up against Sycamore’s side and adjusting the blankets to cover both of them.

Sycamore sighed in his sleep but didn’t otherwise react. The air pocket beneath the blankets warmed quickly, heated by their bodies. Marut slept.

* * *

Marut wokein the gray light of dawn with Sycamore against him, warm and breathing. He carefully shifted away and crawled out into the bitter cold to piss in the snow. The horses had returned to the tent and were dozing nearby with their heads lowered. All four of them had survived the night.

He went back into the tent to take stock. Between his saddlebags and Sycamore’s, they had enough food for a day or two, and that was only if Marut could make a fire to cook the lentils. Cold and hunger would be their biggest problems. The only wood he had was a small figurine of a cat he had begun carving for Chandran’s niece, who loved cats. He held the little lump in his hand for a minute before tucking it back into his bag.

Sycamore was still sleeping. His chest rose and fell as he breathed. His eyes moved beneath their thin lids. Marut wondered what he dreamed of. He reached over and felt Sycamore’s forehead: warm, maybe warmer than it should have been. A shame, but not a surprise. Marut hoped he would live.

He took one single blanket off the pile on top of Sycamore and wrapped it over his cloak as he crawled back outside. The snow had stopped, but an icy wind still blew across the flat grassland with nothing to break it, and it cut straight through Marut’s felted trousers. The clothing that kept him perfectly warm in Chedi’s damp winters was an inadequate joke here.

The horses were awake and grazing. Bunny lifted his head as Marut approached and walked over to greet him and nudge his shoulder. “Hello, small one,” Marut said, looking him over. He seemed well enough, and Rhododendron, too: no worse for wear after their night spent in the cold. One less thing for Marut to worry about.

He tied Rhododendron to one of the tent stakes and set Bunny at a trot toward the hills to the south. He hoped to find trees there, or water, or animals, or all three, if the ancestors blessed him. Wind had scoured the land clean, and Marut came across nothing as he rode but patchy snow and dead, dry grass. He had the sense of clinging to the world with his fingernails, as if the wind would lift him up and away if he eased up on his desperate grip.

The hills were smaller and closer than he had thought. Tucked into a cleft on a north-facing slope, he found a scattered stand of larches, and one of them fallen and dried. A blessing. He chopped it up with his hatchet and tied the wood to Bunny’s saddle. He saw no obvious signs of animals but expected there would be some manner of rabbits or rodents around, or possibly stoats or martens. He set a few simple snares and prayed something would come along to find them. He rode up the cleft to the top of the hill, hoping to find surface water, but there was nothing.

He could see far into the distance from this vantage point, but there was nothing to see aside from some additional hills to the southeast and due west. The grassland stretched around him without relief, snow-covered and desolate. The wind burned his bare nose and cheeks. The gray sky pressed down on him from above. He turned Bunny around and rode back to the tent.

Sycamore hadn’t moved. Marut gathered the droppings the horses had left and used a few pieces of wood as kindling for a small fire. He cooked enough lentils to take the edge off his gnawing hunger and melted snow to refill the waterskins. He sat by the fire until it went out, then crawled back into the tent and beneath the blankets. There was little else he could do until Sycamore either woke up or died.

Near midday, Sycamore stirred and opened his eyes. He blinked at Marut beside him and opened his mouth to speak, then gave a weak cough.

“I’ll get you some water,” Marut said. He sat up and cradled a hand beneath Sycamore’s head to help him drink from the skin. “How do you feel?”

“Not well. I think—” Sycamore moved his head to glance down at his shoulder, although it was entirely hidden beneath the blankets. “I think this is not a good situation.”

Marut could remove the bandages to look, but what good would that do? He couldn’t heal Sycamore or help him in any way. Knowing whether the wound was infected wouldn’t do anything to alter the course of events.

“I’ll help you outside,” he said. “If you’d like to relieve yourself.”

Sycamore grimaced. “I suppose I should.”

By the end of that excursion, Sycamore was gray-faced and taking slow, deep breaths through his nose in the manner of a man struggling to master his pain. Marut tried to be gentle as he helped the wizard lie back in the bedding once more, but Sycamore still cried out as his shoulder met the ground.

“Try to sleep,” Marut said. That at least would give Sycamore some respite. He tugged the blankets high around Sycamore’s chin.

“Yes,” Sycamore said, eyes already drifting shut.

He slept until sunset, then woke and ate a little at Marut’s urging, then slept again. In the morning he was hot with fever and seemed confused at first when Marut woke him, gazing around the tent as though he wasn’t entirely certain where he was.

“Sycamore,” Marut said, trying to sound calm when in truth he was desperate. The wizard was going to die. “You have to do something. I know you said you don’t have healing magic. But you need to try.”

Sycamore was lying with his eyes closed, breathing shallowly through his mouth. At Marut’s words, his eyelids lifted and his dark gaze met Marut’s. “Maybe I could. Like mending a seam…”

“Yes.” Marut gripped the wizard’s good shoulder, battered by fear and hope. “Exactly so.”

“It will take some time, even if I’m able.” Sycamore’s eyes slid shut. “I’ll sleep. Don’t wake me.”

“All right,” Marut said. He sat and watched Sycamore for a minute until his breathing slowed with sleep. Then he crawled out of the tent to check on the horses.

Sycamore slept all that day and the next. Marut went to check his traps both days and found them empty. He slept as much as he could; beneath the blankets with Sycamore was the only place he was warm, and he wanted to conserve his energy as much as possible. The horses, at least, were content and well, and seemed to suffer no ill effects from the weather. Bunny and Rhododendron were good friends by now and were happy to be in each other’s company. They ambled around grazing, eating snow, and sleeping, recovering from the hard riding in the badlands.