Page 21 of The Sorcerer's Alpha

The third night, Marut woke at some point in the darkness and reached over to lay a hand on Sycamore’s chest beneath the blankets. Sycamore was still breathing, and Marut’s hand rose and fell with the movements of Sycamore’s chest. Marut no longer had any capacity for either hope or despair; he was only a body, a skin containing bones and blood. But Sycamore was still alive.

He rode to check his traps again in the morning, numb with cold and hunger. The clouds had lifted, at least, and the sun helped to warm him. One of his snares had caught some type of ground squirrel, large enough for a decent meal. Marut looked at it for a moment and then squatted on the ground and pressed his hands to his eyes, trying to hold back the hot tears welling up. He didn’t succeed. He emptied like a tipped-over waterskin, sagging as he drained onto the earth. At last, he stood up and tied the squirrel to Bunny’s saddle and rode out. When he got back to camp, Sycamore was awake.

“Oh,” Marut said, kneeling at the tent flap, seeing that Sycamore’s eyes were open. “You’re alive.”

Sycamore barked out a sharp laugh. “Ostensibly. How long was I asleep?”

“Two full days,” Marut said. He crawled into the tent and closed the flap behind him to keep the cold air out. “This is the morning of the third day. How do you feel?”

“Help me sit up.” He gripped Marut’s hand to pull himself into a seated position. The tie had come out of his hair, which fell to his collarbones in a black curtain. He raised his good hand to his bad shoulder, gently touching his fingertips to the bandage. Marut saw his shoulder shift beneath his coat. Sycamore winced. “Good enough.”

Marut sat beside him, holding his blanket wrapped around himself. “You healed yourself?”

“I put the pieces back into place. The rest will have to heal on its own. I imagine I won’t be of much use for a while.” He rolled his shoulder again. “I can probably ride.”

Marut was skeptical, but didn’t say so. “Can I look?” he asked, and when Sycamore nodded, he peeled the bandages away to check the wounds beneath. The entry wound in front was only a small slit no larger than the arrowhead and looked no different than it had three days ago. The exit wound had begun to scab over and Marut saw no signs of infection. There would be a scar, certainly, but Sycamore would live.

“Everything is more or less back where it should be,” Sycamore said as Marut tugged his coat back into place. “I think. I don’t know human anatomy that well. But it feels right.”

“Well. That’s good,” Marut said. He couldn’t fathom it: that Sycamore had slept for a while and woken up with a ruinous injury reduced to a minor inconvenience. Of all the magic he’d seen Sycamore perform, this was the most unsettling, but also the most welcome. He would have dragged Sycamore across the steppe on a stretcher if he’d had to, but he thought their odds of survival were much higher if the wizard had two functioning arms.

“Tell me what’s transpired,” Sycamore said.

“I found wood,” Marut said. He began to pick apart the knots in the strips of blanket holding Sycamore’s arm bound to his body. “No water. A little food. The horses are fine. But we don’t have the equipment for long travel in these conditions. I’m worried about the cold.”

“All right. We’ll need to find a Sarnoy village. They usually settle in one place for the winter, so I imagine by now the land will know if any are nearby.”

Marut glanced up at him. Awake for no more than ten minutes and already briskly making plans. “You expect them to offer us aid?”

“We can ask. I don’t expect them to be hostile, at least. We can see if they’ll be willing to barter. I speak a little Sarnoy. They’re always looking for good well sites, and I can search for underground water.” Sycamore lifted his arm as Marut freed him, the barest half an inch, then winced and lowered it again. “We’ll need supplies to last the winter here. There’s no crossing the Koramandi until spring. All the passes will be full of snow.”

Marut set the blanket strips aside. “You know much about the Sarnoy.”

“Well, I read a lot. And I had a Sarnoy tutor when I first came to Banuri. He called himself a hedge wizard, but he was a sorcerer in truth. I had trouble learning magic in the Chedoy way, but he taught me his earth magic and I did much better with that. He said he was too old to learn Chedoy, so I learned Sarnoy from him, too.” Sycamore sighed. “It was much easier to pick up languages when I was a child. My mind is slower now.”

Marut eyed him. He hadn’t expected Sycamore to volunteer so much information. The wizard was always so rigidly controlled, so deliberate in what he said and did. “What other surprises do you have for me? Can you turn into a bird and fly all the way back to Chedi?”

Sycamore grinned. “Alas, no. That would come in handy, wouldn’t it? I would turn into a gazelle and spare Rhododendron the trouble of having to haul me around.”

“You seem a little, ah,” Marut began, and then stopped, not sure how to finish his sentence.

“Am I talking too much? My apologies. I’ve forgotten to be taciturn and menacing. It’s hard to keep that up forever, especially when you don’t seem impressed by my efforts at intimidation.”

“Oh,” Marut said.

Sycamore looked at him, his head cocked to one side, eyes bright with curious attention. “You’re a tough nut to crack, aren’t you?”

“So I’ve been told.” Marut gathered the blanket scraps to give himself something to do. “I’ll light a fire and cook what I caught. Come out when you’re ready.”

He built a small fire in the lee of the tent. The horse’s dung was too moist to burn easily, but it did burn if he used some wood to get the fire going. He skinned and cleaned the squirrel and held it over the fire on a stick. The air filled with the mouth-watering scent of roasting meat. Even the oddly sweet smell of the dung fire couldn’t diminish the appeal. Marut forced himself to wait until the squirrel was thoroughly cooked; he had eaten raw meat more than once, but there was no need now if only he could be patient.

The wizard came out after a while, wearing his cloak beneath a blanket, and went to go stand out in the grass with his back to Marut, presumably emptying his bladder. Finished with that, he joined Marut at the fire, sitting on his saddle which Marut had set out to serve as a chair. His hair still hung loose under the hood of his cloak, and he blew it out of his eyes with a frown as the wind whipped through it.

“This will be ready soon,” Marut said, for lack of anything else to say.

“I can find you an antelope if you think you could shoot it.”

Marut rotated the squirrel. “My aim is good, but the trouble is, they tend to run away.”