Chapter 1 - Blood In The Snow
Blood on snow was never good news.
Blood that fresh, that far from the road, was worse.
I stopped so hard my boots slid.
The lantern in my hand swung once, throwing weak yellow light over the dark
trail cutting through the white. The wind had already started filling it in,
but not fast enough. Whoever made that trail had passed less than a minute
earlier. Maybe less.
I should have kept walking.
It was late. The storm was building. Mara would skin me if she knew I was
standing in a pine break alone with night coming down hard and a satchel full
of herbs on my shoulder.
I looked down the road toward home.
Then I looked back at the blood.
“Damn it,” I muttered, and stepped off the road.
The snow came almost to my calves between the trees. The blood trail ran dark
and ugly over it, thick in one place, dragged thin in the next, as if whoever
was bleeding had refused to fall for sheer stubbornness alone.
I knew that kind of refusal.
Border people learned it young.
The trail bent around a black rock shelf and ended in a patch of churned-up
snow. For one stupid second I thought I was too late.
Then the body against the rock moved.
Not much. Just enough.
He had one knee under him and one hand braced in the snow as if he had been
trying to stand when his strength failed. A horse lay twenty feet away on its
side, breathing in short, pained bursts. The saddle had been cut half loose.
The man looked wrong here.
Not because he was beautiful. Men could be beautiful and still die in border
snow.
He looked wrong because everything about him screamed power. The coat. The cut
of the boots. The weight of the signet ring on the hand pressed into the snow.
Even half dead, he looked like someone other people moved around carefully.
I crouched.
“Can you hear me?”
His head lifted a fraction.
I reached for the split side of his coat.
His hand shot out and closed around my wrist so fast I nearly lost the lantern.
Pain flashed up my arm.
My breath caught.
His eyes opened.
Cold. Clear. Fully awake.
Predator eyes.
Not the drifting eyes of a dying man. Not even close.
“Let go,” I said.
His fingers tightened first. Then eased just enough to become warning instead
of restraint.
“You should leave.”
His voice was rough with cold and blood loss, but it still carried like an
order.
That annoyed me immediately.
“You are bleeding into the snow,” I said. “This is not a position from which to
give orders.”
Something sharp flickered in his face. Surprise maybe. Or disbelief that I had
said it at all.
Good.
He let go of my wrist.
“If you stay,” he said, “you will regret it.”
“Probably.”
I set the lantern down on the snow and pulled his coat aside before he could
stop me again.
Three deep cuts slashed across his ribs. They were too clean for claws and too
even for roadside steel. The skin around them had gone dark in branching veins
that were almost black in the lantern light.
Poison.
Not market poison either.
This was expensive. Deliberate. The kind used by people who needed a man dead
for more than simple hatred.
“You were hunted,” I said.
His jaw flexed.
That was answer enough.
I opened my satchel and spread a cloth over the snow. Needle. Thread. Linen.
Knife. Two stoppered vials. Crushed bark.
He watched my hands.
“If you want to live,” I said, “you will do exactly what I say.”
One dark brow lifted.
“That has never gone well for the people giving me instructions.”
“Then you are overdue for a new experience.”
He almost smiled.
Almost.
I poured the first vial over the wounds.
His whole body locked under my hand.
There it was.
Pain. Real pain.
“Good,” I said. “That means you’re still interested in staying alive.”
“You talk too much.”
“And you bleed too much.”
I pressed linen hard over the deepest cut. His breathing roughened. He stayed
still anyway, which told me more about him than his clothes did.
Men unused to pain thrashed.
Men used to power threatened.
This one endured.
The wind shifted and blew his scent straight at me.
Blood first.
Then cold iron. Cedar. Smoke.
And beneath it, something darker. Warmer. Male in a way that hit low and hard
enough to make my body go still before my mind did.
I hated that.
His eyes narrowed as if he had noticed.
I ignored it and checked the horse instead. Dead already. Clean stab at the
neck. Quick. Merciful.
The man followed my glance.
“Can you stand?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Too fast.
I looked back at him flatly.
“Try again.”
The almost-smile flashed again, gone before it fully formed.
“Not well.”
“Better.”
I slid my arm under his and hauled him upright.
He was larger than I had guessed kneeling in the snow. Taller than any man in
our valley. Broad enough that most women would have left him there from simple
self-preservation.
His arm landed across my shoulders with punishing weight.
Heat rolled off him through soaked wool and leather.
Fever-hot.
“If you collapse on me,” I said through my teeth, “I will let the snow finish
what your enemies started.”
“A comforting healer.”
“A practical one.”
The walk back to the infirmary felt five miles longer than it was.
Twice he stumbled.
Once he nearly pulled us both down.
Each time he forced himself upright with furious control, as though weakness
offended him more than the poison eating through his blood.
By the time I kicked open the side door with my boot, my shoulder was burning.
Mara looked up from the worktable in the back room and froze.
“No.”
She was on her feet before the word finished leaving her mouth.
“Liora, absolutely not. What did you bring me now?”
“A patient.”
She took one look at him and snorted.
“That is not a patient. That is trouble in expensive clothes.”
She was not wrong.
Between us we got him onto the treatment table. He tried to insist he did not
need help while very obviously needing help, which earned him a filthy look
from Mara and none from me because I was too busy trying not to drop him.
Mara cut the coat away from the wounds and swore under her breath.
“By all the dead saints. What did this to him?”
“Steel,” I said. “And poison.”
She looked up sharply.
“What kind?”
“The kind no one around here can afford.”
That shut her up for exactly one second.
Then she reached for the silver probe.
His hand snapped up and caught her wrist before the metal touched skin.
“No silver.”
Mara glared at him. “Then die politely.”
“It reacts with the poison.”
That made both of us still.
I looked at him.
“How do you know?”
He looked right back at me when he answered.
“Because I’ve seen this before.”
That chilled me more than the storm outside.
Seen it before meant he knew the hand behind the method.
Seen it before meant this was no random ambush.
Mara ripped her wrist free with a curse and changed tools.
“Hold him.”
I moved before I thought better of it and braced one hand flat against his
chest while Mara packed the wound with dark paste.
His skin was burning hot.
His muscles locked under my palm.
For one ugly second all I could feel was him. The strength under his skin. The
drag of his breath. The raw male heat of him. The way his eyes opened and fixed
on my face as if I had done something far more intimate than stop him from
rolling off the table.
Mara tied the linen bandage tight.
He sucked in a breath.
Then his mouth moved.
The words he spoke were not in the valley tongue.
I knew that at once.
They should have meant nothing to me.
But I understood every one.
“Do not let them claim me.”
I froze.
Mara glanced up. “What did he say?”
I dragged air into my lungs.
“He’s feverish.”
She gave me a look that said she knew I was lying, but she had more important
things to do than pull the lie apart right then.
Do not let them claim me.
Not save me.
Not hide me.
Claim me.
The word lodged under my skin.
Mara finally stepped back from the table.
“If he lives until dawn, he’ll live another day.”
“You always know how to make a girl feel hopeful.”
“Hope is for people with fewer wounds.”
She jerked her chin toward the hearth. “More hot water.”
I turned to grab the kettle.
That was when I saw the clasp at the torn collar of his coat.
A wolf’s head crowned with thorns.
I went cold all over.
I knew that crest.
Not from trade. Not from market gossip. From an old page I had once seen in the
locked cabinet Mara kept under her bed. A page she had snatched away from me so
fast I had never forgotten it.
Only one house carried that mark.
The ruling line of the North.
I looked back at the man on the table.
Not a merchant.
Not a lord’s spoiled son playing soldier.
Something much worse.
The kind of man whose fall would drag half a territory down with him.
As if he felt my stare, his eyes opened again.
Barely.
Enough to find me.
“If they come,” he said, voice fraying now, “do not trust anyone wearing my
colors.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
His gaze stayed on mine for one long second.
“Trouble,” Mara muttered behind me.
He either did not hear her or agreed.
His eyes closed.
This time they stayed closed.
I stood there with the hot kettle in my hand and the thorn-crowned wolf crest
burning in my mind.
Outside, the storm hit the shutters hard enough to rattle them.
Inside, the room felt smaller than it had an hour ago.
I had dragged the North’s heir into my infirmary.
And whatever had tried to kill him would not be far behind.
