Healing the Scarred Alphas novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Free to Go

Mabyn draws the silver arrowhead out and the boy breathes; Torren unchains her and says the ford is open, and she chooses to stay, until Gethin shows her eleven beds nobody will touch.

I did not look up again.

The boy's lung had closed around the silver, and I had perhaps three heartbeats before the great vessel tore.

"Hold him on his side," I told Gethin. "Higher. Keep the hole down."

His big hands were shaking, but he held.

I threaded the curved needle by feel, with the chain dragging at my wrists.

The first stitch went into the torn edge of the lung, and the second pulled it shut.

I packed honey salve into the wound and laid my palm over it.

Then I put my mouth on the boy's mouth and breathed for him.

Once.

Twice.

On the third breath his ribs lifted on their own, and he coughed up a thread of red.

He screamed, thin and furious, and the whole yard let out its breath.

"There," I said, and my voice came out ragged. "There you are, you little brute. Shout all you like."

His mother came running through the gate with her skirts in her fists.

She stopped dead when she saw the blood on me, and then she fell on her knees and put both hands over her mouth.

I stayed bent over the child, because if I sat up I knew my hands would start shaking.

A shadow fell across the boy.

"Cadoc," Torren said. "The key."

Nobody argued.

The iron came off my wrists in a bright clatter, and I rubbed the raw bands without feeling them.

Aldith stood a little apart, with her hands still locked behind her back.

She was staring at the stitches.

"You went in under the rib," she said hoarsely. "I never would have tried that."

"Anybody would, if they were in my place."

"No," she said. "Not anybody."

She turned and walked off toward the low long building by the wall, and her shoulders were shaking.

Torren watched her go.

Then he turned back to me, and I braced myself, because I had seen that face on my father when a bargain went his way.

It was a different thing on him.

"You'll sleep tonight," he said. "Cadoc will show you where. Eat. In the morning the ford will be open."

"Open," I said.

"Nobody at this gate will stop you walking back across it. Not me, not my brothers, not my wolves." He said it flatly, like a fact he had checked. "You came as surety, and I hold the surety. I say what happens to it. I say go."

Cadoc made a short, disbelieving sound.

"Torren."

"I've said it."

"She's Tavish Ravenhill's blood."

"She's also the first person in eight years to put a hand on a silver wound in this yard." Torren didn't look away from me. "That counts for something. I'll let her go before I let her be what the last one was."

Cadoc went quiet.

I stood, slowly, with the boy's blood drying stiff on my cuffs.

I thought of my father on his grey horse, not waving.

At the foot of the ford, while the steward fiddled with my chain, he had spoken to me without turning his head.

Do what you do.

Then, a moment later, quieter: Don't come home until it's finished.

I had thought it was a threat.

Now I understood it was an instruction I didn't know how to read.

"If I walk back across the river," I said, "he'll send me straight to another bargain. Or he'll send somebody to see that I'm quiet."

"Probably," Torren said.

"So I'd rather not."

"You'd rather be a hostage."

"I'd rather be a healer," I said. "Of anyone who needs one."

Torren said nothing for a moment.

"Say your terms," he said at last.

"I get a room with a key, and the key is mine."

"Done."

"I get wages like any healer in this hold. A copper a day will do, so no one can say I was bought."

"Nobody lays a hand on me," I went on. "I'll put hands on nobody who doesn't ask. And the stores are mine to open. I'll need your whole infirmary, Aldith's herbs and her ledger."

"You'll need Aldith to let you in," Torren said.

"Then I'll ask nicely."

The corner of Torren's ruined mouth moved.

It might have been a smile.

It was gone so fast that I couldn't swear to it.

"Terms accepted," he said. "You're not a prisoner here, Mabyn Ravenhill. If you stay, you stay on your own feet."

He walked away through the gate, and the yard parted for him.

Gethin was still kneeling in the mud with the boy's bloodied hat in his lap.

"Well," he said, brightly, "you've made a spectacular first day."

"Nobody's tried to kill you yet. That's a record." He stood and offered me a hand up, paused, and took it back. "Sorry. Terms. Nobody lays a hand on you."

"You can carry the needle roll."

"I'd be honoured." He picked it up and held it as though it were made of glass. Then his smile slipped, just for a moment. "Come on. I want to show you something before you decide to stay."

He led me through the gate and across the yard to the low long building where Aldith had gone.

Inside, the air smelled of tallow, old linen and sorrow.

Eleven narrow beds ran down the wall.

In each one, a wolf lay turned toward the window, and every one of them was wrapped in bandages that had gone grey.

"Silver," Gethin said quietly. "Every one. The war's been on pause for a season, and these are still the war."

He looked at me.

"Nobody's touched them in eight years."

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