Chapter 6: Stitches

"Can you walk?" Rowena asked.

"I can crawl. I've had practice."

"Don't. I'm not carrying you."

She carried him anyway.

She got his arm over her shoulders and hauled him across the frozen yard and through the cabin door.

It was the first time he had been over the threshold.

She dropped him onto the kitchen table and ripped his jeans open along the seam.

The wound was black at the edges. Silver burns do not close on their own.

"Hester's bag," she said. "Don't move."

He did not move. He watched her pull everything out onto the table.

Needle. Thread. A small tin of green salve that smelled of monkshood and pine tar.

"Clean it first," he said. "Or it won't take."

"I know. I work in a clinic."

"You fetch things in a clinic."

She looked up. He closed his mouth.

"Say that again," she said, "and I'll sew your leg to the table."

He went quiet.

She pressed a wet cloth to his thigh, and her hand landed flat against the bare skin above the wound.

The pain in her chest stopped at once.

She had carried it since the fire, and now it was gone, and she nearly gasped with relief.

Lachlan's breath caught.

His hand closed into a fist on the table, and the muscle under her palm went hard.

"It's the silver," she told herself, and she told him. "It hurts you."

"Yes," he said.

His voice came out low and rough, and he did not look at the wound at all.

She took her hand away to thread the needle.

The ache returned at once, sharp and dull together.

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