Their Hidden Princess novel · Chapter 18 of 32

Chapter 18: The Cave

The roar went on forever.

Then it stopped, and there was only rain.

I was on my knees in mud. I didn't remember falling.

Where the track had been there was a long pile of broken stone, still settling and clicking.

Maudie was on the far side of it, behind her boulder, screaming my name.

Roan was on my side.

He lay on his face with a slab of rock across his back and his left arm bent under him wrong.

He wasn't moving.

I got my shoulder under the slab and pushed.

It didn't move.

I pushed until something popped in my back and black spots floated across my eyes.

It slid off him an inch at a time and rolled into the drop.

"Roan."

I turned him over.

Blood ran down his face from a split in his scalp. His eyes were closed.

He was breathing.

"Beth!" Lysander's voice, from across the slide. "Is he alive?"

"Yes!"

"I'm coming over!"

"You're not!" the sergeant bellowed. "That slope's still moving! Nobody crosses!"

More stones skittered down.

"There's a shepherd's hut below the bend," Lysander shouted. His voice was raw. "I'll take them down. I'll come back at first light. Get him out of the rain. Keep him warm. Don't let him sleep if he wakes!"

"Go!" I shouted. "Take Maudie! Go!"

There was a cave a little way back along the track. We'd passed it an hour before. A shallow scoop in the rock with goat droppings on the floor.

I dragged him there.

I don't know how. He weighed as much as a horse.

By the time I got him inside, the light was going and I couldn't feel my hands.

I found dry gorse at the back of the cave and got a fire going with the flint from his pack.

Then I knelt over him and looked at the arm.

His shoulder was out of its socket. The bone under it was whole.

My mother's old guard had put mine back once, when I was sixteen. I remembered every word he'd said while he did it.

Roan's eyes opened.

"Beth."

"Don't move."

"Maudie?"

"Alive. Furious. Across the slide." I put my boot against his ribs and took his wrist in both hands. "This is going to hurt."

"Everything hurts."

I pulled.

The joint went back in with a sound I'll never forget.

Roan roared so loud it echoed off the mountain.

Then he lay there panting and laughing at the same time.

"Where," he gasped, "did a princess learn that?"

"A very rude old man."

I cleaned his scalp with rainwater and a strip of my shirt.

By the time I'd finished, the split had already started to close.

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