She couldn't rest. Not while the storm raged outside. Not while Tavi remained in it, helpless and fragile and alone. She started to sit up, but simply could not. She did not have the strength to do much more than lift her head. She fell back to the floor and felt a tear of frustration glide from one eye. That tear seemed to trigger others, and then she was weeping, silently, weeping until she could not see, could barely breathe.
She should have been more careful. She should have forbidden him to leave the steadholt this morning. She should have seen to her brother more swiftly, should have understood the Kordholders' plans before it had come to violence. She had fought as hard as she could. She had tried. Furies knew, she had tried. But all of her efforts had been for nothing. Time had swept down on her, swift as a hungry crow.
Tavi was out there in the storm. Alone.
O furies and spirits of the departed. Please. Please let him come home safe.
Chapter 12
Amara strove to ignore the exhaustion and the cold. Her limbs shook almost too hard to be controlled, and her entire body throbbed with weariness. More than anything, she wanted to collapse upon the floor and sleep-but if she did, it might cost the boy his life.
She had wiped the mud from his face and his throat as best she could, but it clung to him in a thin layer of slimy clay, grey-brown and mottled over paler skin. It made him look almost like a corpse, several days old. Amara slipped a hand beneath the boy's shirt, feeling for his heartbeat. Even in this weather, he wore only a light tunic and cloak for warmth, evidence of his hardy upbringing here on the savage frontier of the Realm. She shuddered, soaked and half-frozen, and glanced up yearningly toward the nearest of the funeral fires.
The boy's heartbeat thudded against her own mud-stained palm, quick and strong, but when she drew her hand out, she saw the mud dappled with bright scarlet. The boy was wounded, though it couldn't have been anything major-he'd have been dead already. Amara cursed under her breath and felt for his limbs. They were dangerously cold. While she struggled to force her weary mind to decide on a course of action, she began rubbing briskly, at once scraping more of the frigid mud off of him and attempting to restore warmth and circulation to his limbs. She called his name, several times, but though his eyelashes flickered, his eyes did not open, nor did he speak.
She took a quick look around the chamber. Amara shuddered to think of what the mud of the Field of Tears, where so many had fallen, might do to him if it got into his blood. She had to clean it off, and quickly.
She undressed him roughly. He was too limp and heavy, for all his slender appearance, to allow her weakened hands to be any more precise. His clothes tore in a few places before she got them off of him, and by the time she had, his lips had tinged with blue. Amara half-carried, half-dragged him over to the water and then down into it.
The water's warmth came as a pleasant shock to her senses. The pool's floor sloped down sharply until it was about hip deep, and even as she kept the boy's face out of the water, she sank gratefully into it and simply huddled there for a moment, until the rattle of her teeth chattering had begun to slow down.
Then she dragged him a few feet to one side, out of the mud-clouded water, and began to rub roughly over his skin, brushing the clay away until the boy was clean.
He had a shocking collection of bruises, scrapes, abraded skin, and minor cuts. The bruises were fairly fresh, only a few hours old, she judged. His knees had several layers of skin peeled off, apparently a match to the ragged holes in his discarded trousers. His arms, legs, and flanks all showed patches of purple, slowly forming, as though he had been recently beaten, and a lattice of long, tiny cuts covered his skin. He had to have been running through thickets and thorns.
She cleared the mud from his face as best she could, using her already-torn skirts to clean him, and then dragged him back up, out of the water, and over to one of the fires.