Dalbreck swine. They made sure I understood that. Several times.” He held his side, taking a slow shallow breath. “They’re only bruises. I’m all right.”
“No,” I said. “You’re obviously not.” I pushed away his hand and pulled up his shirt. Even in the dim light, I could see the purple bruises that covered his ribs. I recalculated the odds. Five against thousands. I dragged the stool over and made him sit, then ripped strips from my already shredded skirt. I carefully began wrapping his middle to stabilize his movement. I was reminded of the scars on Kaden’s back. These people were savages. “You shouldn’t have come, Rafe. This is my problem. I brought it on when I—”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Stop worrying. I’ve taken worse tumbles on my horse, and this is nothing compared to what you’ve been through.” He reached out and squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry, Lia. They told me about your brother.”
The bitterness rolled up in my throat again. There were things I never thought would happen, much less have to witness. Watching my brother be slaughtered right before my eyes was the worst of them. I drew my hand away, wiping it on my tattered skirt. It felt wrong to have the warmth of Rafe’s hands on my fingertips when I spoke of Walther, who lay cold in the ground. “You mean they laughed about my brother. I listened to them on the road for five days, gloating over how easily they fell.”
“They said you buried them. All of them.”
I stared at the weak beams of light filtering through the slits, trying to see anything but Walther’s sightless eyes staring into the sky and my fingers closing them for the last time. “I wish you could have known him,” I said. “My brother was going to be a great king one day. He was kind and patient in all ways, and he believed in me the way no one else did. He—” I turned to face Rafe. “He rode with a company of thirty-two—the strongest, bravest soldiers of Morrighan. I watched every one of them die. They were outnumbered five to one. It was a massacre.”
The protective curtain I had drawn around myself was torn away, and sickening heat crawled over my skin. I smelled the sweat of their bodies. Pieces of bodies. I had gathered them all so nothing was left for the animals, then dropped to my knees thirty-three times to pray. My words spilled loose, bleeding from somewhere inside, thirty-three cries for mercy, thirty-three good-byes. And then the earth, soaked with their blood, swallowed them up, practiced, and they were gone. This was not the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.
“Lia?”
I looked at Rafe. Tall and strong like my brother. Confident like my brother. He had only four coming. How much more could I face losing?
“Yes,” I answered. “I buried them all.”
He reached out and pulled me to his side. I sat on the straw next to him. “We can do this,” he said. “We just have to buy time until my men get here.”
“How long before your soldiers come?” I asked.
“A few days. Maybe more. It depends how far south they have to ride in order to cross the river. But I know they’ll be here as soon as they can. They’re the best, Lia. The best of Dalbreck soldiers. Two of them speak the language fluently. They’ll find their way in.”
I wanted to say that getting in wasn’t the problem. We had found our way in. The problem was getting out again. But I held my tongue and nodded, trying to appear encouraged. If his plan didn’t work, mine would. I had killed a horse this morning. Maybe by tonight I would kill another beast.
“There might be another way,” I said. “They have weapons in the Sanctum. They’d never miss one. I might be able to slip a knife beneath my skirt.”
“No,” he said firmly. “It’s too dangerous. If they—”
“Rafe, their leader is responsible for killing my brother, his wife, and a whole company of men. It’s only a matter of time before he goes back for more. He has to be—”
“His soldiers killed them, Lia. What good would killing one man do? You can’t take on a whole army with a single knife, especially in our positions. Right now our only goal is to get out of here alive.”
We were at odds. In my head, I knew he was right, but a deeper, darker part of me still hungered