“My first piece of military advice, sweetheart? You’re in a war. Get used to the blood.”
“I’ll work on it. You try and rest. Hopefully William will be able to look at this soon or Nathaniel will come back. I could have one of the other healers come in, too?”
“No, Quinn. I think this is okay for now. James needs William more than I do.”
He wasn’t convincing, though. As Zander helped him out of his cloak, he could feel how hot Max was. Sweat pooled in the dark hair at his neck, soaking the collar of his shirt. Once the cloak was off, he didn’t lie down so much as fall back when Thomas tried to lower him gently. Landing on the mattress made him groan in pain.
“Would it be better on his side?” Linnea asked through clenched teeth.
Then there was a sound of footsteps at the door.
“Max!”
“Hey, Will.”
Zander didn’t think William even noticed there were other people in the room besides his older brother. He pushed through Zander and Thomas without a word. But then, when he grabbed a pair of scissors from his bag and began cutting up the side of Max’s shirt, he looked at Thomas. “Take the girls out of here, please.”
“I’ll do it,” Zander said, holding his hand up at Thomas. “Do you need me to bring you back anything?”
It took William a minute to respond. He already had Max’s shirt off and he was pulling out a leather-wrapped tool kit. “No.”
Zander waited until he’d closed the door behind him before looking at Quinn and Linnea. “I have to say I’m surprised neither one of you argued about that.” And that neither of them had objected to being ‘taken out’ instead of being asked to leave for themselves. “You’ve both seen worse.”
“William doesn’t need the distraction of the two of us making him nervous when he’s like that,” Quinn said. “He’s upset, then he gets worried that we’re upset. It’s just better to let him work.”
“And it got you out of there, too,” Linnea said.
He frowned. “Am I not supposed to be in there?”
“You’re not unwelcome in there, but don’t you think you could use a few minutes to decompress after the day you’ve had?” Quinn asked.
His stomach felt like it was collapsing in on itself as his gaze met hers.
“Well don’t look at me like you did something wrong,” she said.
“You mean something wrong like killing someone?”
She was silent for a minute, studying him as emotions he couldn’t read swirled in her eyes. “At this point, the only thing I see wrong with you killing Callum Haddon is that it wasn’t Tolliver.”
“Yeah, well…” he glanced away, but “away” turned out to be right at Linnea. A violent shudder ripped through him as he thought of what Callum had said. He looked back at Quinn before just thinking about it made him murder someone else. “Trust me. He deserved it at least as much.”
“Oh, I trust you Zander. I’m sure in the next few hours and days we’ll have a lot to discuss about what happened today, but honestly, right now the only question I have for you is whether you would prefer to eat first or bathe.”
~ Thirty ~
Aftermath
“WOULD YOU LIKE ANOTHER bowl?” Linnea asked, reaching for the empty dish in front of Zander.
He picked it up before she could. “You don’t have to serve me. I can get it.”
A second later, the bowl was out of his hand again.
Quinn shot him a teasing look as she handed it to Linnea.
He slumped back down on the stool. “Fine. Thank you.” Truthfully, though, his motivation for getting it himself had little to do with saving Linnea the work. He needed the distraction. He didn’t even notice picking up his spoon and attempting to spin it like a top until it flew across the counter, knocking into a metal mixing bowl.
Quinn retrieved it and set it back in front of him without comment.
He held the spoon between his fingers. “So no word from Nathaniel and Tobias yet?”
“No. I’m hoping they return soon, though. It sounds like it’s getting nasty out there again.”
He could hear the wind blowing against the house from where he was; now and then a strong gust would even make the flames in the fireplace flicker higher for a minute.
“It’s starting to snow,” Linnea said, stretching up on her toes to get a good look out the window over the sink. “Just a little bit so far.”
Although the front door was two rooms away from them, they all looked in that direction as it opened unexpectedly. Zander swore he could feel the cooler air from his seat.
Quinn was on her feet immediately, and Zander leaped up, too, grabbing his sword from the counter and rushing to get in front of her.
Marcus was already in the entryway, looking on as two guards closed the door behind another man who was brushing flakes of snow off the shoulders of his cloak. Zander recognized him as one of the healers who’d been helping out at the camp, Nicholas-something.
“I heard you needed help,” he said. “I came to do what I can.”
Zander didn’t really understand what happened in the next few minutes, but somehow he ended up back in the kitchen with Linnea. The new healer, Nicholas was with Max, and William had gone back to James who needed him more, and Quinn had disappeared with Marcus.
“You should finish that before it gets cold,” Linnea said, nodding toward the full bowl of stew that had been left on the counter.
He looked at it and shook his head. “I’m not really so hungry anymore.”
She nodded without answering and went over to the end of the room, settling into one of the more comfortable chairs by the fireplace.
Though he wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, he followed her, sitting down on the chair across from her. “Are you doing okay?”
She pressed her fingers against the side of her forehead. “I was starting to think I could count on you to not ask stupid questions, Zander.”
He snorted. “How is it my fault if you’re not as smart about me as you thought you were?”
“All right, maybe that isn’t your fault, though I think I can hold you accountable for trying to talk about me instead of you.”
For half a second, he bought it, and the familiar weight of guilt settled in his chest, but then he narrowed his eyes. “Not so fast, Linnea … Westbrook. Having the most tragic backstory is not an indefinite ‘get out of humanity free card’… What’s your middle name, anyway?”
“Why? So you can call me by it?”
“When you deserve it. Yes.”
“It’s still a stupid question, Zander-Whatever-Cunningham. Just as stupid as if I asked you if you’re doing okay after you slit someone’s throat today. Obviously I’m not. My brother’s injured, my uncle’s out in the snowstorm, we’re at war, and James, who has been pursuing me mercilessly despite getting nothing in return, might die – and then where will I be? The question is so ridiculous it needs its own category of stupid.”
He stared at the floor, though her tirade didn’t embarrass him the way it would have if almost anyone else spoke to him that way. “You’re right,” he said when she was finished.
After several minutes of silence, her voice was low when she spoke again. “If there’s one of those topics you’re in need of discussing in detail, I can do that. But I can’t deal with the polite lying or trying to cheer each other up right now, okay?”
He chuckled. “You mean, let’s just hang out and be wrecks together?”
“Complete wrecks.”
“I can handle that. As much as I can handle anything right now, anyway,” he said, smiling at her.
“So, obviously he deserved it for just daring to come back inside this kingdom, but what made you decide to solve the Callum Haddon problem today?”
His gaze flicked back to the fire immediately; he couldn’t look at her and think about that… not man. He wasn’t – hadn’t been – any kind of a man.
“Never mind,” she said. “I gues
s I’m not immune to asking stupid questions today, either. Do you want to help me get dinner started? Everyone is going to be hungry, and there’s not enough stew for another whole meal.”
“Sure.” He wondered if she’d seen the way his right hand had clenched the hilt of his sword when she’d mentioned Callum. Even once he managed to pry his fingers loose, they were sore.
For a long while, he and Linnea peeled and chopped vegetables in silence, but it was comfortable. Having something to do with his hands felt good, and despite the fact that everything Linnea had said was true, and that neither of them was functioning well emotionally, just being in the room with her, working together, had a steadying, calming effect.
Until a heartrending scream filled the house.
Zander’s knife clattered to the wooden counter.
Linnea uttered a word he wouldn’t have guessed she knew, which turned his attention to her instead of to the shouts and slamming doors in the back of the house.
What he saw nearly made the same word come out of his mouth, and he raced to get a towel.
He knew exactly what had happened, of course. The noise had startled her, too, only her knife hadn’t dropped harmlessly.
By the time he reached her with the towel, there was already a puddle of blood on the counter, and her cheeks were an odd dusky color.
“It’s all right,” he said, taking her hand and wrapping the towel tightly around it. “It’s just a little blood.”
She nodded, but the gray in her features turned slowly green.
He grabbed her around the waist and moved her to the large sink just in time, pulling her long hair out of the way.
“Ugh, sorry,” she said afterwards as he reached for a cup while still trying to hold the towel tightly against her hand. “I don’t know why that happened.”
He filled the cup with water and handed it to her. “Well, you are pregnant. Maybe the baby doesn’t like her mom getting hurt.” He bent his head toward her stomach. “I have to say I agree with you there, kiddo.”
When he straightened back up, Linnea was giving him a strange look – one that made his neck feel warm, though he wasn’t sure exactly why.
He cleared his throat and turned his attention back to her hand. “Let’s wash it off and see how bad it is, okay?”
She nodded tentatively; her face turned pale and sweaty again, but he didn’t think she’d be sick this time.
He held tightly to the makeshift bandage while he lifted the pump handle over the sink and got the water flowing again. Then he unwrapped her hand and carefully helped her slide it under the stream. “You’re doing good,” he said, rubbing gently at her wrist when she winced.
Her sigh made him chuckle. “I know. You’d rather knock my teeth out than let me think you can’t take care of this yourself. But I think I should get a pass tonight since I’m the only reason there’s no puke in your hair right now.”
She looked at him. “Actually, I was thinking that I’m probably the only one in this house who can’t be trusted to cut vegetables without causing more drama that we don’t need.”
“Hey,” he looked away, concentrating on rinsing the blood between her fingers and trying to look at the cut – cuts. The knife had left deep red streaks across three of her fingers. “What’s a war without a couple of war wounds? At least you sliced your own hand instead of getting mad and taking it out on someone else’s throat.”
“That’s only because I wasn’t there.”
“Weren’t where?” Thomas’ voice startled them. Although it wasn’t nearly the same shock as the earlier scream had been; they were both still jumpy. He could feel Linnea’s accelerated heartbeat in her wrist as he turned off the water and reached for the towel.
As soon as they turned to face Thomas, he started running across the room. “Whoa, Nay! What happened?”
Zander looked down – he hadn’t thought the cuts were that bad. Then he saw the blood all down the front of her white apron. “Minor cooking incident,” he said quickly. “It looks worse than it is. She’s okay.”
Thomas grabbed a clean towel before he approached her and took her hand in his. “We’ll have Will take a look at it.”
Although there was no good reason for anything to be funny right now, the little sound Linnea made when she was exasperated amused him, and he couldn’t help smiling. “I think Will has enough to deal with right now. How is Max?”
“Nicholas was working on his arm until just a few minutes ago, but then Will came and asked him to go and tend to James instead.”
She looked at Thomas with wide eyes.
“William says that James is stable for right now. I don’t know exactly what that means, because it still doesn’t sound good, but it’s better than nothing. Dorian is staying right by his side.”
“What happened a couple of minutes ago?”
Thomas shook his head, and the meaning was clear: they didn’t want to know the answer to that question. “You can go see both of them now if you’d like,” Thomas said. “Max is awake, although I don’t know for how much longer. I was going to go check on James in a couple of minutes. You need to show William your hand, anyway. I’ll clean this up.”
Linnea raised an eyebrow. She left the room – but not headed in William’s direction.
For a tense moment, Zander wasn’t sure if Thomas was going to challenge her, but he didn’t. Apparently even Thomas knew the outer limits of Linnea’s patience.
He headed to the basket where Tobias kept stacks of clean towels. By the time he returned to the counter with it, Thomas was already there with the bottle full of bleaching solution they used for the laundry.
He carefully salvaged all of the uncontaminated vegetables and put them in a bowl before Thomas poured the sharp-smelling liquid.
“You don’t get to feel bad about what happened today,” Thomas said as they worked.
“I’m not sure I can just not feel bad about killing someone.”
“You killed Rahas. Do you feel bad about that?”
He sighed. “Not really, but then, he was trying to kill me.”
“So was Callum Haddon. Just because he didn’t have a sword right then doesn’t mean anything. What he was saying about Quinn? That was treason – and in a way that wouldn’t have given her any other choice but to have him executed, because all he was trying to do was prove that she was too weak to do it.”
His eyes flicked to Thomas’. He hated the question he was about to ask, but he did it anyway. “Do you think she would have been?”
Thomas’ gaze was sharp and clear as he looked back. “I think there’s a reason she has you.”
Zander swallowed, concentrating very hard on scrubbing an invisible drop of blood from the counter.
“We didn’t start this war, Zander. We didn’t invade their kingdom, we didn’t try to usurp their throne, or kidnap any of their royal children, or poison their people. And Callum Haddon was not an innocent bystander. I’m honored to know that someone like you – who could still feel bad about killing him – is on our side, but, you did us all a favor today. It wasn’t wrong.”
“My senior year was not supposed to be this complicated, you know.”
“Yeah, well, neither was my sister’s pregnancy. But life doesn’t end just because something happened that we didn’t originally plan for.”
He nodded.
Thomas reached for the rag Zander had finished using. “Speaking of my sister, I don’t plan to ever tell her what Callum said about her today. I don’t know if it’s something she should hear or not. Whether the topic ever has reason to come up between the two of you, I’ll leave it there.”
His mouth dropped open; he wasn’t sure what Thomas was implying – or at least, he didn’t want to think about it.
“I’ll go put these in the laundry.”
~ Thirty-One ~
Larya
“SO WHEN WERE YOU planning on showing me your hand, Linnea?” William’s voice was unexpected, interrupting her half-asl
eep daze as she stared into the fire in the sitting room.
Across from her, Zander raised his head – and an eyebrow. “You still didn’t tell him?”
“I’m fine. I didn’t cut my hand off.”
She regretted it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Everyone in the room was silent, looking anywhere but at her or at each other.
An hour ago, when he’d stepped out of Max’s room for long enough to accept a plate of dinner, William had broken the news that he wasn’t sure Max’s arm could be saved – at least not all of it. Max didn’t know yet; they’d all been sort of in shock since then.
Only William didn’t seem to acknowledge the awkwardness of her comment. “It still needs to be treated, Linnea,” he said, though he walked toward the window instead of her, setting his bag on a low table as he went.
They still hadn’t heard anything from Nathaniel. Thomas and Zander kept taking turns pacing to the window and back, looking for any sign of him, or for a message from a bird.
Quinn had already had to talk Marcus out of going out into the snow searching for him – it wasn’t worth it to risk Marcus’ life, since there was a good chance Nathaniel was safe in the village, and not out in the weather.
Thomas cleared his throat. “At this point, I’m just praying he’s not out there. Even Aidel would have a challenge getting us a message through that.”
Sometime since dinner, the weather had turned from an ordinary snowstorm to a blizzard. The wind shook the windows every couple of minutes, and the air outside was blindingly white. As William looked out, something – a stick maybe – flew up and smacked the glass, making all of them jump.
After a tense few seconds, William confirmed that it hadn’t caused any damage.
“We should go out and close the shutters,” Thomas said. “It’ll help it warm up in here anyway.”
“Depends on your definition of warm,” Zander grumbled, though he got up and followed Thomas without hesitation.
William continued staring out the window as long as he could, until the heavy wooden shutters clattered shut, blocking his view – or most of it. Someone opened the slats a little, but William still turned away and came to sit on the table across from her. “Okay Nay, let’s have a look.” He grabbed a pillow and set it on her lap before taking hold of her towel-wrapped hand and laying it on the cushion.
Leaves of Revolution Page 24
