by Alisa Adams
She tried to swallow but her throat was dry and clogged. She breathed through her nose.
"Okay..." Finn told her, slowly and carefully. He was using that voice that Ilya had always taken on whenever she had to tell Merith bad news, which did not put her nerves at ease.
"You're going to take hold of the arrow with your strongest hand and pull it straight back, as hard as you can."
Merith's lips struggled on a choking sound.
"Won't that hurt?"
"It will hurt more the slower you do it," he told her. "Faster is better."
Merith wasn't the strongest of people, but it was only a little arrowhead. She could give it one sharp pull.
Finn continued, gesturing to the knife she still held in the flame. "As soon as the arrow is free, you're going to press the side of that knife against the wound."
Pure horror shot through Merith's bloodstream.
She was most certainly not going to do that! Dear God, he wanted her to burn his skin? He had just been shot and punctured by an arrow. Was he insane?
Her thoughts must have been clear on her face because Finn answered despite her silence.
"Burning the flesh knits it together. It stops me from bleeding out. It hurts and it smells a bit but unless one of us has a needle and thread and can do some stitches, this is the only option that we have right now."
Merith felt herself going a little faint. The smell? Good grief, what was the smell of burning flesh like? Did she even wish to know? Just the notion of it was making her feel queasy. She closed her eyes and took long and slow breaths.
"Merith..."
When she opened her eyes again, Finn's face was right there next to hers, as close as it had been when they had dropped the map on the roadside. That felt like a lifetime ago. Back then, Finn had been clean-shaven, bright-eyed, and eager for an adventure. His smile had been light and easy. Now, he was watching her with a stare so intense, it had her heart doing little somersaults in her chest. His face was dirty, there was soot in his hair, and the scar on his forehead was stark against his coloring. There was stubble growing over his chin and jaw, and there were specks of blood on his neck and ear.
Three days ago on the roadside, Merith had met Finn the Boy.
Now, she was looking at Finn the Man. The soldier. The one who put duty over everything else.
Everything else aside from her feelings, apparently.
"Merith, you don't have to do this. I can have it taken out at the next town we visit. I should heal around it. I won't bleed out."
His eyes were truthful but it didn't matter to Merith whether his words were pure honesty or flat-out lies. She wasn't going to leave him in pain, with that arrow in his arm, simply because she was too cowardly to test her nerve. Ripping out an arrow after the flesh had healed and hardened around it would be agony like nothing else. Of that, she was sure. But more than that, Merith felt it was only fair and moral for her to help the man who had aided her so many times. She owed him this.
"I have it," she told him, proud of herself when there was no quiver in her voice. "We're taking that arrow out so that you can rest and heal."
With a single finger, Merith poked the back of Finn's shoulder to get him to turn around. She tried not to notice how warm his skin was, even on a night as cool as this one. She didn’t know how he did it. Even sitting next to the fire, Merith's skin had broken out into gooseflesh.
After watching her for a moment, as if to test that she meant her sentiments, Finn eventually turned as instructed. He rested her forearm on his folded thigh and pushed his other hand down on it, to keep it in place. His bicep was stretched long and vertical.
"Alright," Merith said, though she wasn't sure if she was reassuring him or herself.
Very gently, she wrapped a hand around the four inches of arrow left sticking out of his arm. It moved a little and the muscles in Finn's back threw shadows as they tensed. She winced. "I'm going to pull it out on the count of three. One...two..."
Merith yanked as hard as she could.
To his credit, Finn neither shouted nor cried out in pain. His body curled and a grunt slipped past his clamped teeth, but he did not yell. Instead, he grumbled.
"That wasn't three," he told her, a sort of laughing sob leaving his lips. A trickle of blood was already rolling down towards his elbow.
"It would hurt more if you were expecting it," Merith muttered.
Quickly, so as not to let him bleed more than necessary, she took the knife—now red hot—and brought it to his arm. She hesitated when the glow of the metal shone against his skin, highlighting the crimson.
"Do it," Finn instructed.
Biting her lip, Merith placed one hand on Finn's shoulder, and then, before her fears could see her unable to finish the job, she pressed the flat side of the blade against the wound.
This time, Finn did yell. Only he did it through a clenched jaw, turning it into a strange grinding howl. Merith winced as she watched his face contort and his back muscles bunch. His entire frame went hard and solid, trying not to move away from the pain she was inflicting. A strange smell rose like steam from the wound. Half roasting meat, half acrid stench. Merith wrinkled her nose but held on.
When there was no more blood oozing from beneath the blade, Merith took it back. The metal had seared a little to his flesh and peeled away in a manner that had her wincing again. a red hot welt had appeared on his skin but the hole the arrow had left behind was no longer seeping. It had closed and fused together.
She breathed a sigh of relief.
It was a long moment before either of them spoke.
It took a while for Finn to unclench his muscles and even longer for him to risk testing the movement of his arm. The air took time to clear of the awful smell and Merith's heart was still thundering, even as Finn quietly thanked her and then appeared to shrug off the whole experience to rise to his feet.
What in the world is he doing?
"We need food."
The words were simple, unequivocal, and, as far as Merith was concerned, entirely unimportant right now. She was so surprised he was standing.
"I'm going to go hunt us something to eat. I'll be back quickly," Finn said, pulling his shirt over his head.
Merith was distracted by the view, for he had turned as he spoke to her, revealing the front of his chest instead of the back.
His body was shaped very differently than hers, with lines of muscle around the waist, and a dusting of hair across the top. What was odder still was a fine and dark line of hair that ran down towards the hem of his trousers. She blinked and suddenly the beige linen had fallen into place. It was only then that she realized the significance of what Finn was saying.
He was going hunting. Alone.
Leaving her there. Alone.
Scrambling to her feet and catching her heel on a sharp stone, Merith winced as she reached out to grab hold of Finn's wrist.
"Wait. Surely, you cannot mean to leave me here?"
Whatever foreign bravery had been given to her in the last few minutes as she tended to her guard, it had left her now. She trembled at the very idea of being left with only her own company, unable to defend herself. Her stomach tightened like a rock and her eyes were wide with fright.
Finn reached out to take hold of her arms. His touch, at least, was more steadying than his words. It calmed her breathing and grounded her to the earth beneath her feet.
"It is safer than having you with me," he told her. She felt his thumbs rubbing over her skin, pressing against the silk of her sleeves. How was he always so warm? "I'll be faster alone, and we'll be able to eat sooner. I'll be back before you know it. Ajax will stay with you."
"Who?"
Finn grinned.
"The horse."
Merith blinked. Oh, the horse. How comforting.
"You know how to ride, don't you?" he asked her. The question had her bristling and some of her offense burnt off her worry.
"Of course, I know how to ride!"
"Then if anything happens, you get on Ajax's back and you ride south." He pointed in the correct direction. "You don't stop until you know there is no one following you and you can see a town ahead. You just keep riding until you get to the nearest building and ask them for help."
"No, wait, Finn—"
"Nothing will happen," he cut in, refusing to let her panic tumble into a stream of babble again. "I'm just telling you this so that you feel more comfortable. But, nothing will happen." Pointing in the opposite direction, back over his shoulder, Finn indicated a dark thatch of shadow on the other side of the field. "I'm going to be in those trees over there. I'm barely going anywhere. If it was daylight, you'd still be able to see me."
Merith knew that he was just trying to calm her down. But she also knew that it was working. Sort of.
She nodded. "Alright." Taking a step back, she looked about their little camp. "Maybe I will try and sort something out for us to sleep on."
"That's a great idea," Finn said with such cheeriness that she wondered if he was just humoring her. "We'll need somewhere to sleep, preferably in that shelter, after we eat. I should be back before you're finished building it."
The promise turned out to be a false one.
Perhaps Merith had made the bed wrong or possessed a natural speed in building nests from straw. Or, maybe her nervousness had given her some sort of energy that saw her speeding through the process. For whatever reason, however, she was done with her own task long before Finn returned to the camp.
Having carefully built a solid and cushioning mattress of straw, Merith had taken up Finn's tunic as a sort of bed sheet. Once the straw was covered, she had placed Ajax's saddle at its head on one side as she had seen Finn favor it as a pillow. Then she shook out the blanket she had been sleeping beneath earlier and set it down as a covering. Once done, she had assessed her work with her hands on her hips and an unimpressed twist to her lips. She had glanced at Ajax. Ajax had glanced at the bed.
"I know, I know. But it's the best I can do."
Not even bothering to consider the fact that she, esteemed daughter of the great warlord Mackenzie, was talking to a horse, Merith allowed the silliness to distract her. Talking to the gelding seemed to make her feel less alone. And if she wasn't alone, it made it easier to forget that Finn wasn't there.
On the other hand, one could only sustain a one-sided conversation for so long and, an hour later, Merith had fallen into a frightening silence.
Sitting by the firepit, she distracted herself by plucking bits of loose leaf and crop from the soil between her feet and flicking them into the flames. She watched as the tongues of orange and yellow consumed the little pieces of flora, instantly vaporizing them into nothingness.
As the fire died down a little, the noises of the field grew clearer. A scurry here, a scratch there. An owl hooted, and she heard some bird calls. Back home, in her chambers, Merith would have lain awake and listened to such things gladly, curious as to what they all meant. Now, sitting outside on the cold and damp earth, watching dew fall upon the funnels of the plowed field, Merith could not care less for the noises.
Each sound was not a curiosity. It was the opportunity for danger.
Every scurry and scrape had her tensing until she could work out what innocuous creature had made it. By the time the moon was at its zenith and midnight had come, Merith's shoulders were painful with all the sudden jolts and checks she had made. The fact that Ajax was perfectly calm only served to irritate her further.
Why, oh why, could she not have been born with just a little courage?
Hours later, as the sound of shifting earth broke through the air, Merith's body went taut once more. She felt her shoulders draw in, her arms wrap around her knees, her head lower as if she were trying to make herself as small and unnoticeable as possible.
When the sound came again, she held her breath, trying to listen closer.
On the third time, her imagination began to run wild, and she wondered if she was now supposed to run for Ajax, to send them both off south.
But she couldn't leave Finn!
Every single nerve in Merith's body was on high alert. Every sense was peeled and searching.
When she finally discovered the source of the noise—footsteps over the churned earth—she was so tightly wound that the release was too powerful to control. The shadow across the way belonged to Finn.
Sitting beside the fire one second and up on her feet the next, Merith sprinted across the field. Her toe caught on one of the plowed hills; she stumbled but kept going. Her feet, clad in dainty slippers that had never been so dirty in their life, did not stop until she had rushed the last few meters and fallen into Finn's arms.
When her hands reached up it was completely outside of her control. And when they brought his head down to hers, she was operating purely on impulse. There was also no rational thought when her mind sought security and affection in the easiest way it knew how, and she reached up onto her toes.
Merith wasn't sure which one of them was more surprised when her lips found Finn's.
12
As the fleeting image of Merith dashed across the field, Finn could not resist smiling. Despite all the difficulties they had faced in the last few days, the injuries sustained and the fact that he had just spent three hours to hunt the smallest dinner imaginable, she was too pretty in the moonlight not to lift his heart. Even in the dim light, he could see the relief on her face. Her emotions were so profound that they shone through the darkness.
There was something about being cared for in such a way. To have your arrival mean so much to another human being.
Finn was hardly immune to the heat that bloomed in his chest.
Warmth turned to a blazing shock, as Merith did not slow. The light silk of her slippers flashed beneath her skirts as she sped only faster towards him. Her arms came out, and Finn was forced to do the same.
He could either catch her or be bowled over by the speed of her sprint.
Her body collided with his, knocking the wind clean out of him. Her arms came about his neck and, before Finn could adjust to this sudden change, her hands had gripped his head and pulled him down.
A heartbeat later, Merith’s lips met his, and Finn’s world turned upside down.
He could have wondered what was happening. His mind could have assessed and analyzed, worried as to what had happened to prompt this sudden bout of intimacy. But, in that moment, Finn’s mind had short-circuited, and all he could think of was Merith.
Her lips were as soft as velvet. Sweet and delicate, they clung to his with untutored eagerness. He felt the subtle shift of her mouth, the parting of her lips as she gasped at their touch. There was a toughness, a chapped patch on the side of her lip, where the chill of the night had damaged them. Such a small thing and yet Finn’s heart bled for the marring of such silky perfection.
On instinct, Finn’s tongue drew out to touch that lip, turning the kiss damp and wet. Merith sighed against his touch.
Finn’s nerves caught fire. He felt them scorching through his limbs.
Finn reached up to take Merith’s face in his hands. Every thought until now had been for her safety, but now he handled her with a possessiveness that was almost rough.
Perhaps it had been too long since he had been with a woman. Perhaps it was the dangerous situation in which they found themselves, heightening his emotions.
Perhaps it was simply because it was Merith.
As his mouth moved against hers, claiming a kiss that was hot and unfair upon someone as innocent as she, Finn could not escape her. With every breath, her scent was in his nose. With every gasp, her taste was in his mouth. The silk of her hair tumbled over the backs of his hands. Her tiny figure was pressed hesitantly against his.
Such desire—the need to be close but the timid fear of letting loose her passion—was driving him wild, wishing she would take faith in her instincts and kiss him with all that she meant to.
But while
such sweetness burnt him hotter, Merith’s reactions were also reminding him of how this could not continue.
That to kiss her now would be to take advantage of her, and to shame them both.
With all the self-restraint he possessed, Finn let her go. His hands dropped from her face, his lips wrenched away from hers, and he took a stumbling step backward, almost tripping over his own feet.
He was breathing hard, likely staring at her with an expression of shock and awe. Yet, in a bizarre twist, Merith’s reaction was far calmer. Her lips were curved in a soft smile, her fingertips brushing against the dampness he had left behind. The only symptom of her own virginal surprise was the way her eyes were wide with wonder.
Damnit if the gaze she leveled upon him didn’t look almost proprietary.
Finn struggled to find his breath.
“We shouldn’t have done that.”
Three hours had been a long time, as he had hunted. And as he had slunk and snuck through the undergrowth, Finn had come to the only plan available to them. He would have to escort her back to her father’s castle. Only in her childhood home would she again be safe enough to set his mind at ease. There was nothing for her in the north. In all likelihood, her intended husband was now dead or her future with him null and void even if he was a living yet usurped laird.
She had to go to her family.
Finn has been raised poor, but he knew enough of civility to know what her father might think of his daughter being returned to him touched by licentious hands.
Even if they did come with a heart that was steadily falling in love with her.
At first, Finn’s words did not seem to faze Merith.
