Moon Of Ashes

What The Blood Remembers

*********

His weight nearly took me down with him. I got an arm under his and dropped us both to the floor instead of letting his skull c***k on it, which in hindsight — was probably the stupidest instinct I've ever obeyed. Twelve years of planning his death, and my body's first move was to catch him.

"Someone get the healer," I shouted, and then remembered there wasn't one. Not since my mother.

"There's no healer," said a voice behind me. The cook, I think, hovering in the doorway in a nightdress with her hair still pinned up. "Not since old Maren died last winter. What happened to him?"

"I don't know, I just......" I looked down. Cassian's shirt was black with blood, soaked through at the side, and when I pressed my hand there to slow it he made a sound like he was trying not to make one at all. "Get me cloth. Clean water. Now."

She ran. I don't know why she listened to me. Maybe because nobody else in the room was moving.

"You're going to have to hold still," I told him, tearing his shirt open at the seam because I didn't have a knife free and didn't want to reach for the one on my thigh in front of witnesses. His stomach jumped under my hands, muscle flinching away from the cold air. The wound wasn't as deep as the blood made it look — a long gash along his ribs, ugly but survivable if it didn't fester. Someone had gone at him with a blade meant to hurt, not kill.

"Funny," he said through his teeth, eyes half-shut, "for someone who doesn't know me, you've got very steady hands."

"Shut up and breathe."

"Bossy." A wet laugh that turned into a wince. "I like that in a stranger."

"I said shut up."

He did, for a second. Then, quieter, like the words were slipping out from somewhere he didn't have the strength to guard anymore: "They said it wouldn't come back on me. They said if I did what they wanted, it would stay buried."

My hands went still over the wound.

"Who did?" I asked, too fast, too sharp for someone who was supposed to be a stranger to him.

His eyes cracked open, unfocused, fever-glassy already. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at something years behind me. "The healer's kid," he muttered. "I told them — I told them not to touch the healer's kid. That wasn't — that was never supposed to happen."

********

The room tilted.

I kept pressure on the wound because my hands had learned to do that from watching my mother do it a hundred times, on wolves who bled for the pack and wolves who bled because of it, and because if I stopped now he'd see my face and my face would tell him everything. But something in my chest had cracked open right along with him, and I didn't know yet whether it was hope or the beginning of a much worse kind of grief.

"Who's the healer's kid?" I said, voice flat, forcing it flat.

He didn't answer. His head lolled to the side, and for one horrible second I thought he'd gone, but his chest still rose, shallow and fast. Fever talking, maybe. Blood loss talking. People say all kinds of things when they're bleeding out on a stranger's lap.

The cook came back with an armful of cloth and a basin of water, and behind her, the guard from the treeline — Tomas, I'd learn his name was — burst in with two others, faces gray.

"Who did this," Tomas said. Not a question. A promise.

"I don't know," I said. "He just showed up bleeding. Someone needs to stitch this properly, I can only slow it."

"You know how to stitch?"

"I know how to keep him alive until someone who does gets here." That was true enough. My mother had taught me before they'd taken her from me. I just hadn't planned on using it on him.

Tomas crouched on Cassian's other side, jaw tight, and for a second I watched something pass between them that wasn't quite pack loyalty and wasn't quite fear — something closer to old debt. "Cass. Cass, look at me. Who did this to you?"

Cassian's eyes opened again, clearer this time, like the sound of his own name had dragged him up out of wherever he'd gone.

"Ferris," he said.

The name landed in the room like a dropped blade. Tomas went white. The cook's hand flew to her mouth.

"That's not possible," Tomas said. "Ferris has been dead six years."

"Then I got stabbed by a ghost," Cassian rasped, and somewhere under the pain there was that same crooked almost-smile from the hall, like he found his own bleeding out mildly funny. "Feels about right for this pack's luck."

"He's delirious," Tomas said, mostly to himself, mostly to convince himself. "Blood loss. He doesn't know what he's saying."

But Cassian's hand found my wrist then — weak, but deliberate, fingers closing around me like he needed something solid to hold on to while the world swam. His eyes found mine, and for one terrible, suspended second I was sure he saw straight through me, straight to the girl who'd stood over him with a knife in her plans for twelve years.

"You have her eyes," he said, so quiet only I could hear it. "I knew it the second you walked in."

My pulse roared in my ears. "Whose eyes."

He didn't get to answer. His grip went slack, his eyes rolled back, and Tomas was shouting for someone to bring the strongest wolf in the pack to carry him to his quarters, and the cook was crying, and I was left kneeling in a spreading pool of Cassian's blood with his handprint still warm around my wrist and a single sentence detonating quietly in my chest.

*I told them not to touch the healer's kid.*

Not the healer. Not my mother.

Me.

He hadn't been talking about t

he night she died at all. He'd been talking about the night they let me live.