Winter Be My Shield

by Spurrier, Jo

  A flutter beneath Cam’s fingers brought him back to the present. Her blue-tinged lips parted and when Cam heard the faint whisper of her breath he wanted to laugh with relief. ‘Ha! Well, my little thief, you’ll answer for my hare after all!’

  There was a tickle in his throat. Isidro tried to keep his breathing shallow to avoid another bout of coughing, but he knew he was fighting a losing battle with the dry winter air.

  The sun had set and deep blue shadows were spreading over the snow. An owl called from somewhere among the scattered trees. He had been standing here long enough for a cloud of mist to gather around him, a haze of ice crystallised from the moisture in his breath.

  Rhia came to stand at his side. ‘Isidro, you should come in out of the cold.’

  ‘In a moment,’ he said. His voice was hoarse and rusty. Rhia said it was just the pneumonia, but he wasn’t so sure. Many things had been damaged beyond repair during his time in Kell’s tent.

  He felt her eyes upon him and tried not to show his irritation. Most southerners were small but Rhia was slight even for them, due to the years she had spent as a slave. Only a fool mistook her stature for weakness, though — he’d seen her pull arrows and spears from struggling warriors and set enough broken or dislocated limbs to be sure of that. She’d been born in the empire, but had spent half her life in Mesentreia after being captured on a raid and then given in payment to a physician, who taught her his craft.

  ‘Issey …’ Rhia began again. Isidro smiled faintly. She was as protective as a tiger of her cub when it came to her patients, but he was in no mood to be mothered. Since he’d finally found his way back to consciousness he’d spent a week lying in his furs, too ill to get up but in too much pain to escape into sleep. This was the longest he’d spent outside since the day he’d been captured.

  ‘Cam will be back soon, whether you watch for him or not,’ Rhia said. ‘You will only make yourself ill again by waiting out here.’

  ‘Where did he say he was going?’ He turned to face her, and that shift of weight was enough to set his right arm to throbbing again. Isidro laid his left hand gingerly over the limb, held in a sling across his chest beneath his coat. It had woken him again in the middle of the night and Rhia had given him a dose of poppy to let him sleep. Cam had set out before he’d woken.

  ‘He went to check his snares,’ Rhia said, showing no impatience, even though she’d already answered the question several times.

  ‘It shouldn’t be taking him this long.’ Isidro winced at the petulance in his voice. He’s probably just taking the chance to get out on his own for a while, he told himself. With the way he and Brekan have been at each other’s throats, I can’t blame him. Eloba and Lakua, the sisters who shared Brekan as their husband, had just taken their tent down for repairs when the weather worsened, so all seven of them had been crammed into a single tent while the storm howled around them.

  It was dangerous for a traveller to be out alone after dark, and not just because of the threatening war. Aside from the soldiers, the Mesentreians still hunting the fugitive prince and his tiny band, and the Slavers striking from the west, wolves, leopards and tigers roamed these hills. With their normal prey frightened away or hunted out by foragers, they might be desperate enough to stalk one man alone.

  ‘If he cannot return safely, Cam will take shelter for the night and find us in the morning,’ Rhia said. ‘The weather is good and he knows how to stay out of sight and cover his tracks if there is danger. He will be fine.’

  She was soothing him like a fractious child. Isidro drew breath to reply, but he inhaled just a little too deeply. The cold air hit his lungs and a spasm clenched like a fist in his chest and doubled him over in a fit of coughing.

  Rhia drew his good arm over her shoulder and turned him back towards the tent. ‘Inside, quickly. You need warm air.’

  The fit of coughing was so severe that he couldn’t draw breath. With his head swimming and bright spots dancing before his eyes, Isidro didn’t resist as she propelled him towards the larger of the two tents, the sisters having set theirs up again at first light.

  Garzen appeared in the doorway just as he and Rhia reached it. With the lamplight behind him and thick black lines of mourning tattoos carved into his face, he would be a fearsome sight to anyone who didn’t know him. He held the flap open with one hand and steadied Isidro’s shoulder with the other as he stumbled through the doorway and into the spruce-scented warmth of the tent. Garzen started to let the flap fall behind him, but then stiffened and raised it again. ‘Who’s that?’

  Isidro turned, but his vision was too blurred to see.

  ‘It must be Cam,’ Rhia said, but there was a note of uncertainty in her voice.

  His face grim, Garzen ducked out through the doorway, snatching up one of the spears driven into the snow outside as he went.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Isidro wheezed, still out of breath.

  ‘Cam left on foot,’ Rhia said, peering after Garzen with a frown creasing her brow. ‘Someone approaches leading a horse.’

  Cam ducked through the doorway with the limp figure slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Set her down here,’ Rhia commanded, spreading her own furs out to receive the girl.

  ‘She was alive when I found her, but that was hours ago,’ Cam said. ‘I didn’t want to take the time to stop and check on her again.’

  Rhia eased off the girl’s cap and cowl, lifting them carefully away from nose and ears that might be damaged by frostbite. ‘We shall see. Where are the hot stones? I need them now!’

  ‘Just wrapping them up,’ Eloba said from the stove. She and Lakua had answered Rhia’s shout for help without needing to be told what to do — every Ricalani knew the procedure when someone was brought in unresponsive from the cold. Smooth, round pebbles of soapstone were kept in the stove for just this purpose. Lakua lifted them from the coals with a pair of bone tongs and Eloba wrapped them carefully in scraps of cloth and fur.

  Isidro sat cross-legged on his bed, trying to stay out of the way. Rhia always slept near him in case he needed her during the night, so the girl’s head lay only a foot away from his own pillow, with frost melting in her hair and her lips a pale and bloodless blue.

  Rhia opened the girl’s coat. Beneath it, her clothes were Mesentreian, fastening up the middle with a row of silver buttons. Rhia ripped them open without ceremony and packed the hot stones around her torso, testing each one against her lips first to make sure it wouldn’t burn. One of the buttons rolled over to Isidro’s blankets and he picked it up with his good hand to examine the crest stamped into the metal.

  Once all the stones were packed around her body, Rhia covered her with a pile of furs. Then, while she gently pulled off the girl’s mittens and gloves, Lakua did the same with her boots and boot liners and pressed the girl’s bare feet against her belly to warm them.

  Cam had shrugged off his coat and stood in the cool spot by the doorway as he gulped down a bowl of lukewarm tea. Isidro tried to speak to him, but barely got the first word out before the cough took him over again. Each racking spasm sent searing needles stabbing through his shattered arm. Rhia glanced at him over her shoulder and said, ‘Eloba, brew tea for Isidro —’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Cam, crossing the tent to the stove and the low table behind it, where the medicines Rhia had ground and mixed were waiting in a bowl ready to be steeped. Cam filled it from the kettle on the stove, added a generous dollop each of butter and honey and brought it to Isidro, who was still struggling to catch his breath. Cam tried to hide it, but Isidro could see the worry in his face.

  ‘Go ahead and say it,’ he rasped. ‘I look like crap.’

  ‘You look as bad as she does,’ Cam said, nodding to the patient in Rhia’s furs. ‘She has an excuse. I thought you were getting better.’

  ‘He was out in the cold waiting for you,’ Rhia said without looking around. ‘I tell him to go in, but your brother is more stubborn than any mule.’ She was still not quit
e fluent in Ricalani and her grasp of the language always suffered when she was under stress. Cam and Isidro both spoke Mesentreian, her preferred language, but the others did not, and the language of their enemies made them uneasy.

  ‘Any sign of danger out there?’ Isidro said as he sipped the brew.

  Cam shook his head.

  ‘Where did you find her?’ Isidro nodded towards the woman.

  ‘I tracked her to her camp after she raided one of my snares,’ Cam said. ‘But where she came from?’ He shrugged. ‘She had a Ricalani pony, but she was wearing a Mesentreian uniform under that coat.’

  ‘Not just any uniform,’ Isidro said, and nodded at the button lying on his furs.

  Cam raised one eyebrow and then leaned across him to pick it up. The silver button was stamped with the sigil of a flaming torch. ‘The Angessovar crest,’ he said, rolling it between his fingers. ‘That’s odd.’ Only someone attached to the royal household would wear that crest.

  The inner clothes she had worn were made of the soft black wool used by the king’s household guard, but it lacked the frogging and insignia Isidro remembered from his time at court.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Cam, and tucked the button away into his sash. ‘So what do you think? She could be a concubine who took advantage of the bad weather to slip away.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Isidro said. The coughing fit had left him exhausted, and the soporific in Rhia’s brew was taking effect. He was finding it hard to focus on the girl’s face — it wavered and blurred before his eyes. ‘Whoever she is, she must have been desperate, to leave without shelter or supplies.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Cam said. ‘Well, I hope she can give us some word of what’s going on out there.’

  Rhia twisted around to face them. ‘If she wakes, you may ask her,’ she said, and levelled one finger at Isidro. ‘You rest now. Cam, I want more wood for the fire. She must be kept warm.’

  ‘As you command,’ Cam said with a mocking bow. He took Isidro’s empty bowl away with him as he left.

  ‘Lie down,’ Rhia said to Isidro, and began to pull off his boots.

  ‘I can do that,’ he protested, but she ignored him, setting the boots neatly at the foot of his bed and then twitching the furs up to cover him. ‘Do not argue,’ she said, and pressed her hand against his forehead. He closed his eyes against the coolness. ‘You are feverish again, Isidro. Rest. Your curiosity will wait until you wake.’

  ‘Will it?’ he said. ‘Will she live?’

  Rhia turned back to the slight figure occupying her furs. ‘I think so. But we shall see.’

  Chapter 3

  Sweat prickled on his skin and stung like acid on the searing wounds on his back. The burns reached from the nape of his neck down to his buttocks. Naked, he knelt on a blood-splattered carpet of spruce with his hands tied behind his back and the end of the cord that bound them thrown over a beam overhead and pulled tight. All the weight of his torso rested upon his shoulders, twisted as far as they could go: they felt as though they were slowly tearing free. Blood dripped from his mouth to the spruce beneath him. He’d bitten his lip to keep from screaming.

  Rasten held the poker beside his face. Wisps of smoke wafted from the scraps of charred skin encrusting the iron. The heat of it dried the sweat on his cheek and Isidro closed his eyes to keep from flinching until it touched.

  ‘Rasten,’ a soft voice said from across the tent and a moment later the heat was gone. Isidro turned his head and could just see the two men standing with heads together, talking in low voices.

  Another figure knelt at Kell’s feet, her bound hands fastened to a block of lead too large for one man to lift. For a moment, Isidro caught sight of her face between strands of black hair that clung to her sweating skin, like the heavy black lines of mourning tattoos. He met her eyes for only an instant before she looked away.

  ‘But the queen wants him whole.’ Rasten’s voice drifted across the tent.

  ‘She wants to watch him die, like she did his father,’ Kell said. ‘But we progress too slowly. Much longer and the prince will be beyond our reach. Do as I say, boy.’

  From the corner of his eye Isidro saw Rasten take a serrated knife and a bowl of liquid from the row of implements laid out on the table. The girl at Kell’s feet huddled closer to the ground, as though willing herself to sink into it and vanish. Isidro steeled himself as Rasten came to his side again.

  Rasten threw the knife into the ground, where it lodged point first, and hunkered down by Isidro’s head. ‘Do you know what this is?’ He dipped his thumb in the liquid and wiped it across Isidro’s bitten lip. The salt-laden water bit like barbed needles and Rasten laughed at Isidro’s grunt of pain.

  Then he tipped the bowl over the ravaged skin of his back.

  Isidro kicked the covers off and sat up, too quickly. It set his head spinning and he had to swallow hard against the gorge that rose in his throat. The beast in his arm flexed its claws.

  Drenched with sweat, Isidro reached for the collar of his shirt and peeled it away from his skin, letting the cooler air flood in. The scars on his back prickled. When his fingertips brushed against one he flinched reflexively, even though all but the worst of them were healed. The burns had been the least of his troubles.

  Rhia had strung an old blanket across his bed to keep the light from disturbing him, but it also isolated him from the radiant heat of the stove. The cool air chilled his skin and soon turned his damp shirt cold and clammy. Isidro pulled the furs up around his shoulders again and lay back until the world remained still once more.

  His arm rested in its sling over his chest, a heavy and awkward weight across his ribs. Isidro gingerly slipped his good hand under it to move it to a better position. No matter how careful he was, any movement sent ripples of fire through the limb. The bones were broken in too many places for anything as simple as splints and birch bark to hold them in place. If he hadn’t been so cursed sick for the last few weeks, Isidro knew Rhia would have cut it off.

  At first, he’d tried to convince himself it would heal and that eventually he would be able to use his hand again. Over the last few days, though, as he had recovered enough to remain awake for a few hours at a time, he had come to understand how bad the damage was. His arm was beyond repair, a useless extremity of battered flesh and ragged bone.

  Isidro hadn’t imagined for a moment that he would survive Kell’s treatment. His only goal had been to hold out long enough to allow Cam and the others to get away. It was past sunset when they finally broke him. Rasten had nailed his hand to a log and then set about breaking every bone from wrist to forearm. Once it was done, Rasten explained that they could start the whole process over again with his left arm. He’d run his fingertips over the ruined limb and murmured in Isidro’s ear what lay in store for him. He was to be taken to Lathayan for his execution, to be cut apart and slaughtered on the palace steps like his father before him. A man could survive the journey with one shattered limb, so long as he had the Blood-Drinker’s enchantments to keep the wounds from turning septic. Any more and even Kell’s powers wouldn’t help him survive the journey — after each limb was shattered, they would have to cut it off and cauterise the stump. Rasten gave Isidro a choice — he could walk to his execution like a man, or be carried to the palace steps as a limbless, sexless lump. Worn down by pain and exhaustion, Isidro had surrendered, and told them where to find Cam’s camp.

  By the time they’d reached it, Cam was gone. In the days afterwards, while Duke Osebian and the king’s men searched for the prince, Kell and Rasten had set about punishing Isidro for costing them their prize. Isidro remembered little of it, only snatches viewed through a fevered haze. He had escaped further maiming, probably because Kell didn’t want to anger the queen by denying her the chance to witness the torture herself, but that still left a whole world of torment within his reach.

  Isidro never imagined that he would survive the ordeal. He’d given himself up for dead the moment the soldiers closed around him in the v
illage. Ever since he and Cam had fled the palace nearly ten years ago, they’d been well aware of the likelihood that one or both of them would be captured and brought back to face Valeria’s wrath. It had never occurred to Isidro that one of them could be left crippled, unable to fight or fend for himself. Now he was a millstone around Cam’s neck, an unbearable burden that could not be laid down. They were still here in the shadow of the army and the invasion because he was too weak to leave, Isidro knew. If he’d died in Kell’s chains, or never awakened after sinking under the black water, they’d all be safely away from here. If they fell afoul of the Mesentreian soldiers, or were captured and enslaved by the Akharians, it would be because of him.

  Murmuring voices reached him through the curtain and Isidro sat up again, suddenly craving company and conversation, anything to distract him from the memories and the despair. He kicked the covers back and ducked under the rough curtain, crawling awkwardly with one arm and blinking in the sudden light.

  Rhia and Garzen were both kneeling beside the girl’s bed, their heads bent over one of her small hands. A golden bracelet set with red stones encircled her wrist and beneath it was a wide burn, raw and weeping. It cut across the kinship tattoo graven into the delicate skin of her inner wrist. The blistered and scorched skin was so badly damaged he couldn’t make out the symbol identifying her lineage and her clan. The sight of the burns made his stomach twist and he had to look away.

  Rhia looked up, and read his distress in a glance. ‘Isidro —’

  ‘She’s alive, then,’ Isidro said, and forced himself to look at the wound. ‘What’s happened there?’