Page 42 of Heart’s Rescue

Rowan

Thin Ice

My hands shake as I hold the warm bandage up to Arryn’s dark skin. Voids help me, I don’t know what I’m doing. Phaedron was always better at this sort of thing, at patching cuts and scrapes and offering the right soothing words. The voids knew he’d had enough practice with me growing up. I’d thrown myself off anything that would stand still.

Arryn winces, and I pull back.

“You okay?” I ask. An idiotic question.

She nods. Her teeth have closed around her lower lip, and her tight expression makes me think she’s trying very hard to ignore everything I’m doing.

“How does it look?” she asks.

I swallow hard and pull the bandage back from Arryn’s arm. It doesn’t look too bad, honestly, now that I’ve gotten the wound clean. It’s a deep cut, but it’s straight and it’s short. I don’t know what things are like in Arryn’s world, but here, that kind of injury is hardly more than a scrape.

“It looks like it hurts,” I say.

She finally glances down at the cut, then laughs. It’s a beautiful laugh, like bells ringing in the Worlds Above. She glances over at me with a smile that lifts the temperature in the shelter.

“I’m okay,” she says. “I’ve had worse.”

I exhale a little louder than I intended. I hadn’t realized how worried I’d been that this was her first battle, the first time an enemy had drawn blood.

“I meant,” she says, then hesitates.

And now the temperature in the shelter plummets right back to ice because I swear on the voids I know exactly what she’s going to ask.

“Does it look… wrong?”

“No,” I say, speaking very slowly because I don’t want to make any promises that I can’t deliver. I distract myself by turning around to rummage in the first aid kit for Charay’s antiseptic salve. “This might sting,” I warn her.

I pull the cork out of the bottle, dip my fingers into the smooth, cool goo, and then wince as I bring my hand to her warm skin. She hisses and jerks back.

“Sorry,” I say. “You okay?”

She nods. “Fine. Go ahead.”

I swear I can hear Phaedron telling me not to waste this stuff as I smear almost half the bottle on Arryn’s arm. I know it’s not going to make one damned bit of difference if her injury’s been void-touched, but that doesn’t stop me. Then, finally, I unroll a clean bandage and wrap her arm as best as I can, which is probably too loose and probably also uses too much fabric. When I rock back on my heels, she sighs.

“Thank you,” she says with a shy smile that makes me feel like there’s not enough air in the shelter.

“Course,” I reply as if that were some sort of answer.

Her smile evaporates as she frowns at the amateur bandage.

“Rowan?” she asks. “When will we know?”

I hesitate. Some part of me wants to pretend I don’t know exactly what she’s talking about, and another part of me wants to tell her that she has nothing to fear and everything is going to be just fine for the rest of her life.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, honestly. “We should check it every day. If it’s going to go… you know. It’ll happen pretty soon, I think.”

She nods again, then turns away. I want to apologize, to tell her it won’t be a problem, that her arm will be just fine or, if not, that I’ll be able to help her if her cut turns out to be void-touched.

But I can’t bring myself to lie to her.

The river is closer than I’d expected. And it’s frozen. I frown as if the river is going to be affected by my disapproval. Closer isn’t necessarily a surprise. The river moves around a lot, more than any other feature in this strange borderland between the Outer Ring and the void. But I’ve never seen it frozen before.

I shouldn’t be surprised. The temperature has been dropping steadily as we’ve moved away from the World’s End and toward the void. The void’s pushing back against us, of course, trying to reject our presence. And one of the ways the void gets rid of us is by freezing us out.