Page 37

"You saved me."

"Don't make it sentimental."

That almost got a smile out of him, and it would have, if I had been watching my own blind side instead of his.

The one who got through came from the ferns on my left, low and fast and silent. I never saw him at all.

Guy did.

He moved between us without a word, and the blade that had been meant for my ribs went into his side instead, under the arm, deep.

He killed the man for it.

He did it fast and without any sound at all, and then his knees went and the whole weight of him came down and I got under his arm and caught him before he hit the ground.

"Bisbane."

"I'm fine."

I looked down at the blood already soaking black through his shirt and spreading across my sleeve where I held him.

"You're bleeding on me."

"My apologies."

The remaining men had pulled back into the brush, and I could hear them regrouping forty yards out, and worse than that, I could hear others coming up the valley behind them.

I began making a plan immediately. The main camp was three miles east with ninety people sleeping in it, children and elders and Omegas in lockdown. A blood trail that wide would walk Fitzwalter's men straight into all of them.

I couldn’t take him home.

But my family had hunted this forest for three hundred years, and there was a cabin above the spring on the north ridge that hadn’t been opened since I was a small child. "Can you walk?" I said.

"Leave me."

I nearly dropped him. "Excuse me?"

He grunted, and I knew that he was in pain. “They're after you."

"Yes, I gathered that from all the attempted murder."

"You'll move faster without me." His breath came short, and he was heavier against my shoulder than he had been ten seconds ago. "Go."

"And you'll die."

"Probably."

I stared at him. The Sheriff of Nottingham, bleeding into my forest floor, telling me to run and leave him for the men who had come to kill me.

He’d ridden in here alone knowing Fitzwalter might be a half hour behind him. He’d come to tell me my father was innocent, with nothing to gain from the telling and his own neck on the block for it. And then he’d put his body between me and a knife without one second of hesitation. Which no one in six years had done for me, not once, not ever.

"You stupid bastard," I said.

He managed something that was nearly a smile. "I've been called worse."

I hauled his arm across my shoulders and got my hip under him and took his weight, and he was enormous, and I did not care.

"Walk."