Heart of the Forest (Arwn's Gift Book 1) (23 page)

“We have to get out of here!” Grwn yelled over the chatter of tiny, hungry coblyn.

“I’m not leaving my brother!” Yorwrath growled as he pulled a small dirty body from his arm with one hand and used his other to swipe at the swarming mass.

“He has magic protecting him, Yorwrath. We don’t.”

“Fuck, fine!” Yorwrath grunted. “C’mon, Dy’ne, we’re leaving.”

We cut our way through that churning, stinking sea of tiny bodies. I say “we” because even I was able to kill a few with my sword. I would have been proud of myself too, if I wasn’t too busy trying not to get eaten alive by hundreds of ugly little monsters. We were right at the entrance to the cave when one brave beastie lunged into the light and bit into Yorwrath’s arm. He screamed, truly screamed, and I was there before I comprehended what my feet had done. I sliced the small creature in two. Its legs fell to the ground trailing entrails. It lost its hold on Yorwrath as it opened its mouth wide to squeal, and he drove his sword through its skull in the dirt. For a moment Yorwrath stared at the creature. Grwn walked up behind me and patted my back hard enough that I staggered. We stood still panting for a few moments, and then it finally sank in what I had seen on that altar, and I darted back to the mouth of the cave. Yorwrath dropped his sword and grabbed my waist.

“Aneurin!” I yowled his name as I beat on Yorwrath’s chest. I screamed and sobbed and clawed at Yorwrath. He let me rage at him for a few moments before he had enough and slapped me across the mouth. I glared at him.

“I know!” He shoved me to the forest floor. “We all bloody saw, but there’s no going back in there.” He looked up at the sky. Dusk was threatening. I knew goblins came out at night, and I was pretty sure the coblyn were the same.

“We…we have to go,” I managed to sob out slipping my sword into its sheath.

“Yes, we do. This place will be fucking crawling within the hour. Take Ys, he’d—”

“Don’t you fucking say it!” I growled. My face was tight and hot, and the tears wouldn’t stop. “Come here and let me tie a quick tourniquet, you stupid fucking piece of shit, so you don’t bleed out,” I screamed at Yorwrath, who simply nodded and walked over. I ripped apart one of those carefully labeled linen wraps and tied it around his bicep as tight as I could. “You need stitches and that needs to be cleaned as soon as we get back.” My voice was tight and emotionless as I turned from him and walked over to Ys. I wanted to break down and scream but I couldn’t. The long and short of it was I had a lot of rage inside of me and nowhere to direct it. “I’m going to kill them both,” I said as I mounted the large white stallion with its silver mane.

“What? I didn’t catch that.” Yorwrath asked.

“I said I’m going to fucking kill both of those useless fetid sheepfuckers!” I twitched, practically vibrating with rage.

“
Mi hefyd
.” Yorwrath sighed as he heeled on his massive black steed. I clicked my teeth at Ys, and he followed Yorwrath through the thick darkening forest with Grwn trailing behind us.

My heart felt like it had been ripped out. Yorwrath led us back to the temple, but when he reached the base of it, he slipped from his horse. The sound of him hitting the ground seemed surreal to me. I stared at him for a moment without fully comprehending what had happened. Nothing made sense anymore. I wanted to scream and cry and rail at the world, but I couldn’t. My feet took me to his side before I even knew what was happening. His eyes were shut tight, and the bandanna had fallen from his head. His skin was hot to the touch, and his mouth hung open, his lips twitching as though he were trying to say something. I lowered my ear to his lips.

“Leave…me,” he breathed on the softest, weakest breath.

“Sorry,” I sniffed, wiping the tears from my cheeks. “But I refuse to do that.” I pulled my hair behind my ears and looked up at Grwn. “We need to take him into the little room and stoke the fire high.” I barked the order. “Careful with him.” Grwn nodded and bent down, gathering Yorwrath’s long prone body in his arms. He was cursing under his breath, his bottom lip trembling.

“Was it the bite?” Grwn asked. His broad face looked so sad I swear the points of his ears drooped.

“More than likely. You smelled that thing,” I grumbled as we crossed the threshold into the rooms we slept in. “Lay him on the bed back here and take off his tunic and shirt. I am going to need you to bring me a lot of water.” Grwn set Yorwrath on the bed and stripped him like I asked. I winced when the arm came into view. The bleeding had stopped, but the flesh was red and inflamed. The veins surrounding the torn flesh were almost black with bile. Grwn left with surprising speed for an elf of his stature. I upended the bag on the bed and searched through the pouches of herbs. There were several bundles of dried sage. I tossed one on the fire and stoked it with a few more logs so it burned hot and high—far too hot for the summer heat. Sweat dripped from my forehead as I turned a cup and my dagger’s hilt into a makeshift mortar and pestle.

I didn’t get any sleep that night. I cleaned the wound, brewed a crude potion so he could sleep, and made a basic version of my healing ointment, which I massaged into the hot flesh after I sewed up the wound. Nothing I did or gave him seemed to quiet the fever. I sat beside him with the herbal in my lap, as heavy sage smoke filled the room and coated my lungs. His breathing was labored, a soft, slow wheeze.

After pulling my hair in frustration, I lay beside him on the bed. His body was so warm it was like lying next to the fire.

“Grwn, bring in the bathing tub and fetch water, milk, and bread,” I called as I sat back up, ready for round two. My bones ached, but I’d be damned if both of them would die. I could probably stop Yorwrath from breathing his last… And I would do everything in my power to avoid taking the arm. It was an option: severing the fetid flesh would take out a good part of the infection. But he was a warrior. If I took his arm, I might as well slit his throat.

Grwn brought me what I asked for and then started filling the tub, as I poured the milk into a small metal bowl and set it on the fire. Once the milk was boiling, I added the bread and mixed it with my dagger until it was a paste.

“Is there an alchemist’s workshop here? Would there be one?” I looked up at Grwn for a moment. He was pouring bucket after bucket of water into the tub.

“There might be something similar. Druids use ointments and herbs in rituals… There might even be something left from the last Ritual of Oak and Mistletoe. I don’t know if the elixir will be good after almost eighty years, but it’s better than nothing.” Grwn sniffed. While he spoke, I prepared a poultice from the hot milk and bread mixture, which I wrapped around Yorwrath’s infected bite. “I thought you were going to eat that.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not, you haven’t eaten in two days. If you pass out, you’re no good to him.”

“Maybe the whole point of this is to work myself until I die of exhaustion?” I beamed up at Grwn, and he furrowed his brows.

“I’ll go see what I can find.” He reached into his belt and produced a small apple. “Eat something.” He tossed the apple at me, and I caught it. Again he left, leaving me alone to stare down at Yorwrath and sigh.

After a bit of a struggle, I got him into the tub of cool water, keeping the poultice on the side of the white enamel. Preventing a much larger person from sinking into a bath while lifeless had become an art form to me. Bracing my arm against the side of the tub, I kept it flush with his chest. Eventually, Grwn returned, grinning ear to ear.

“Near the entrance, there is a huge storehouse of herbs! The unicorn has clearly been tending to it for a while. There is everything you can imagine in there. I already filled a tub with water and stoked the fire. C’mon, follow me.” He walked over and picked up Yorwrath like he weighed nothing and practically ran through the temple with me trailing behind them.

The room was any Cunning Woman’s, alchemist’s, or apothecary’s dream. Every sort of apparatus imaginable filled the first room, and further back were row after row of dried herbs on shelves. The tub in the room even had a leather strap to hold the patient in place. Grwn arranged Yorwrath like I had him upstairs and tightened the strap across his chest.

“I’ll come back in a few hours with some food.” And suddenly Grwn was gone again, the heavy wooden door rattling in his wake. I threw more sage on the fire and built it up high like it was in the other room and then I stripped out of my trousers, bodice, and boots, leaving on the short shift which stuck to my skin with sweat. I grabbed a square of linen from a tattered pile nearby and soaked it in cool water before setting it on Yorwrath’s sweat-drenched forehead.

* * * *

Days passed. I didn’t leave Yorwrath’s side, even as it neared a week. Grwn did, however, finally get me to eat something. He spent time with me in the sweatbox of sage. We broke bread together, and he went out hunting to keep himself busy. Yorwrath’s condition did eventually start improving. The fever broke on the third day, and I moved him to a cot by the fire. And by the seventh he was starting to wake. His sleep was fitful that last day, and he twitched and growled, whispering frantic things in the elven tongue. Keeping him alive had distracted me for a whole week for the most part. Admittedly I had fits of crying and screaming, and it was during one of my tantrums that he awoke.

“Did they return with the body?” Yorwrath’s voice was almost unrecognizable. I shook my head no. “You look like shit, Dy’ne.” He coughed, and I poured a cup of water for him. He reached for it with a trembling hand. That dark wooden cup proved too much for his weakened arm, and it slipped between his fingers to the floor with a hollow sound. We both stared at it for a time.

“Squeeze my hands.” I held my hands out to him, and he took them. He was weak as a kitten. I couldn’t tell if it was from fighting the sickness, or if the fever had gotten to him. The wounded arm was significantly weaker, which said a great deal that I chose to ignore. “You just need your rest.” I offered him a small smile.

“You should have left me to die, you stupid fucking whore!” he yelled at me, splitting his chapped lips. Tears were in the corners of his eyes. I sighed and got another cup, leaving the fallen one on the ground. “Is this your revenge? Seeing me turned into a plowing cripple?” He turned from me, and I rolled my eyes.

“No.” I grabbed a scrap of clean linen and dipped it in the water and dabbed at his lips. He bit at my fingers, but I was quick enough that he only caught the cloth. “You’re not a cripple.”

“If you knew the effort it took to move my fingers, Dy’ne, you’d say differently.”

“You’ve been asleep for seven, maybe eight days; your body will be stiff. Stop being melodramatic. Here.” I sat next to him on the cot, “Lean on me and drink this water.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Make me understand.” I trailed my hand across his smooth jaw. The touch softened those hard eyes, and he turned to look at me.

“There’s no way a Dy’ne like you could possibly understand.”

“Of course.” I sighed. “Can we be honest?”

“I’m always honest.” He smirked.

“That’s a lie, and we both know it.”

My words made him sigh, and a moment later he sat up and leaned against me. It wasn’t the first time I had done something like this. I wrapped his hand around the cup and then wrapped mine around his. He drank the entire thing in one long draft. I paid attention to how he swallowed, checking for weakness.

“What do you want to be honest about, Dy’ne?” he asked as he moved to lower the cup. I took it from him.

“I respect you. Underneath all of your hardness and coarseness lurks a good man.”

“That’s a pretty lie.” He snorted with a wince.

“It’s not a lie.”

“Fine, honesty… Here’s your honesty, pretty Dy’ne. When I first saw you I intended to have you over that table, share you with my men, and then slit your throat. So how’s that for being a good man?” He crossed his arms, and I set the empty cup on the chair. Rolling my eyes, I smoothed his hair off his forehead and took his temperature with my hand. He was still warm—not dangerously warm, but the fever had returned.

“And yet you had a human wife, and a daughter.”

“I had a son, not a daughter. If you’re going to fucking taunt me at least get it correct, Dy’ne.”

“Tell me about your wife?” I stroked his hair, and he tensed in my arms. I think he might have realized how weak he was at that moment.

“I’d rather not.”

“I need to take the stitches out; you’ll need the distraction.”

“Pain doesn’t bother me.”

“Fine. Get up I need to brew something for your fever.”

“And if I don’t want to?” He looked down at me, those red-brown eyes sparkling in the firelight.

“I guess I could sit here a while.” We sat silently for a few minutes—well, as near to silently as we could get. His breathing was loud and labored.

“Don’t tell Grwn how bad it is.” His words shattered the quiet. I glanced up at him. His gaze was fixed on the fire. The new fever was clearly starting to take its toll. “I think he’d leave if he knew…and tell the others.”

“Would that be a bad thing?”

“Only if you think having someone come to slit my throat is a bad thing. I rule as long as I am fit to, Dy’ne. I command the Redcaps because I killed Aeon, not because I’m his son. And someday someone will kill me too.”

“And if you die by other means?”

“Then Grwn would cut off my head and take it to Gwyn—my second—and give him my bandanna soaked in my own blood.”

“Before this, I didn’t know elves could get sick.”

“Perhaps you should study the section on elves in your herbal closer, Dy’ne. We can’t catch the plague, but certain venoms can and do kill us. The saliva from certain creatures is toxic to us. I’ve known some who’ve died from coblyn bites,” he growled, his chest rumbling.

“Why didn’t you stop if you knew you were dying?”

Oh, he didn’t like that question at all. Yorwrath sat up with a grunt and lay back down on the cot without a word, rolling away from me. I growled at him and stood.