Page 9 of Cursed Shadows 5

The heels of my boots dig into the stone road. My arms are limp by my sides.

I blink, once.

My heart flutters. “Bakery…”

That’s all I manage before my lashes shut on the mild light of Kithe, on the panic of it, and my spine crashes into the chest behind me… a chest far too strong, too carved from muscle to be Eamon’s.

A smooth voice follows me into the abyss: “Feeling peckish, heartbreaker?”

3

††††††

I wake on a stretcher, surrounded by the wounded, the weeping, the wisping fragrance of warm and fresh bread…

And I am alone.

Dare is nowhere to be seen.

There are a lot of faces around me, but so few are familiar.

I frown on the slender face of a litalf, one I am certain chased me from the rockpool into the misty woods, then drag it to Mika, the dokkalf whose leg looks entirely shattered.

Black powder has her deep in unconsciousness, sprawled and drooling on a narrow bed.

The bakery is crammed full of them. These narrow, wooden beds padded with sheepskin.

In my line of sight, hazy and tired, two robed healers are scooching between the beds, the spaces between us so narrow that—as I slide my gaze around, wall to wall, wounded to wounded, I notice—there is no space for a visitor.

We are all alone in here.

I push up onto my elbows.

The healer hunched at my side, wrapped in inky robes, born of dark blood, hisses at me. Her glare is a flash of white eyes, purewhite and textured like paint on a rough canvas; her fingers still on the phials and jars she’s set out alongside my leg.

I only glance at her once before I look down my body.

The armour has been cut away from me. The vest, gone, leaving me with a sweater rolled up to just beneath my breasts. My complexion is black and purple and blue.

I don’t concern myself with the scrapes over my torso, or the arm that is looped out of the sweater, my shoulder exposed and padded with moss.

It’s the very clearly battered ribs and chest that has my heart skipping a beat.

One thing to know I am injured, but to see it, my complexion turned black and purple from my bellybutton to my breasts, is a whole other thing.

“I fix.” The healer snares my attention back to her.

I blink at her once, then at the phials.

Not one of them is filled with black powder… not a single one.

Suppose she doesn’t have anymore left. Maybe she already ran out of the supply, or she’s decided I am not broken enough for the powder, so she sets out all other sorts of balms and oils to use on me.

I don’t even grimace.

I have this sense of distance, mind from body, and I stay planted on my elbows as she starts working on my wounds.

“I fix head.”

---