Page 29 of Chained to the Horned God
Valoa’s waiting in the infirmary with clean bandages and fire in her eyes.
“More acid?” she asks, frowning at my arm.
“Yeah.”
“You ever think about maybe not getting sprayed with venomous sludge?”
“No.”
She presses a rag to my shoulder. I don’t flinch.
We say nothing else.
Because there's nothing to say.
Valoa’s fingers tremble as she threads a needle through torn flesh, but she doesn’t stop. The cot beneath the wounded gladatrix is soaked in more blood than any body should hold, and still she works—biting back curses, barking orders, barking at me. Her eyes are rimmed red, dark hollows carved beneath them like bruises from a fight she never entered but always loses. She hasn’t slept more than a few breaths in two days.
When I tell her to rest, her voice cracks like flint against steel.
“I don’t get to rest, Barsok. Not when you’re out there bleeding for their amusement.”
Her words hit harder than the ogre’s hammer two days ago. I actually flinch. She doesn’t notice—or maybe she does and doesn’t care. She yanks a bandage taut and ties it with a jerk that makes the patient groan.
I open my mouth. Shut it again.
There’s no comfort I can offer her right now that wouldn’t sound like a lie. We both know what this place is. What it makes of people. What it eats of them.
She wipes her hands on a rag that was white once. Now it’s a patchwork of dried blood and something that smells like spoiledherbs. Her breath comes short, shallow. Her shoulders slump. But she doesn’t sit down.
Instead, she moves on to the next body.
It takes everything in me not to lift her, not to carry her back to the cell, to force her to sleep. But I know how that would end—with her gone cold in my arms or screaming to be let go. So I stand there like a statue, my fists clenched tight enough that I feel the sting of my own nails cutting skin.
By midnight, the infirmary reeks of sweat, piss, blood, and boiled poultices. I sit on a bench near the far wall. My armor’s in a pile at my feet, caked in gore and grime. My back is stitched and bruised, and I haven’t eaten since morning. But all I can do is watch her.
She moves like a shadow half the time, flitting between cots, fetching salves, whispering something I can’t hear to dying men with hollow eyes. The rest of the time, she moves like a wildfire—snapping at guards, snapping at survivors, even snapping at Durk when he stumbles in with a cracked rib and tries to flirt.
“Don’t you have a wall to smash your head into?” she growls.
He grins, holding his side. “That’s tomorrow’s fight, sweetheart.”
She doesn't laugh.
Neither do I.
When she finally collapses onto a cot—one across from Durk’s—I feel something twist inside me. She curls in on herself like a flame trying to survive the wind. Her hands are tucked between her knees. Her head rests on her arms. Her red hair’s a tangled halo around her face. Even asleep, her body is tense, like she’s bracing for the next disaster.
I should say something. Anything. I should go to her. Lay a blanket across her shoulders. Whisper the name of a star I used to follow across the seas. But I don’t move.
Because I’ve never known how to comfort something soft without breaking it.
Durk catches me staring. He says nothing. Just grunts and pulls a crust of bread from his belt pouch. Tosses it my way. I catch it without looking.
“She’s tougher than she looks,” he mutters.
“I know.”
“She’s got more fire than ten of you.”
