Page 51 of A Night of Secret Surrender
‘If you get up too fast, it will happen again, believe me.’
‘This has happened...to you before?’
‘Twice. Once in Madeira with the sickness I told you of and another time in the north of Portugal.’
She nodded, wiping at her face with the dirty fall of sleeve. ‘If you give me a moment...’
She lay back and closed her eyes, her lashes long and dark against her cheeks. No boy had lashes like that, he thought to himself, and found the canister of water.
‘Here. This will help. Take a sip.’
She drank deeply, raising herself on one elbow. The bridge of her nose was badly swollen.
‘Can you breathe properly?’
‘Only through my mouth. I think my nose is broken.’
‘No, it’s only bruised. If it were broken, it would bleed more and hurt like hell, too.’
‘I hope...you are right.’ Her voice was small and flat, her eyes leached of the vivid colour that was so much a part of her.
‘I’ll carry you. We can’t stay here for long.’
She shook her head, but he had her up already, his hands under her knees and behind her back as he lifted her off the ground. She weighed so much less than he might have thought, the thinness of her body disguised by her rounded breasts and bottom.
* * *
His heartbeat was loud but slow as he walked on with her, no sign of fatigue or exhaustion showing anywhere on his body. She felt odd and disconnected, weak and cold. The blood loss, she supposed, and tried to rouse in herself the energy to walk, but couldn’t. She knew of no one else in the whole world who would have done this for her, picked her up and walked her to safety. For so many years she had been on her own, by herself, in a city that festered with greed and violence.
It was a wondrous discovery, this, and made more so because Summer was a man who knew some of the depths to which she had sunk and who had seen revenge in the blood on the sharp edge of her blade in the dungeons of Les Chevaliers.
He’d used the long length of his old habit to tie her to him, in a sling of sorts that was both ingenious and comfortable, and even an hour later he had barely broken into a sweat.
Still, the way was steep and the oncoming rain had begun to make it slippery, too.
‘I can walk if you let me down.’
He shook his head. ‘This way is faster. We need to be as far from the town as we can manage by the nightfall.’
‘You’d get further without me.’
He began to laugh. ‘Are you suggesting I abandon you here, Mademoiselle Fournier, in the middle of nowhere and bleeding?’
‘Anyone else would have long ago. They would have recognised that I was not worth the risk.’
‘Your friends must be a motley group, then, if that is indeed the case.’
She felt she should tell him that she had no friends and never had, but the confession was too sad and too pointed so she stayed silent. Even as a young girl she’d not held anyone truly close, save for Summer, she thought, for the few months at Langley.
* * *
When the light began to fade he finally stopped.
‘We’ll camp here until the first light of dawn and then move on. It’s a site that will let us see if anyone is coming from all directions.’
And it was as he said, the last light scouring steep hills and showing wide valleys in the distance.
‘We can’t make a fire, but at least the weather is clearing up and if we find shelter under the larger trees we should stay dry. How’s the head?’
