Chapter 28 | Part 3 | The Weight

Balin came back carrying Xandor, an arrow in his own leg.

Not his leg originally. One of the grey cloaks had fired during the retreat, a parting shot placed with the same professional accuracy as the one that had taken Xandor down, and it had caught Balin through the meat of his right calf while he was half-carrying, half-dragging the druid through the tree line. He’d kept walking. Aldric had watched the young dwarf absorb the impact like he’d absorbed the flat-blade hit, with a grunt that was more anger than pain, and then he’d adjusted his grip on Xandor and kept moving because stopping wasn’t available.

They’d put a ridge between themselves and the ambush site. Half a league of frozen hillside, the pines thickening as they climbed, old growth that hadn’t been logged because nobody lived this far north to log it. Aldric found a depression between two granite outcroppings where the rock walls provided cover on three sides and the canopy above was dense enough to break their silhouette from the ridge.

He put Dulint on watch. The old dwarf went without speaking, his axe in his hand, his face the color of dirty snow.

Then Aldric knelt beside Xandor and went to work.

The arrow in the druid’s shoulder had a broadhead tip, designed to lodge rather than pass through. Pulling it straight out would tear the muscle open. Aldric had seen this in the Ninth Frontier. He’d watched field surgeons handle it, and he’d watched men die because field surgeons weren’t available.

“Maris. I need your hands.”

She appeared beside him, pale but steady. Her fingers were thin and cold and they didn’t shake when she held the wound open so Aldric could see the angle of the barb. That was useful. Everything about Maris was either useful or devastating, and the margin between the two was her own body’s willingness to keep functioning.

“It needs to come forward, not back. Through and out.” He found Xandor’s eyes. The old druid was conscious, sweat beading on his olive skin despite the cold. “This is going to be brutal for about ten seconds.”

“I’ve had worse.” Xandor’s voice was steady, which meant he was lying or he’d actually had worse, and Aldric respected both possibilities equally.

He pushed the arrow through. Xandor made a sound that wasn’t a scream because he’d bitten down on the leather strap Maris had placed between his teeth, but it was the kind of sound that existed in the same territory as screaming, a vibration that came from the deepest part of the chest and traveled through the ground. The broadhead emerged from the front of his shoulder trailing blood and tissue. Aldric snapped the shaft and pulled the rest through the back.

Maris packed the wound. Her hands moved with the practiced efficiency of someone who’d watched herself bleed from the nose and ears enough times to have developed opinions about wound management.

Balin sat against the granite wall and watched.

The arrow in his calf was simpler. A bodkin point, narrow, designed for penetration through armor. It had gone clean through the muscle. Aldric pulled it from both sides, packed both holes, and wrapped the leg with strips torn from the grey cloak he’d taken from the fighter he’d wounded. The young dwarf didn’t make a sound.

“I didn’t die,” Balin said to Dulint.

His uncle was twenty feet away, standing watch between two pines, his back to the camp. He stopped moving. Didn’t turn.

“I was supposed to, wasn’t I? Fast, you wrote. ‘Balin dies fast.‘” The young dwarf’s voice was flat. Not triumphant. Not accusing. Just the voice of someone reciting facts that had lost their power to surprise but not their power to wound. “I ran toward the line. I fought. I bled. And I didn’t die.”

Dulint turned. His iron-ore eyes were wet. His mouth opened, and no sound came out, and Aldric watched one of the strongest men he’d ever traveled with stand in the frozen pine forest and break apart without making a noise.

“Not here,” Aldric said. Quietly. To both of them. “That conversation happens when we’re not bleeding and they’re not behind us.”

Balin looked at him with something that might have been gratitude or might have been contempt for the interruption. Then he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the granite.

Aldric finished binding his own arm. The cut was shallow enough to scab, deep enough to limit his grip strength. His sword arm. The arithmetic was merciless: every engagement from this point would be fought at eighty percent. Eighty percent against professionals who’d already proven they could coordinate, track, and execute an ambush in territory they’d scouted in advance.

He sat back on his heels and looked at what he had.

One druid with a shoulder wound that would take weeks to heal properly and was going to get days at most. One young dwarf with a leg wound that would slow the group’s pace by at least a quarter. One old dwarf who was carrying a secret that had just been spoken out loud. One seer who hadn’t collapsed yet, which meant the next collapse would be worse. And himself, sword arm compromised, responsible for all of them.

He’d lost men before. In the Ninth Frontier, when Varian and Elric were taken, he’d stood in the empty watchtower and counted the things he could have done differently. The list had twenty-three items. He’d memorized it. He carried it the way Dulint carried the note in his boot.

This wasn’t the Ninth Frontier. These people weren’t soldiers who’d accepted the contract. They were a druid, two dwarves, and a seer who’d been pulled into something none of them fully understood, and he was leading them because someone had to and the alternatives were worse.

The horn had sounded once, patient, after they’d fled. Patient meant organized pursuit. Patient meant they knew exactly where the group was going because the Cube in Dulint’s pack was broadcasting its position to anyone with the means to listen.

He looked at the blood on the snow. His. Xandor’s. Balin’s. Three fires burning on the same ridge: one for the wounded, one for the dead they hadn’t left behind yet, one for the people still following.

He waited for a second horn.

It didn’t come.

End of Chapter 28.3 —> 28.4: The Second Blood: The Silence After