Page 107 of Fortune's Blade

Although it would have to get in line after this trip.

He had his hand over Antem’s mouth and the man was slumped against Louis-Cesare’s chest, but he was alive. And looking about like you’d expect for someone just dragged back from the brink of death by a spectral vampire hand. His eyes darted around the room, slid over Claire with a shudder, and landed on me.

And clearly said “help me” without being able to utter a word.

“We have to get him out of here,” I whispered, and Louis-Cesare nodded.

But Claire had heard my words, too, and she was scowling. Maybe because she was checking over her patient as Louis-Cesare slowly lowered him back down, with a stethoscope on his chest and a blue-powder-covered hand on his forehead. I didn’t know what the latter was, but she’d used it when diagnosing me.

And she didn’t seem to like what either was telling her.

“No,” she mouthed back.

“No?” I whispered, glancing back at the tent flap. “Then what the hell would you suggest? If we leave him here, they’ll just kill him anyway—”

“I know that!”

“Then what do you want me to do, Claire?” I was fucked if I had any ideas, except to try to get Dorina’s whereabouts out of him—whenever he woke up again. If he woke up.

Because he’d just passed out again, which I couldn’t blame him for, but he looked like a dead man and I’d seen a lot of dead men. His skin was waxy it was so pale, and his eyelashes never even fluttered. The only way I knew that he was still clinging to life was the very shallow, very rapid rise and fall of his chest.

Maybe I wasn’t going to owe Mircea anything, after all.

“The heart has been repaired,” Claire confirmed. “I don’t understand how, but that can wait. But he’s in hemorrhagic shock—”

“Meaning?” I asked.

“Meaning he’s lost too much blood and there’s no way to replace it! And without it—”

“We don’t need him well,” Louis-Cesare said. “Just conscious enough to tell us where Dorina is.”

“You did not just say that to me,” Claire hissed back. “And you weren’t here! His last words were trying to help Dory, to make up for some of what he’d done—”

“And that makes it all right? We almost—” He stopped when the rest of what she’d said registered. “Wait. Then we already know Dorina’s whereabouts?”

“No, he didn’t get that far,” I said. “But he was about to. If he comes around again—”

“Then he can tell us, and after that, he’s on his own,” Louis-Cesare proclaimed, looking relieved. Because, yeah, that would make things simpler.

But then there was Claire, who had some things to say about that, all of which were profane. Including a few comments on Louis-Cesare’s parentage that were frankly uncalled for. The two of them had never gotten along, but I thought they had mended things somewhat over the past few months.

Apparently not.

And then it got worse.

“Our instructions weren’t to let anyone in, Lord Regin,” one of the guards on the other side of the tent flap said, and the three of us froze.

“Get out of my way,” Regin snarled and started to come in, only this time, my body was ahead of my alarmingly slow brain and I was there, sobbing.

And stumbling out into the night, drawing Regin along with me, those courtly manners overriding his upper brain functions much as whatever I was currently doing had done to mine.

Or maybe not.

Because the hand that grabbed my arm wasn’t gentle. “How is he?”

“Dead.” I started to move again, to push him along, to get us as far away from the tent as I could and buy Louis-Cesare and Claire time to . . . do something. Only one did not push a dragon. My arm never even moved.

“Dead?” he repeated, as if he didn’t know the word. He looked so strange suddenly, so bewildered, that I wondered if the damned translation spell was acting up.

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