Page 86 of Fae Champion

“I do.” His eyes cleared some. “Thanks to you.”

Awkwardly, I grimaced. “I’m not sure what I did to help, but I wouldn’t have been able to do it if you hadn’t saved me first.”

His eyelids closed; he dragged them back open, even that small action requiring too much effort. Foam coated his mouth and lined his nostrils from his earlier struggle.

“Truly, thank you, for saving my life,” I said.

He slid his head back and forth across the ground, just a couple of inches. “We’re even, then. No debts between us.”

“No, I guess not.”

“No debts is good. You don’t want to owe anyone anything, or they’ll make you pay up when you least want to.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Do.” He allowed his eyelids to drift shut, and I was left staring at how his long eyelashes—a dark umber—contrasted against the pure white of his coat.

“Is anybody listening to us?” he eventually mumbled.

“Give us a minute?” I asked the closest twoattendants, who immediately looked up to the viewing balcony and the queen within it … who’d instantly want to know why I wanted a private word with Azariah. “Never mind,” I muttered to the aides. “Just keep doing what you were doing.”

One with bouncy dark curls knelt across from me, next to the back of the unisus’ head. “Azariah,” she said, “I want to give you something for the pain, but it’ll make you sleepier than you already are, and fast. Do you think you can walk?”

“I’m … not sure,” he said while I asked, “He’s in pain?”

“Quite a bit, I’m afraid,” said Bouncy Curls. “His lungs incurred a lot of damage.”

“Can’t you just carry him off the field like you did with all the fallen fighters?”

“We can. Azariah, would you rather us do that?”

“Hmmm,” he answered.

“Then here’s the pain relief now.” She uncorked a vial like the many Braque carried in his satchel and waved it beneath the unisus’ wide nostrils. A smoke-like substance the color of darkening twilight bifurcated into two tendrils and wafted up into them. Hundreds of stars as minute as sand grains glittered throughout the smoky magic as Azariah breathed it in. His eyes fluttered beneath his closed eyelids.

Bouncy Curls met my gaze. “We can give you thirty seconds. Any more, and things won’t go well for any of us.”

Neither of us flicked a glance at the balcony though we both were surely thinking about its main occupant.

I nodded. She and the rest of the attendants ambled away, pretending to confer with each other, glancing back at Azariah often, as if discussing how they’d get him out of here.

“What is it, Azariah?” I asked tenderly of the large beast I barely knew but who’d stood up to the queen for me.

His eyelids slid open, but only halfway. “The bond between you and Rush Vega … she can’t find out.”

“What bond?”

“The mate bond. If she…”—his eyes fluttered closed—“finds out…”

“Azariah?” I prompted, when he seemed half asleep.

“She’ll kill you both, and she won’t … bother making a show of it.”

“Wait—what? Why?”

But his breathing had grown heavy, deep, and steady, erasing all his previous struggle, at least while he slept.

Bouncy Curls was behind me. “You won’t get anything more out of him for a while now.”

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