Page 36 of Threadbound

Someone was supposed to come in and put a cast on his arm, and Bran’s anxiety had started rising the minute—no, thesecond—Jamie had walked out of the room, afraid that someone was going to come in and try to do something else to him while Jamie was gone. Afraid that he would panic,again, and that they would drug him or tie him down without Jamie’s intervention.

Bran closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing.What kind of warrior are you,he asked himself,that you panic at the thought of some stupid human medicine?

Self-admonishment wasn’t helping.

The door opened, and the flare of hope he felt that Jamie might have returned was quickly quashed as a woman walked through the door, her brown hair cut close to her head, her fair skin dotted with freckles and her grey eyes kind, if wary. She was pushing a little cart with a basin, gauze and fabric strips, and a few implements.

“Did he go to get a cuppa, then?” she asked Bran, noticing Jamie’s absence.

It took him a moment to process the question, and he nodded.

The woman studied him for a few seconds while he tried to keep his breathing under control. “Should I finish rounds and check back before we do this?” she asked. “If you’d like him to be here?”

Bran definitely wanted Jamie to be there. The problem was that he didn’t know if Jamie had any intention of coming back. He’d said he was going to get food—but he’d been gone for over an hour. Bran drew in a long breath, let it out, and nodded again.

Maybe Jamie had been really hungry. Or maybe?—

He told himself to stop thinking about it.

“Okay, then,” the woman replied, tucking the cart just inside the door. “I’ll be back in about a half hour, and we’ll get you set to go.”

She waited for him to nod once more, then disappeared again.

The welling panic in his chest eased, and Bran took a few more deep breaths.

Maybe Jamie would come back before she did.

And maybe his arm would just heal on its own, and he’d just get up and walk out of here.

He lay on his side, breathing shallowly and trying to decide if he was physically able to get out of the hospital bed and escape before someone caught him, drugged him, or locked him in a room somewhere. As the minutes ticked by, his chest tightened, and then a wave of dizziness and nausea hit him hard enough that he curled up tighter in spite of the pain it caused, struggling to keep from retching.

Taranis and Habetrot, spare me, please.But the goddesses of death and healing either didn’t hear him or didn’t care, and pain tore through his physical body as magic hemorrhaged from him, taking what few reserves he had left.

“Oh, shit, Bran!”

He barely registered Jamie’s voice before he felt a hand on his back, another hand on his forehead.

“I’ll call the nurse?—”

“No,” Bran managed to gasp.

A hand smoothed over his hair, and he cringed inwardly at how much that simple gesture helped to calm him.

“Bran—”

“It’s… I—” He swallowed back bile. “I’ve been… sick. For a while.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly. It didn’t mean what Jamie thought, of course, but it was more or less true.

“Oh.” Jamie sounded… hurt? Bran couldn’t quite tell. “Are you—” He didn’t finish the question, and Bran was still too woozy to open his eyes to try to read the emotions on Jamie’s expression. Was he disappointed? Sad? Bran didn’t know him well enough to know.

“It will pass,” Bran managed.

In fact, it was passing a lot faster than it usually did. Maybe because Jamie was with him. His unstable magic was caused by not having completed the threadbond, so perhaps simply having Jamie there, his hand once more smoothing over Bran’s hair, was enough to settle it. For the moment.

The vertigo eased, and Bran opened one eye. Jamie looked worried, he thought, regret surging through his gut to replace the nausea with a different kind of queasiness. None of this was fair—not to him, and not to the unwitting half-breed.

“Is it—bad?” Jamie asked softly.

“It’s treatable,” Bran answered, hedging. Not a lie.

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