Page 58 of Swords of Soul and Shadow
Right, painful limp left, right, excruciating limp left.
He repeated the steps in his head to remind himself to keep going, to focus on walking instead of the fire that was now his leg. Stars, he’d never had an injury that had hurt this badly. It was hard to think past the next step ahead. He clenched his teeth until they ached.
How had it reopened? Had her power truly failed? The wound felt as fresh as when he’d first been hit.
His head still felt lighter than a feather, and a storm raged in his stomach.
When they rounded the corner, the turn jostled his leg. The pain erupted into a firestorm. His good leg gave out, and he collapsed, Hallie with him. She shouted as she fell right on top of him.
His leg screamed. An involuntary, strangled cry escaped his hold. He would not yield more than that. He would pass out before he let that happen.
Hallie rolled off him. “Niels, what happened? Can you…did something else…is it just your leg? Oh stars, oh stars. It’s my fault.”
He was able to summon a choked chuckle. “It’s okay. ‘Tis but a simple flesh wound.”
Seemed he could remember how to speak all proper-like when he was in pain. Or maybe he was simply descending into madness. As if in answer, his Fogs headache flared; blackness flickered in and out, so swiftly he wasn’t sure how much time he lost.
When he blinked, Hallie was flinging aside shirts and pants and anything else in her pack. Niels barely saw her through the haze distorting his vision, one that told him the next blackout might be permanent. Her panicked words were now garbled nonsense in his ears.
Hiking the mountain had been too ambitious. His leg had always been a ticking time bomb, and now his time was up.
His vision went in and out. One second Hallie was ripping things out of his pack and hers, the next her panicked eyes floated above his. “I don’t have time to go down the mountain and back. I don’t have time—”
“I’ll be…fine…”
He didn’t think she heard him. He wasn’t even sure he’d spoken out loud.
White-hot pain bit into his leg and radiated down to his toes before bouncing up into his chest, climbing all the way to his neck. He clenched his eyes shut, a few searing tears escaping. A few seconds later, cold air pierced the heat like a dagger. It didn’t last long before the heat returned.
Fingers, hot and inquisitive, poked his wound.
It took everything in his power to keep the scream from ripping through his throat at the stinging pain that lit through his leg over the next few seconds. Light blazed against his lids.
The tension left his body, but the headache stayed. The pain in his leg receded to a mild sting, like he’d been stung by a mountain hornet. His breathing still came in gasps, and sweat ran in rivulets down his face, but he was able to open his eyes.
It wasn’t bright in the corridor. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and the light floating through the window above them was a dull, fading gold, streaked with red. Firstmoon would be rising soon.
“Niels? Can you hear me?”
Hallie sounded oddly breathless, like she had run a marathon before speaking. He turned his head to find her crouched near his injured leg. His trousers were missing below his knee, the stiff material slashed and frayed. She’d cut it off. Blood coated the floor beneath his leg and the knees of Hallie’s trousers.
“Yes,” he croaked. She looked worse than he felt, like she was about to pass out herself. “What did you do?”
She shifted back on her heels, swaying a little with the motion. She clutched those stupid goggles in her right hand. She wiped her brow before holding out her hand, a bullet sitting in the center of her palm.
He blinked. “What—did you take—how did you—Fely said that it would kill you!”
“It was close to the surface.” She looked away. “I had to.”
“But why? Why would you put your life at risk to even try?”
Niels scanned the floor for a knife, a pair of shears, anything that she might’ve used to extract it. Because she couldn’t have been so stars-blasted stupid as to use her power again when Fely had said it would probably kill her.
Yet there she sat, armed with nothing but her own hands, breathing heavily and wiping her brow of sweat again and again. He shifted a little; his leg protested with the movement, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been earlier. It was even better than the first time she’d tried to heal him.
Hallie fiddled with her hands in her lap. “Because I couldn’t let you die.”
Niels sat forward, taking one of her hands. She didn’t resist, but she still wouldn’t look at him. “Hallie.” He rubbed her fingers until she looked up. “Thank you.”
