Free Blood Witch by Thea Atkinson

found she couldn't keep from wincing and letting
go. He fell with a thunk to the ground.
    "I can't," she
said.
    Yenic chewed his
lip thoughtfully. "Hurts too much?"
    "I kind of overdid
it during the attack."
    "Kind of?"
    She sighed,
looking down at Gael's head and settled for easing onto the dirt
and pulling his head onto her lap. "I guess I got stabbed a little
bit."
    Yenic dropped the
feet and managed to look annoyed and concerned at the same time.
"Stabbed."
    Said baldly like
that, it did sound a little extreme.
    She nodded. Gael's
head fit nicely into the crook of her thighs and she truly did feel
winded and sore.
    "You go get his
sister. She'll know what to do with him. I'll stay here."
    A hound snuffled
up to her as she sat. It had a white spot on the top of its nose
that reminded her of Barruch. She would go to the stables later and
bring him a parsnip from Saxa's kitchen. That was providing she
wasn't angry at her for getting Gael into this condition. Yenic had
yet to leave and she wondered what the hesitation was.
    "What are you
waiting for?"
    "I don't know," he
said. "Something just doesn't feel right."
    "Because it isn't.
Aedus is inside somewhere shooting people with sleeping potions,
Corrin is in the bathhouse waiting to have his fate decided, I'm
sore as a cat with a cut tail, and Gael is lying here on the ground
with his head in the lap of a woman he hates. What could be
right?"
    Yenic chewed the
inside of his cheek thoughtfully, but finally sighed and gave in.
She watched him leave, thinking how peculiar he would look to the
citizens of Sarum with his chest bare, tattaus running up one side
and beneath his arm. He stood out in other ways too. Most of Sarum
was fair – as Yuri's original tribe was fair and large, but Yenic's
fairness was different. He was wiry strong, not broad like Yuri's
people. Her people. Well, half her people. And he was much
shorter.
    Still. That wasn't
all of it. The people of Sarum, original and captured and enslaved,
had all adopted an air. They seemed to know subconsciously that
they were from within and went about their business as though no
danger could touch them. In a word, they were oblivious.
    The soldiers were
somewhat different. They were wary, but they too expected the city
to keep them safe from those without. Yenic, however, stepped
lightly, bounded where he could, as though in one movement he could
avoid sudden danger. He never took a straight route. She watched
him seeming to meander through the throngs and clusters of people,
but was decidedly intent on his direction. He never swung his arms.
He had an economy of movement that spoke of a warrior's training,
but he had something else that the Sarum warriors did not.
Something she couldn't name.
    She thought back
to the time beneath the early morning sun, back at the oasis, when
Aedus had gone off and they'd thought she was just foraging. She
could easily remember the feel of his hands on her skin, the taste
of his mouth with its lingering sweetness of honey and peaches, how
filled with need she was to have him closer even though they were
already pressed hard against each other.
    She felt as though
someone was watching her.
    "What are you
doing?"
    She looked down
into Gael's face. Yes. Someone was. She thought her face must be
burning red.
    "Sleep well?" She
asked him and tried not to compare the eyes she saw beneath hers to
the honeyed eyes that had looked into her own just moments before.
Tried and failed. She wasn't sure whose were more captivating. She
told herself it didn't matter.
    Gael groaned and
rolled onto his side. "I wasn't sleeping."
    "Of course not. I
snore when I'm awake too."
    He glared at her
and tried to get up, grabbed his head and weaved back and
forth.
    "Careful," she
said. "You've not been awake long."
    He didn't open his
eyes, but his tone told her if he did, his nasty glare would not
have left. "I told you, I was not asleep. I don't sleep."
    "Ever."
    "When I need it,
yes. But not on duty."
    "You