Risk

Chapter XII

Jasta bit her lip and debated calling Rowan's name again, the hope that he would wake up dying in her chest. He still hadn't moved a muscle, so calling again would prove to be pointless.

She struggled to her feet, wincing as her bad leg bore a little too much of her weight. But she couldn't just sit there. If there was something she could do to help him recover faster, then she would, by all means, do it. She didn't want to sit idly and watch as his recovery time was doubled because of her inaction.

She walked as slowly as she could bear, careful not to put much weight on her injured leg, and limping heavily. Her progress was infuriatingly slow, and she didn't know how much longer she could take it. She tried to hobble a little faster, one hand pressed against the wall to help her take a bit of weight from her injury.

"Rowan!" she called again, this time louder than ever, with absolutely no regard for whether she woke the neighboring room's occupants or not.

No reply at all. After a minute more of hobbling along, she reached him and immediately began to look him over. He looked tired, more than anything. Maybe he'd just passed out due to fatigue?

But even as the thought entered her mind, she knew that it wasn't true. He would have passed out much sooner if it was ever going to happen. The fact of his exhaustion could have surely played a part, but it wasn't the sole reason for his faint.

She looked harder, searching for a reason that would explain his sudden black-out. Why would he be losing blood faster now? It was hours after he'd been hit with the knife. The bleeding should have only slowed down as time went on.

But his wound seemed to be completely defying that notion. The stain around the slit in his shirt had nearly doubled in size, and some of the darkly glinting blood was even leaking through onto the chair.

First things first, his positioning was terrible for being treated, especially given the location of the wound. She would never be able to get anything done with him sitting like that, and the way he was hunched over like he was could only succeed in hurting his side even more.

So the first order of business was getting him out of the chair, which she managed to do by simply grabbing his ankles and pulling, making sure to stop just short of completely pulling him off, because his head would thump painfully against the floor unless she gently let it down—which she did.

And now she needed to get a good look at the injury. Treating it would be a very different matter if it was deep compared to shallow, so she carefully unbuttoned his shirt and peeled it away from his blood-wet skin.

She almost removed something else with the shirt. It was a silver necklace that clanked against the hard wood that he was lying on. The charm was a tiny silver tree, delicately twisted and incredibly real—red stones speckling the branches like tiny, glimmering pieces of fruit. It was unimaginably intricate, and she just wanted to stare at it for hours. It seemed that the longer she looked, the more detail she uncovered—a small knot here and there, the way the branches twisted as if the metal had actually grown that way, rather than crafted under a blacksmith's hammer.

She reluctantly tore her eyes away from the beautiful necklace and down to Rowan's side.

The gash there was much more jagged than she would have guessed, but it was blessedly shallow. She let out a quiet sigh before taking in a steeling breath of air. She would have to clean it so that infection couldn't set in.

She got up and hobbled over to the water basin, trying to go as fast as she could without damaging her leg further. And she didn't stop her hurry once she'd reached the table, snatching up the provided towel and getting it sufficiently damp before she rushed back to Rowan.