Maric squeezed Dara's wrist, hoping to detect some hint of a pulse, but it was impossible to feel anything now that the wagon was moving. It was a pointless hope, anyway. He had a hole all the way through his chest, puncturing his heart. He didn't have a pulse. Maric knew that.
He'd lost so much blood, too. His clothes were wet with it and he'd left a puddle of it behind to soak into the dirt road. Dara wasn't a large man. Even if he'd had a functioning heart, the blood loss would have been too much. There were some things not even magic could fix.
He should have sent Dara back to Paige. He would have still been without him, but at least he would have had the hope of maybe visiting him again someday, at least Dara would have been safe and hopefully happy. Now when he woke up alone each morning he would have to lay with the knowledge that it was because he had been careless with the one person he had ever truly connected with.
The sun was beginning to set by the time they arrived at the damn inn. It took less than a minute for news of their arrival to spread through the staff and patrons and for people to start crowding out of the inn to come and gawk at them. A little girl no more than five years old approached the back of the wagon and stared up at Dara's bloody, slack face.
Brayan grabbed her by the back of her shirt and spun her around, facing her back towards the inn. "Get the children out of here! Get everyone back inside!"
Brayan had the kind of voice people obeyed even without knowing his status, and in less than a minute the crowd had vanished again.
No one seemed to know what to do after that. Maric certainly didn't. He knew he ought to let go of Dara, both physically and emotionally. He knew he should go inside and get cleaned up and be a prince. But he just... didn't. He couldn't.
Garrod was the first one to approach the back of the wagon. "He was a sweet boy."
Maric clutched Dara tighter against his chest. "He was more than that."
"Mm." Garrod nodded seriously. "Do you know anything about his religious beliefs? What he would have wanted done?"
"No. I hardly knew anything about him." Maric shut his eyes. "Fuck."
"He was born in Ticia, wasn't he? They burn their dead."
"Is it the same for the Eth, though?" Brayan asked. "They have their own language, their own culture."
"Thank you," Maric told them. He had been worried that nobody would understand why he was so upset over a bed slave, but that wasn't what Dara was anymore. He was just a person who had died. A person who Maric had cared about deeply.
Mathers approached the back of the wagon and gave Maric a sympathetic pat on the leg, then slowly retracted his hand and pressed his lips together like he wasn't quite sure he should have done that.
Maric didn't care. A deep sorrow had drowned out all other emotions. Mathers could have slapped him and he still wouldn't have cared.
"Please let me take a look at that cut on your chest," Mathers said. "The arrow went through him and cut into you, didn't it?"
Maric couldn't even feel the sting of it anymore. "I don't care."
"I know you don't, but please let us care for you until you can care about yourself again," Mathers said. "Can you imagine dying to infection because you wouldn't let me clean out some trivial wound?"
"Please, Maric," Brayan encouraged when Maric didn't move. "You don't have to decide anything about Dara yet. Nobody will touch him. Just climb out of the wagon and let Mathers tend to you."
"Okay," Maric said after a long moment of hesitation. He didn't want to, but he needed a next step. He needed to do something. He found the ratty old jacket Dara had insisted on keeping with him tucked into a corner of the wagon, folded it up, and gently lay Dara's body down with his head resting on it.
He gave Dara one final look, hoping by some impossible miracle to see his chest rise and fall, and then climbed down out of the wagon.
He stood, passive, as Mathers unbuttoned his shirt. It stuck to him in places, a mix of his own blood and Dara's dried into it.
The cut on his chest had split the skin open into a wound the size of a bronze coin. It would need to be stitched and would leave a scar. Good. This had been the worst day of Maric's life, but he never wanted to forget it.
"Hey!" Brayan shouted, and Maric looked up to see that the little girl from earlier had climbed into the back of the wagon. She had a cup of water in hand and was pouring it onto Dara's face.
She screeched and thrashed as Brayan grabbed her by the back of the shirt, spilling the contents of the cup of water everywhere. "He's thirsty!"
Brayan lifted her out of the wagon and set her on the ground. "We don't play with corpses. That's disrespectful."
The little girl tried to twist away, but Brayan had a firm hold on the back of her shirt. "What's a corpse?"
"A dead person."
"He's not dead," she insisted, trying to twist away again with no success. "He's thirsty."
"You're more qualified than our doctor then, are you?" Brayan asked her, but Maric could see his mind ticking over, could see Brayan's eyes searching her face and picking out her dark hair, her eyes the same almond shape as Dara's. She had Eth blood in her.
And Eth blood on her, now, because she'd been touching Dara.
Mathers climbed into the back of the wagon and pressed his fingers against Dara's throat, against his wrist. Bent his ear close to Dara's mouth and listened for breathing. The grim expression on his face told them all they needed to know: Dara was still very much dead.
Brayan turned the little girl around to face him and held her by the shoulders. "This isn't a game, okay? This is very serious. I need to know why you think he's alive."
The little girl leant back against the hold Brayan had on her, forcing him to support her weight. "Well, he just is because, um. Dead people aren't thirsty because they can't be."
"How do you know he's thirsty?" Brayan asked.
"Umm..." The little girl's gaze wandered around, taking in each of them. "I don't know."
Brayan sighed. "Right."
"He's really thirsty. I don't like it. Make him drink."
"Mathers," Maric said. "I know it's a long shot, but I'm going to need you to get some water into him. Can you do that?"
Mathers thought about it for a moment. "I honestly don't know. He won't breathe it in at least, but getting it past his throat when he can't swallow will be a challenge."
"I can get fluid into his stomach," Thayne said as he started going through his saddlebag.
Maric returned to the cart and Mathers helped him lift Dara out of it. As soon as Brayan saw that they were moving, he hurried ahead into the inn. By the time Maric made it inside Brayan had a key in hand and was ready to lead the way upstairs.
The time they'd delayed outside had been enough for the staff to light a fire in their nicest room and get the beginnings of a hot bath going. Maric laid Dara down on the bed and carefully removed his shirt.
There was still a hole through his chest. Maric knew it was irrational to expect anything else, but there was still some small part of him that had hoped to find him healed. Or to at least see some sign that his body was making an attempt. As long as he didn't understand how Dara's magic worked, who was he to say what was and wasn't possible?
When Thayne joined them in the room a minute later, he had a funnel and a thin, metal pipe in hand. It didn't take much imagination to figure out what he planned to do with them. He offered them to Mathers.
Mathers hesitated a moment before reluctantly taking the items from Thayne and turning to Maric. "I will do this, but before I do it I want to be very clear that I don't expect it to work. Young children say strange things all the time, and even if there is some part of Dara that isn't entirely dead there's no reason to believe that he can be saved or that doing this will be helpful. I just don't know enough about his magic to say for absolute sure that it won't be and I don't think it can make things any worse, so I'm willing to try if you're willing to let me do unpleasant things to his corpse for what will very likely be no reason."
"I know it's a slim hope, Mathers, but it's the only one I have," Maric told him. "Do it."
Thayne propped Dara upright and tilted his head back under Mathers' guidance. Maric had seen some gruesome field medicine in his days and was normally difficult to bother, but he had to look away when Mathers started sliding the metal pipe down Dara's throat. If he hadn't, he might not have even noticed the little girl slip into the room.
She had no qualms about watching, but she did wrinkle her nose in disgust. She pointed a finger at Dara. "Is that blood?"
"Yes, that's blood," Brayan told her. He came up beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder, but he seemed unsure whether he should guide her away.
She moved closer to the bed and stretched her pointing finger out towards Dara. Brayan pulled her back before she could poke it into the hole in Dara's chest.
The little girl leant back against Brayan. "He has a hurt, but it doesn't hurt. Why?"
"How do you know it doesn't hurt?" Brayan asked.
"It doesn't," she said.
"But how do you know that?"
She shrugged and started picking her nose.
"What's your name?" Maric asked her.
"Alexi." She put her finger in her mouth and sucked on it. "Are you a prince?"
"Yes, I am, and if you tell us something actually helpful I'll give you anything you want, Alexi."
"Sweets," Alexi said without a moment's thought.
Maric shut his eyes for a moment and let out a slow breath. This was what he was putting all of his hopes on. The word of a child too young to have any sense of rationality. "Yes. I will give you sweets."
When Alexi pulled forward Brayan let her go. She climbed onto the side of the bed. "Well..." she said as she stared at Dara intently. "He's hungry also."
"But what makes you think that?" Maric pressed as Brayan stuck his head out of the door and shouted instructions for someone to bring up liquid food of some kind.
"Umm... like a tummy feeling and, um... feeling like that." Alexi patted her stomach. "And then you want to have some food like a cake or an egg, but not cabbage because it's yucky."
"I know what hunger is," Maric said. "I want to know how you can know when someone else is hungry or thirsty."
"Well sometimes you eat soooo much that you even throw up and you're still hungry."
"So you're saying—"
At the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps Alexi's attention lept to the door. She jumped off the bed, dashed over to Mathers' saddle bag, and crouched down behind it even though the bed had been right there and hiding under or behind it would have been far more effective.
A woman in a floury apron appeared in the doorway, her eyes going wide as she took in the scene in the room. "Please forgive the interruption, your highness," she told Maric, and then she beckoned to Alexi. "Alexi, come on."
Brayan stopped Alexi with a hand on her arm when she started to obey. "Is she your daughter?"
The woman's eyes darted between Maric, Brayan, and Alexi. "She's an orphan, but I take responsibility for her. I'm so sorry she was bothering you, sir. I'll get her out of your way."
"Who were her parents?"
"Ah..." She hesitated, her eyes fixing on Alexi for a long moment before lifting to meet Brayan's again. "Four years ago a heavily pregnant woman stayed here. She left early in the morning and when we went to clean her room, there was Alexi laying in the middle of the bed. We don't know who her mother was and we never saw her again, sir."
"Was she Eth?"
The widening of the woman's eyes suggested she had also noticed Alexi's features. "No, of course not, sir. We wouldn't rent a room to a slave."
Alexi pulled against Brayan's grip, but he held her in place. For the first time, she was starting to look upset.
"I'm sure you've guessed at what happened," Brayan told the woman. "A woman of rich enough blood to stay at your establishment comes, gives birth to a child with Eth features, and abandons her to you. Maybe it was rape, maybe she had an affair with her family's slave, but whatever the case she ended up pregnant with a child she knew she couldn't keep."
The woman swallowed. She looked like she might cry. "The features aren't so obvious in a baby, sir. Please. We didn't know and we raised her. What were we supposed to do? Sell her the moment we started to suspect?"
Alexi twisted in Brayan's grip and made a noise that sounded like a growl. Brayan finally let her go and she ran over and latched onto the woman.
"What's your name?" Brayan asked.
"Rosalie, sir."
"Well, Rosalie, if you grind bitter milkroot and ripe bloodbane berries into a pulp, it will lighten even the darkest hair and stain it a fetching reddish colour that won't quickly fade," Brayan told her. "My older sister does that sort of thing for work. She used to pay me three bronze pieces to go out and scavenge them for her."
"Oh." Rosalie dabbed at her eyes with her apron. "I understand, sir. Thank you."
"Perhaps you can help us in return," Brayan told her. "She's been telling us that this young man, who we thought was dead, is thirsty and hungry. Is there any chance there's any truth to that, or is she just a child saying silly things?"
"Well..." Rosalie hesitated. "I don't know much about these sorts of things, but shouldn't it be clear if someone is dead or alive?"
"He's clearly dead, but he has rapid regenerative abilities that may complicate things in unexpected ways," Brayan explained. "We would have assumed that didn't include surviving injuries as extreme as his or coming back from the dead, but an Eth child making cryptic statements was enough to make us wonder. Has she ever known things she shouldn't have before?"
Alexi had wrapped Rosalie's apron around her like a cloak and was leaning back against her. "They said they'd give me sweets if I help."
"We won't hurt her or take her away from you," Maric promised when Rosalie hesitated again. "Please. I understand that she's important to you. That young man on the bed is important to me, and if he can be saved I need to know."
"I don't understand it, your highness, but she does know things sometimes," Rosalie said. "Things she shouldn't about how other people are feeling. She's so young and she can't put things into words very well, though, so I'm truly not sure what it means or whether or not it's any kind of magic."
Raedon ducked around Rosalie through the doorway, carrying a tray with a cup of milk and a bowl of soup on it. He set it on the bed and Maric looked away again as Mathers began pouring the milk into the funnel.
"Thank you," Brayan said. "You can take her away now. A child her age shouldn't see this sort of thing."
"Thank you, sir," Rosalie said and she tried to lead Alexi away, but Alexi planted her feet on the ground and refused to move.
"Sweets?" Alexi inquired.
"Downstairs there's an older man with a beard, dressed in blue like the rest of us," Brayan told her. "Tell him Brayan sent you and that I promised you sweets. He'll have something for you."
"Okay!" Alexi said, and she dashed off. Rosalie gave them one last smile and followed after her.
Mathers finished pouring the soup down Dara's throat, then he set the funnel aside and gently eased the pipe out. He propped Dara upright on pillows and then sat back. "That's all we can do for now."
"Can you clean him off and stitch his wounds up?" Maric asked as he lay down next to Dara. "Just... treat him as though he's not dead. Please."
"Of course," Mathers said. "Let me see to your wound first, though."
"No," Maric said, no room for argument in his tone. "I'll let you do it once you've taken care of Dara to my satisfaction. Not before."
Mathers looked like he wanted to object, but finally he nodded and went to get a washcloth from the tub. He handed Thayne a second one, and together they began the work of cleaning the blood from Dara's body.
It didn't help as much as Maric had hoped. Beneath the blood, Dara's skin was a pale, sickly hue that didn't make him look any more alive.
Maric discarded his shirt and made a token effort to wipe himself down just so that he could touch Dara without making him dirty again. There was so much blood, especially on Dara, that it felt like they'd never be rid of it. The whole room smelled of it. Maric lay down next to Dara and rested his forehead against Dara's cheek.
And then he startled backwards as Dara took a deep, gasping breath in.