Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(101)

Midway up, the smell of blood began getting stronger. Not all of it was Quentin’s. Most of it wasn’t. I climbed faster.

After another ten feet, I found the body. Not a human’s body: a dog’s, white fur stained with blood, head lolling. He’s past helping, whispered a small, shameful voice. Keep going. If I stopped to help him, I might be too late to help Quentin. I might not be able to save my squire.

And if I didn’t stop to help him, I would never be able to live with myself. I dropped to my knees on the step below the one where he was sprawled, reaching for him. The fur on his neck was thick and tacky with strings of slowly drying gore, but most of the blood, I realized, wasn’t his: it had run down from the red stains around his mouth. The only actual injury seemed to be in his belly. It would still be enough to kill him if it wasn’t cleaned and bandaged—the fur there was practically black—but it wasn’t enough to have killed him yet.

I dug my fingers into his fur until I found his pulse. It would have been too fast in a human, or a Daoine Sidhe. I didn’t know what was usual in a dog. Were they faster than their bipedal companions? Slower? I just had to hope that this was normal. His breathing was shallow but steady.

“Madden,” I whispered, leaning closer. “Can you hear me?”

His eye opened and he whined, low and shrill in the back of his throat.

I hadn’t realized how tense I was until my shoulders unlocked. I forced myself to smile, running my hand along the curve of his neck. “Hey,” I said. “Can you shift? I can help bandage that hole in your stomach, if you can shift.”

He rolled his eye, which I took as an indication that he was willing to try. I moved back, watching as he shivered, a small motion that gradually spread to his entire body, becoming a shudder, and finally becoming a shift in the world. The dog disappeared, replaced by a burly man with red-and-white hair, wearing a white ruffled shirt and a pair of blue linen trousers. The front of the shirt had turned almost completely black. There was no hole in the fabric. That seemed odd for a moment, before I realized the shirt hadn’t existed when he was stabbed: the knife had gone through fur and skin, not fabric. Magic was strange, and its inconsistent rules were sometimes unforgiving.

“Hey,” he whispered.

“Hey,” I replied, and moved to help him into a sitting position. He grimaced, but didn’t make a sound. “I need you to take your shirt off.”

That was enough to coax a pained smile from him. “I don’t swing that way, and Tybalt would murder me. He doesn’t like dogs to begin with.”

“Tybalt will understand battlefield necessity,” I said, beginning to undo Madden’s buttons. “I need to bind your wound. I don’t expect you to walk, but if we can stop the bleeding, you’ll be okay long enough for me to deal with the Queen of Highmountain, get back to Arden, and find Jin.”

Madden grimaced again, rolling his shoulders to help me with the undressing. “I don’t mean to be a pessimist, but maybe you’re expecting too much of yourself? I can’t stand. I don’t think she’s going to get here in time.”

“Hope can be cruel, but giving up is worse,” I said. Revealed, the wound in his stomach looked about as good as it was possible for that sort of thing to be. It was high and off to the side, where it might have sliced into the fat and muscle of his abdomen, avoiding his internal organs. If we were only dealing with blood loss and not sepsis, I might not be being overly optimistic after all.

His shirt was linen, sturdy enough that it refused to rip when I pulled on it. That was good. I used Sylvester’s sword to slice it into strips and wrapped them around Madden’s middle, doing my best to stop the bleeding without tying them tight enough to do additional damage. He was panting and pale by the time I was done, but still sitting upright; he hadn’t blacked out even once. Under the circumstances, I was willing to call that a win.

“I have to go,” I said quietly. “Did she say anything about what she was hoping to accomplish?”

“She told her handmaiden her hands were too dirty; she’d burn for what she did,” said Madden. He frowned. It was impossible to tell whether the pain in his expression was physical, or due to remembering Verona’s words. “She said if she was willing to finish this—the queen said that if the handmaiden was willing to finish this—her sister would be taken care of. The handmaiden’s sister, I mean.”

“I understand,” I said. Blood loss was making him loopy. I wasn’t going to get much more out of him. Still, I paused, and asked, “Madden, what’s at the top of this tower?”

He blinked, seeming perplexed. “The sleepers,” he said. “I thought you knew.”

“Oh, root and branch,” I muttered. “No. I didn’t. I’ll be back.” I pushed myself to my feet and started up the stairs, faster now that I knew what I was racing toward—and what I was racing against.

The tower where the elf-shot sleepers were kept was an interesting target, tactically speaking. Nolan, Prince in the Mists was definitely there; Dianda Lorden might or might not be. Either way, they’d make excellent hostages. The thought that Tybalt might have already been moved up there crossed my mind, and was promptly dismissed. Arden’s people couldn’t have moved that fast. If they had, they would have been in the room when Verona and Minna arrived.