The Wish Granter (Ravenspire #2)(28)

She hesitated a split second as her arm fell past her shoulder, and then quickly snapped her wrist forward and threw the star with all the strength she had. It flew to the right, and Sebastian gasped as it grazed his side.

“Oh no!” Ari rushed to him as blood soaked his tunic. “Please tell me I didn’t just kill you.”

“You didn’t just kill me.” He peeled up the stained fabric to reveal a long, narrow slash of open skin.

“I’m so sorry.” Her hands hovered uncertainly in the air as he let the tunic fall, covering the wound as it kept seeping blood.

“It’s just a flesh wound,” he said. “I’ve had worse.”

She stepped closer to him, trying to gauge how much blood was on his tunic.

“At least it wasn’t my eye.” The corners of his mouth twitched slightly.

Seriously? Now he was going to (kind of) smile?

“I can’t believe you’re making a joke. I could’ve impaled you in the stomach. Or the heart.” Her eyes widened as the sickening possibilities hit her.

“This is nothing.” Blood dripped off the edge of his tunic. He grasped it and began pulling it over his head.

“I’ll get the medical supplies. Where are they?”

“In the chest beside the stairs that lead to the upper deck.”

The tunic slid over his head, and Ari stared at the muscles that defined his stomach. At the wickedly raised scar that slashed across his chest. At the, stars help her, way his shoulders moved as he rolled the tunic into a ball and pressed it against his wound.

She needed to focus. Preferably on something other than Sebastian. She was turning to fetch the medical supplies when Sebastian twisted at the waist to throw the bloodstained tunic toward the edge of the arena. The sight of his back stopped her. His skin was a mess of crisscrossed scars, some faded to a faint shining white, others still a raised purple-red line that said they’d been inflicted within the last year.

The ache that had started in her chest when he’d said that he didn’t have friends ignited into something that seared her heart and pricked tears against her lashes.

He was her age. Yet some of those scars looked like they’d been there for at least a decade. She’d like to meet the person who could lash the skin from a child’s back, and then she’d like to strap that person to a bale of hay and keep practicing until her throwing star landed dead center.

“Do you have the medical supplies?” he asked as he turned and caught her staring (mortifyingly) openmouthed at him. His body went still, and an expressionless mask slid over his face. His eyes were guarded, as if bracing himself for her unwelcome pity.

Which meant Ari had to talk about something else—anything else—to cover up the awful ache she felt when she looked at him. She took a breath, hoped inspiration would hit, and said the first thing that came to mind.

“You must lift a lot of heavy things. Hay bales maybe? Swords? Multiple swords at once? I don’t know how else you’d get muscles like these. Not that I’m looking at your muscles. I mean, I am, but only because there’s really nothing else but sawdust to look at, and so . . .” Stars above, why was she still talking? “I’m just going to get the medical supplies now, and both of us are going to pretend this entire conversation never happened.”

She hurried to get a bandage and cleansing ointment, and prayed that she wouldn’t say another unbelievably awkward word about muscles or lifting things or basically anything that didn’t have to do with bandaging his wound. When she returned, the guarded look in his eyes had faded, though he was watching her like she was a puzzle he couldn’t quite figure out. She dropped her gaze to the cut on his side, and his body tensed.

She’d have to touch him to put the bandage on, and that would be upsetting to him. It was bad enough that she’d sliced him open with a throwing star. She couldn’t force him to endure her touch as well—and he would choose to endure it because she was the princess. A member of the servant class wouldn’t risk arguing with royalty.

“Here’s the thing,” she said as she moved to his side. “I want to bandage your wound because I can reach it better than you can, and because I feel terrible for hurting you. But we’re friends, remember?”

“So you keep telling me.” His voice was a shade warmer than neutral.

She’d call that a small victory.

“Friends are equals.”

He made a sound in the back of his throat.

“That means friends don’t tell each other what to do and expect obedience,” she said.

“Which is why a weapons master and a princess don’t get to be friends,” he said gently.

It was a setback, and it stung more than Ari thought it should, but she hadn’t survived life as a bastard daughter ignored by her father the king—unable to fit in with either the nobility or the servants until Thad took the throne—without learning how to handle disappointment.

She handed him the ointment. “You’re going to change your mind. I can be pretty relentless. Obviously today’s session is over. I’ll give you a few days to recover before I come back for another one.”

“I don’t need a few days.”

“All right, I’ll be back tomorrow morning,” she said.

“Princess Arianna, if you need help tonight, for any reason, I sleep in a cot in the office attached to the arena,” Sebastian said with quiet intensity, his gaze brushing over her bruised arms. “I’d be surprised if Teague’s men would visit the palace and try anything, but just in case. I’m here.”