Sara Larson - Defy

It was Tanoori, lying in a puddle of blood, an arrow protruding from her chest.

IS SHE DEAD?” I dropped to my knees beside Rylan.

“Not yet. She’s breathing, but just barely.” He had his hand pressed around the wound, trying to stop the bleeding. “We’ve got to get this arrow out.”

It was embedded on the right side of her chest, closer to her shoulder than her belly. All we could hope was that it hadn’t punctured her lung. At least it was far away from her heart.

“Move out of the way.” Suddenly, Lisbet was there, pushing Rylan and me aside. She held her hand above the wound and closed her eyes, concentrating. Finally, she looked up at us. “After we remove the arrow, I will need some time to work on her. But she should live.”

Relief poured through me. Though I wasn’t sure how I felt about Tanoori anymore, I didn’t want her to die.

“Here, take this to stop the bleeding once we pull it out.” Rylan yanked his tunic over his head, and handed it to Lisbet.

He knelt back down beside us and I forced myself to look away from his lean, muscular torso. I helped Lisbet roll Tanoori onto her side, to make sure the arrow hadn’t passed all the way through her body.

“We can’t pull it out here; she’ll bleed to death. We’ll have to break the shaft and then remove the arrow when I have time to work on her,” Lisbet said.

We held her while Rylan got a grip on the arrow shaft. He exhaled and then snapped it off as close to her body as he could.

Lisbet immediately took the shirt Rylan had given her and pressed it around the wound.

The storm that had been hanging over us all day finally broke. Raindrops made little dots of darker soil all around us. Slowly at first, then it began to pick up speed as Lisbet hunched over Tanoori, one hand pressing the shirt into her chest and the other hovering above her body, shaking.

“We have to leave now, before they come back with reinforcements. There isn’t time to do anything for her.”

I looked up to see Eljin standing above us, staring down at Tanoori, his expression inscrutable.

“If she can’t walk, she gets left behind.” Eljin turned on his heel and walked away, leaving us crouched around Tanoori, staring at him in disbelief.

“We can’t leave her here to die.” I looked at Rylan, but his expression was grim.

“He’s right. We do need to leave, or else we might all die.”

“They were terrified of Eljin. They won’t dare come back,” I argued.

“He’s obviously not willing to take that chance.”

“How quickly can you heal her?” I turned to Lisbet.

“Not fast enough. The wound is bad — and we haven’t even removed the arrow yet.”

My chest ached with anger and desperation. Was that it, then? She escaped the hangman’s noose, only to be shot down in the jungle by her own country’s arrow?

“I’m not leaving her here. I’ll carry her on my back if I have to.” I bent down and began to tear the bottom edge of her tunic off.

“Alex, what are you doing?” I heard Damian’s voice but ignored him, continuing to tear the fabric until I had a long strip to bind her wound with. “What is she doing?”

“She’s apparently going to single-handedly save the girl who tried to kill you, my lord,” Rylan responded.

“She also tried to kill Alex the other night, if I’m not mistaken.”

One of them sighed, but I didn’t look up to see who. Instead, I took the strip of cloth and tied it over her shoulder and across the wound, with Rylan’s ruined tunic underneath it, pressed against her chest. Lisbet watched me silently, her expression indecipherable.

When I finished the makeshift bandage, I gently pulled Tanoori up off the ground. She was dead weight, and I grunted with the effort of holding her up. The rain fell harder and harder, making everything that much more difficult.

“We can’t carry her on our backs,” Rylan said as he crouched down to help me prop her up.

“Then what should we do?” I cried. “Leave her here to die? To be eaten by an animal?”

“If we could make some sort of sling or stretcher, then we could all carry her together,” Damian said.

I looked up at him in surprise. His expression was guarded. I couldn’t imagine what he thought as he stared down at us, trying to help the girl who’d attempted to murder him.

“If you want her to live, she needs to be kept as still as possible, so she doesn’t lose more blood than she has to. Even if you are able to transport her to the next stopping place, she may not make it long enough for me to heal her.” Lisbet looked at me as she spoke.

“We have to at least try,” I responded.

Lisbet nodded and then stood up. “Give me one of your bedrolls. If we use the poles from a tent, we could make a stretcher to transport her.”

Damian shrugged the pack that held his bedroll off his shoulders and handed the bedroll to her. Rylan found his pack, which held our rolled-up tent and the broken-down poles in it. The poles were lightweight and made to pull apart into pieces for traveling. I hoped they’d be able to sustain Tanoori’s weight.

“What are you doing ?” someone shouted. I glanced up to see Eljin storming back over to us, his eyes furious above his ever-present mask. “I told you we had to leave! If you don’t come right now, I will kill you all and leave you with her.”

Lisbet ignored him and kept working, deftly tying the bedroll to the poles we’d laid out in a rectangle.

“No one else will be dying today,” Damian said, his voice cold. “Either help us, or go. We’ll catch up if we have to.”

“You expect me to leave you here?” Eljin’s eyebrows lifted above his mask. “To assume you’ll come find us, rather than turn around and head back?”

“We have no supplies, no map. We would most likely die if we tried to return to the palace on our own.” Damian stood up and folded his arms across his chest.

While they argued, we finished attaching the bedroll to the tent poles, and Rylan and I moved over to Tanoori.

“Move her on three,” he said.

I nodded.

“One. Two. Three .”

We both heaved, and lifted her onto the stretcher.

“There, you see? It’s done.” Damian gestured to where she now lay on the bedroll, deadly pale and soaked. The rain running off her body was crimson from her blood.

“If she slows you down, I will have no choice but to make you leave her.”

“She won’t,” I replied, meeting Eljin’s gaze from where I crouched on the ground.

He shook his head and turned away.

We each took a side of the stretcher and hefted her up into the air. Rylan was across from me and Damian was in front. Lisbet tried to help across from Damian, but she wasn’t nearly as strong as me, let alone the two men. I was afraid she’d tire soon, leaving Damian to shoulder half the stretcher alone.

Sheets of water poured down from the roiling black clouds above as we moved forward, across the stream and into the trees where the army had come from. No one was there anymore, other than Eljin and his men and us.

“You’d better appreciate this,” I muttered under my breath as thunder cracked overhead.

When we finally stopped for the night, the storm had quit, but the clouds remained, murky and startlingly close to the earth, encasing the tops of the trees in their dark, swirling depths.

My whole body hurt when we set Tanoori on the ground. My back was one huge knot of pain and my right arm cramped from moving out of the same position after hours of holding up the stretcher. Jax had been farther ahead in line, and he and some of the other men had already set up Lisbet’s tent. We moved Tanoori inside, and Lisbet immediately began to hover over her.