Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 85553 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 428(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85553 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 428(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
These are strange, though, because one side of the tracks are crisp footprints, and the other side is a smear. Are there animals here that have only one set of feet on one side? Or is it injured and coping? I get to my feet, dusting off my pants and looking around for a likely culprit. I take a step to the side—
—and immediately flail.
In the moonlight and shadows, I misjudge a solid-looking pile of snow, only to have it collapse under my feet. I sink into a crevasse, my hand smacking hard on the ground and the bones crunching as I try to stop my fall. I let out a gasp as white-hot pain lances up my arm and it buckles.
“Vivi!” Skarr races to my side, and he hauls me out of the crevasse.
“I’m fine. I’m fine.” I try to push off his hands as he holds onto me. “Really. It wasn’t that deep of a crevasse.”
“Are you hurt?” His eyes glow in the darkness, scanning over me as if looking for weaknesses.
“No,” I lie, ignoring the pain throbbing in my hand. The last thing I want is to show weakness to this guy, who makes everything a competition. I’m worried he’s going to think an injured Vivi means I can be easily “conquered.” “I said I was fine.”
He frowns in my direction and gestures at my arm. “You say you are fine, but I am reasonably certain that human fingers do not bend in that direction.”
I glance down at my hand…and want to throw up. My pinky is sticking out at a weird, broken angle about halfway down, just past the first knuckle. I must have landed on it trying to break my fall.
Before I can contemplate what I’m doing, I reach out and straighten it.
Bones crack and grind against one another. Hot pain sheets through me and I stagger, whimpering, even as the world gets dark around me. Somewhere nearby, Skarr grunts and puts a supporting arm around my waist.
“Blink it away,” he says in a solid, reassuring voice. “The pain can make you vomit, or pass out, and neither are good for a warrior. Blink it away. Focus on something else. Shall I tell you of the time I bit another gladiator’s fingers off and one got lodged in my throat? I nearly choked on the sands and died. It was quite embarrassing.”
That’s a horrifying story, made all the worse by the casual way he speaks of it. The man’s insane. “Please…please don’t tell me more stories like that.”
“Alas, those are all I have. If it makes you feel better, he punched me in the gut with his good hand and dislodged his fingers from my throat, and I went on to win the battle.”
Why…would that make me feel better?
“Here,” he says, grabbing the edge of his tunic. He rips off a long strip and holds it out to me. “Bind your wounded finger to the one next to it. It will help it heal straight.”
I take the strip from him, but when I touch my hand, pain flares through me again. I shake my head, holding the makeshift bandage back out to him. “You do it for me. I don’t think I can.”
“You can,” he reassures me. “And you will do it yourself, because you are strong and capable…and because if I do it wrong, you will blame me.”
Despite the pain, a laugh huffs out of me. He’s not wrong. I eye my trembling hand and hold the strip over it. “Distract me, then.”
“I once fought a full-blooded ssethri male,” he says immediately. “And I never want to do so again.”
“Why?” I ask even as I take deep, steadying breaths, preparing myself to wrap my fingers.
“He was a good fighter,” Skarr muses. “That was not the problem. I grabbed him by his tail, because it seemed like a smart way to use leverage, and it fell off. Did you know that ssethri can discard their tails? I did not, and I found out the hard way. So there I am, holding a useless tail while he scrambles across the sands to get to the weapons laid out for us.”
“But…you…won?” I begin to wrap my hand, whimpering through the pain. I want to stop, but I know I can’t. The pain is awful, but I also know there’s no other choice. I can’t have a bad hand in this landscape. I need to be able to use all of my limbs. I need my finger to heal properly.
Skarr makes a scolding noise in his throat, his gaze on my hand. “Do not ruin the story for yourself. Let me continue. Good, keep wrapping.”
Through a haze of pain, I wrap my pinky to my good ring finger, and all the while Skarr continues with some story about fighting a gladiator with a snout and razor-sharp teeth and a tough hide. How they were neck and neck, trading blows and breaking weapons.