The Alpha's Concubine (Historical Shifter Romance) (64 page)

Through the haze of pain, she saw Khelt's face, that of a man once more, staring at her in disbelief. He knelt a few paces away, shoulders trembling as he witnessed what he had done. Of all the burdens the alpha had managed to endure unflinchingly, this was not one of them. The look on his face was that of a ruined man, one who had become the cause of his own undoing.

Netya closed her eyes, lifting a hand to try and reach out to him. The pain in her side was dull and deep, and the numbness of the cold made it seem very distant.

"Now do you see?" she whispered as the alpha crawled over to grasp her hand.

"Save your breath, girl," Adel hushed her, struggling to tear open her clothing and get at the wound. "Khelt, press your hands on her side, here!"

Netya ignored her, shivering as the throb of her injury grew even dimmer. "Both of you. This is all your hate for one another has wrought."

Khelt looked up at the den mother. The anger that had consumed them moments earlier had burned away to nothing. Instead there was only terrible, harrowing despair.

"I see," he whispered.

—
47—

The Waning Sun

Caspian was still attempting to gather the scattered pack back together when Khelt and Adel reappeared out of the darkness. The group were fearful and exhausted, and with their leaders missing they threatened to fall apart entirely. Bringing them to a halt in a broad cranny sheltered by a line of trees, Caspian did his best to make sure everyone was accounted for.

The dim worry that he had not yet counted Netya among their number grew, but it only flared to life when he saw her limp body cradled in Khelt's arms. Adel huddled by her apprentice's side, clutching her hand and muttering under her breath as she leant up against the alpha. The pair of them were ragged and bloody, barely even able to hold themselves up.

"What happened?!" Caspian exclaimed as he dashed forward to meet them, eyes fixed on Netya's pale face. A torn piece of hide bound another wad of blood-soaked clothing to her body just above the hip. Her chest rose and fell gently, but her breathing was shallow.

"Never forgive me," Khelt murmured, unable to meet his friend's gaze. "Never forgive me for this."

Caspian looked to Adel. The den mother only shook her head, features contorted with pain, and called for her seers.

"We may have undone the very thing we desired to protect," she said. "Try to start a fire, and put up a tent covering to shelter her. She will die if her blood does not stop flowing soon."

He had taken his eyes off her. She had slipped away into the storm, and he had not been there to protect her. Caspian felt the pounding of his heart building in his ears, fear stealing away his breath as he stared at Netya's beautiful face, the soft locks of her black hair drifting in the wind, the wooden pendant still resting upon her breast.

It took the help of two seers to ease Netya out of Khelt's grasp. The arm he had been using to support her legs seemed to pain him greatly every time he tried to move it, but he refused any aid, sitting silently by himself as Adel and the others tended the wounded girl. The den mother's hands shook as she called for medicine and the tools she would need to close Netya's wound. The back of her fur gown was split open, and blood dripped from the gashed flesh beneath. It was not long before she began to sway and falter. Ignoring her weak protests, Caspian pulled her away and made her lie down while Selo saw to her wounds.

The other seers stepped in to take care of Netya, the rest of the pack working to erect a barrier using their tent poles and hide covers that would give them a little more shelter from the wind. With the snow still building up around them, the group huddled in their cranny in the side of the valley, cold and anxious, stranded in the middle of the blizzard.

Piles of furred bodies huddled together for warmth, but Caspian could not join them. He and Fern sat up all night at Netya's side, long after the seers had finished doing all they were able. Once more, any sense of impropriety he might have felt at revealing his feelings for another man's woman vanished. He had been a fool to think they would dim with time. Whenever Netya was at risk, whenever danger threatened her, he could not stand by and watch from afar. The world would become so much darker without her in it. Losing her would mean losing too much. They would not sit up and talk again. She would not ask her curious questions for him to answer. They would make no more wood burnings together. He would never feel the warm, honest touch of her lips.

Khelt sat apart from the camp, his head bowed as he faced the storm alone. For the first time in many years, Caspian had no desire to reach out to him. No one had spoken of what had happened, but he knew. The beasts inside had come loose, and Netya had been caught in the middle. He tried to tell himself that his friend was a good man, that it had been an accident, a moment of blind impulse. The calm, balanced reasoning that Caspian prided himself on told him that Khelt was not to blame, and yet all the reasoning in the world could do nothing to still his heart that night.

You were supposed to be the one protecting her,
he thought. Anger might have made him demand answers from Khelt, but he could not bring himself to leave Netya alone.

Devotion to the spirits had never been something he prided himself on, but as he squeezed his love's hand he implored them to take the essence of his own life and share it with her. If there was even a small chance they heard him, he did not want to jeopardise it by letting go.

Netya's body lived, but she did not return to the world of the living. Wounds that one of their own kind might have overcome within a few days, Adel said, might trouble one of the Sun People for weeks. Caspian carried her himself as they filed their way back down the valley, trudging through the deep snow back the way they had come. Khelt did not lead the way any more. He walked at the back of the column, refusing anyone's aid as he clutched his wounded arm to his side.

The weather refused to lighten, but Adel pushed them on just as hard as Khelt had done the previous day. Another night spent out in the cold, and Netya might not be the only one who did not live to see dawn.

Caspian's spirit felt caught in the same place as Netya's, trapped somewhere between one world and the next. Everything seemed distant to him, even the chill of the wind and the voices of those around him. He could not acknowledge the waking world until the girl cradled in his arms opened her eyes. The furs he had bundled around her body to keep her warm added an exhausting weight to his burden, but he bore it without thinking. As he forced his legs to keep moving through the snow, the sight of her face nestled beneath the hood of her wolfskin kept a thread of hope in his world, and he clung on to it. A little spark of the sun that had somehow crept into their pack. She thought differently. She acted differently. That was why he loved her.

Regathering some of the supplies they had abandoned the previous day, the pack finally emerged from the valley at nightfall. Snow had dusted even the land at the edge of the mountains, but it was not the icy blizzard that had threatened to swamp them the night before. Day by day they travelled, meandering back to the lowlands bordering the plains, before halting their progress entirely. Still Netya did not wake, and Khelt did not seem to know where to lead them next.

The nervous discord among the pack grew, but Caspian barely cared to indulge it. When Netya began crying out in her sleep, her body writhing and shivering with pain, he felt his heart was on the verge of splitting apart.

"She is getting worse," he said to Adel as she tried to soothe Netya with a few drops of strong herbal tea.

"Her wound is healing, but it is not the wound that pains her," the den mother replied. She looked at him, eyes lined with the marks of her own sleepless nights, and swallowed the grief in her throat before speaking again. "The poison of our kind has taken hold of her body. It burns strong beneath her skin, and it grows worse by the day. The pain will soon become too great, and she will die."

"You must heal her. Surely you can."

Adel shook her head. "I cannot. I am not skilled in the medicine of the Sun People. Many of the plants I would use to purge toxins from her body might kill one of her kind. I have little faith they would even work. This sickness is deep and wicked."

"Then what of her own people? If anyone would know of a cure, surely it would be them. They had an antidote to the nightwood berries when we believed there was none."

"This is no ailment born of a plant," Adel said. "From what she told me, her people are not great healers. No seers or shamans hail from her village. Besides, I fear they would sooner see her dead now than offer their aid."

Caspian raked a hand through his hair, desperation racing in circles through his mind. She could not be abandoned to the pain of such a death. Not Netya. Not such a cruel fate for her.

"The North People," he said suddenly. "They are of her kind. Their shamans would know which medicines might heal her."

"It would take days to reach them," the den mother replied. "And it is a slim hope."

"Days for the whole pack, perhaps, but not for a fast wolf. Their western village is not so far from here."

Khelt must have been listening from his seat nearby, for at the mention of the North People he rose to his feet and approached them. "I will take her," he said, his voice solemn and subdued, as it had been ever since the night in the valley. "If there is any hope of me undoing what I have wrought, I must try."

"It is not your place to take such a thing back," Caspian said, standing up to meet him. He locked eyes with his friend, the wills of both wolves struggling against one another for a moment. For a love they both shared, for a conflict that had long been held in check, and for the duty of shouldering such a responsibility rather than entrusting it to another.

Caspian placed a hand on the alpha's shoulder, and pressed him back down into a sitting position. "I would run until the life left my body, if it meant saving her," he said softly.

Khelt's eyes fell, the fingers of his injured arm clenching into a fist. After a long pause, he nodded. "You were always faster."

"And you more stubborn. The pack needs leadership. Stay, and prove to them you are still worthy of being called Alpha."

"It will be difficult carrying her when she is like this," Adel said. "Her wound may open up again."

"The sickness will claim her life faster than an open wound. How many days do you think she has left?"

Adel shook her head. "I have only seen this once before. That man died within a week."

A sickening feeling crept into Caspian's stomach. He did not want to believe it might already be too late for Netya. "Bind her to my back, tightly. We cannot wait any longer."

He shook his head in refusal at the offer of any food or supplies as Adel and a few others rested Netya's limp body upon his wolf's back. Anything else was pointless weight to carry, and he would not be stopping along the way. He would run until he reached the North People, or until his body broke.

They bound Netya's hands around his neck and her hips to his midsection. He could feel her shallow breath against his fur. The distant pulse of her heart pattered against his back. A soft groan left her lips, and her knees tightened against his sides. If she was even dimly aware of what was happening, he hoped she knew to hold on.

The cords of grass and animal sinew were painfully tight against his body, but he did not protest or give any indication that he wanted them loosened. If Netya slipped from his back at any point, he would be unable to carry her properly the rest of the way. He waited for no farewells or talk of when he might return. As soon as the knots were in place, he ran.

It tormented him to hear Netya's soft noises of pain as his shoulders jolted and jarred beneath her, but he could not afford to take a gentler pace. He was forced to shift position constantly, making sure she never began to slip or slide. The grass tore beneath his paws, throwing up clods of loose earth as he ran. At first he sprinted as fast as his legs could go, making a tiny speck of the pack's encampment in the distance behind him. He ran as he had never run before, knowing that every tug and strain on his sore muscles was a small piece of his life he could channel into Netya's one chance at survival.

The passionate energy of his first dash took him far, but he realised he would collapse long before reaching the North People's territory if he did not pace himself. It fought against every impulse in his wolf's body to slow down. He refused to settle into the brisk trot he knew he would be able to maintain all day long. It might kill him to push himself so hard, but it was not his own life that mattered.

Easing off his pace only a little, he ran hard all day long, streaking through the scrublands and back into the long grass of the plains. Ground that had taken the pack many days to traverse sped by him in a matter of hours, making his way north and east in the direction of the village he remembered on the borders of the great forest.

The sun was dipping below the horizon by the time he reached the rocky hunting grounds that were home to mountain cats and other hostile predators. With Netya on his back and his body already aching for rest, there was no way he could fight off any sort of attack, nor was there time for caution. He relied on his speed to carry him through the night, skirting many of the telltale crags he knew were likely to house dens of wild animals. Still, he could not avoid all of them, and before long he was traversing territory that had been freshly marked with the acrid stench of whichever nearby feline pride had claimed it.