The final canine near the woman had taken her stick in its jaws, and while it tried to wrestle the wood out of her hands, she struck it on the head with her fist. She made a move to strike it again, and right as I stabbed the second wolf Albus was fighting, the girl’s canine released the stick to snap its teeth around her wrist. She screamed in pain, but smashed the stick so hard across the wolf’s snout that the wood splintered. The wolf yelped and let go of her, and before it could recover and lunge to attack her again, I jumped onto its back and buried my blade in its heart.
“Princess!” I exclaimed, turning to the woman while I shoved my dagger back into its sheath. There was still so much panic in my chest that I couldn’t stop to breathe, but I took in her condition. Blood had already run down her wrist to her hand, and was dripping off her fingertips into the snow. She was smaller than I’d imagined, at least five inches shorter than me, and she was completely nude. In defending herself she’d let fall the sleeping fur, my sleeping fur, which she’d wrapped around her shoulders. “Your wrist. Your feet!”
In a rush, I returned the blanket to her shoulders. Then, knowing she could get frostbite if she kept her bare feet in the snow, I scooped her up and started running back toward my camp. When I got there, I dropped her onto the other sleeping furs. My mind was in such a state of agitation that I didn’t know whether to tend first to her wrist or her feet. The fire had died overnight, and now it was nothing but glowing embers, but she needed warmth. Stop the bleeding first, I thought, and, falling to her side, I took her arm in my hands.
She pulled it away. “Tend Albus,” she instructed, and I would’ve been surprised at the worried tone to her voice if that didn’t further my panic.
Albus! He’d followed us back, and was lying in the snow nearby already licking his wounds. I flung myself to the dog, and my hands ran over every inch of him to assess the damage. He had bites all over his body, but though they were all bloody, most of them had already stopped seeping. The only one that looked serious was an open gash down the left side of his muzzle. Given its location, it wasn’t a wound I could bind, but it was as good a spot as any. A dog’s muzzle never took to bleeding long.
Comforted about his condition, I left Albus to take care of himself, and dashed back to the Princess. She’d taken to cleaning off her arm with snow, but every time she wiped away the blood, it was replaced by a fresh flow.
“Is it broken?” I asked, knowing a wolf’s jaws were easily capable of such a thing.
I was finally beginning to breathe again, so I knelt at her side to examine the bites more closely. She shook her head in response to my question, wincing a little when I touched near the lacerations. It was fortunate that I always kept supplies in my saddlebags for emergencies like this. Occasionally, Albus got himself slashed by a deer’s antlers, or I underestimated the amount of fight left in a wounded animal. It wasn’t just binding injuries I’d become good at, but I’d taught myself to stitch them too, even if the end result wasn’t as sophisticated as a surgeon’s would be.
“What are you doing out here?” I reached behind the princess to pull my things out of the saddlebag—the surgeon’s needle and silk thread, that had cost me an arm and a leg’s worth of pelts; the roll of covering linen; and the decanter of antiseptic I’d brewed myself from herbs. “Why’d you leave your clothes behind? Are you trying to lose your toes?” Maybe it was the muddled rush of fear and fight, but until my last question, I’d forgotten who I was talking to, and I’d abandoned the necessary formalities. Now, my cheeks flushed red, and I bowed my head. “My deepest apologies, Princess. I’ve spoken too plainly.”
She was quiet for a few moments, but I was too afraid to look up and see whether or not I’d offended her. “Surely you know how I’ve come here,” she said eventually. I hesitated insecurely, but then, seeing as she wasn’t upset, I reached for the decanter. She watched me pour some over her wounds, only wincing again just slightly. I thought she might be waiting for a response, but I didn’t know what to say. “I’ve been with you the last couple of days.”
I’d put the bottle back and was reaching for my needle and thread, but when she said that, my movements slowed with concentration. I was still too unsure to look her in the eyes, worried it might be brazen, but I squinted at the sleeping furs thoughtfully. The tone of her voice was so familiar. Soft and sweet, like the agreeable chiming of a melodic bell, reminiscent of my tiny wisp.
“The potion worked then, Princess?” I asked, trying to remain calm while I threaded my needle.
“Yes.” I could hear a smile in her voice when she answered, but when I passed the first stroke of the needle through her skin she whimpered, and her other hand landed on my shoulder to squeeze it for a diversion from the pain. “I hadn’t thought it did when you used it last night, but then I woke up this morning with you, and I had flesh again.”
She sucked in a pained breath of air the next time her hand tightened on my shoulder. In the momentary pause of her explanation, my eyes passed over what was exposed of her bare body, still wrapped in the fur blanket, and at thinking that’s how she’d woken up, with me, my cheeks tinted a dark red once more.
“The witch didn’t tell me I wouldn’t be able to change back on my own,” she said. “I tried to yesterday, but I couldn’t. I had begun to worry I’d be stuck like that forever.” I moved on to the next tooth mark with a nod. “I thought I could run to the village before you woke and steal any clothing someone left on a line, but the wolves…”
I wanted to ask if she’d have come back after finding some clothes, or whether she’d have been on the run again, but I’d never spoken to royalty so freely. I didn’t know my boundaries. “You’re safe now, Princess,” I told her in assurance, and nodded toward my dog, “thanks to Albus.”
“And you,” she added. She took in an inquisitive breath, and bent over enough to get in my line of sight. “Who are you?”
I straightened up to meet her gaze, because that’s what she wanted. The painting in her chambers was nothing compared to her true beauty. It could never have captured the brilliant twinkle of her deep blue eyes, or the perfect shine of her dark hair, or the energetic glow of her russet complexion. I felt my face burn all over again, and I resumed concentrating on my work.
I hadn’t mentioned my name to the wisp because it couldn’t have said it, so I answered her question with, “My name is Kiena, Princess.”
“Of house?” she asked.
“No house.”
“Right, you said your father was a soldier, and then a traitor,” she recalled, removing her hand from my shoulder now that I’d finished her stitches. “Who did he fight for?”
“My father fought for Lord Tithian, Princess,” I answered, and in a way far more gentle than I bound any of Albus’s or my own wounds, I began to wrap linen around the princess’s wrist. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that she recognized the name, even though both of us had just been infants at the time. Lord Tithian’s township, Ocnellio, had been decimated after my father turned. It was a rough time during the war; Valens had been crippled by civil unrest that King Hazlitt was supposed to fix. No more Ocnellio, no more house Tithian. “My mother’s just a cottager. Myself, a hunter.”
I didn’t tell her that my father was the infamous traitor who started the rebellion that added to that civil unrest. That he fought to keep King Hazlitt from the throne for reasons he never told my mother, and thus she’d never told me.