LADY ISOLDE WAS still kneeling beside the wounded man when Dera got back; she looked up when Dera opened the door. “Anything?”
Dera shook her head. “Everything’s quiet. Gwion has his guardsmen out doing a search and fanning out from the outer walls—but there’s been no sign of anything amiss, he said.” She nodded at the man on the ground. “Just him.”
The man had fainted for good and all now, it seemed. His eyes were closed, the lids puckered and sunken, and when Dera dropped to kneel by his other side and touched his hand, the skin felt clammy and slack. “Can you help him?”
She already knew the answer, though. She’d been watching Lady Isolde treat wounded soldiers for nigh on three weeks, and she knew what the look on Lady Isolde’s face meant now. It was the tight, clenched look that meant the man they were working on was going to die.
Lady Isolde bit her lip. “See where the arrow’s gone in?” She gestured to the blood smeared shaft just under the man’s ribs. Bright scarlet blood was still pumping out around the wound. “The bleeding gets worse every time his heart beats. He’d only bleed to death faster if I tried to get the arrow out. And it’s pierced his lung, as well. Do you hear that?”
Dera tilted her head and did hear it: the whistling, bubbling sound every time he tried to take a breath.
“So nothing we can do?”
Lady Isolde raised a hand and brushed the man’s greasy, grizzled hair back from his forehead. “Just help him die.”
* * *