Bitter Harvest

The first thing I noticed about the man bleeding out in the dirt was that he was trying to hide it.

Most people, when they've got a hole in their side and their life leaking into the soil, they scream. They beg. They clutch at whoever's passing and promise God anything. This one had dragged himself behind the blacksmith's woodpile and pressed a folded shirt against the wound like he was late for supper and didn't want to make a fuss.

I almost walked past him. I'd been walking past a lot of things lately.

"You're bleeding," I said.

He opened one eye. Gray. The other stayed shut, crusted with something darker than sleep. "Astute."

"Astute," I repeated. "You're dying in a stranger's firewood and your last words are going to be *astute*."

"Not my last words." He shifted, and the shirt soaked through a little more. "I've got a whole speech prepared. It's long. You'd hate it."

I knelt because my hands were already moving before I told them to, pulling the satchel off my shoulder, the familiar weight of it settling against my hip. The smell hit me then. Iron and rot, the sweetish edge that means infection's already set in. Whoever knifed him hadn't done it clean.

"Move your hand."

"No."

"I need to see it."

"I need you to keep walking." He said it without heat. Like he was doing me a favor. "You don't want to be seen helping me. Trust me on that."

I looked at his face properly for the first time. Young, younger than the gray eye suggested, maybe twenty-five. Sharp cheekbones, a nose that had been broken at least twice, and a mouth that was trying very hard not to wince. A bruise bloomed purple along his jaw. Not from the knife. From a fist, maybe, or the flat of a blade.

"I'm a healer," I said. "And you're going to lose consciousness in about four minutes, and then you'll bleed out in about ten, and then the blacksmith's going to find a corpse in his woodpile and he'll be cross about it. Let me see."

Something moved behind his eye. Not gratitude. Calculation. He was weighing me, I realized, even now, even here, deciding whether I was a threat or a tool. That's the kind of man he was. I'd met a few. They never ended well.

"Four minutes," he said finally. "You're generous."

He moved his hand.

The wound was bad. A blade had gone in below his ribs and twisted on the way out, and someone had packed it with cloth that wasn't clean. I'd seen worse. I'd seen worse on people I loved, which is a different kind of worse, but I pushed that thought down where I keep it and got to work.

"This is going to hurt."

"It already hurts."

"Good. Then you know the difference." I uncorked the yarrow tincture and poured it straight into the wound.

He didn't scream. He made a sound low in his chest, a grinding, animal noise, and his hand shot out and grabbed my wrist hard enough to bruise. His grip was strong for a dying man. I let him hold on. Sometimes that's the only thing you can give.

"Breathe," I said. "Out through the nose. You're doing fine."

"I'm doing *terribly*."

"You're doing fine for a man who should be dead. That's the standard I'm working with."

The corner of his mouth twitched. Almost a smile. Then the pain took it back, and he breathed the way I told him, and I packed the wound with a poultice of comfrey and honey and bound it tight with strips torn from the cleanest part of his own shirt, which was a small cruelty I didn't mention.

When I finished, he let go of my wrist. There were red marks where his fingers had been. I flexed my hand, felt the old crescent scar on my palm pull tight, and stood up.

"You'll live," I said. "Probably. If you don't do anything stupid for a week, and if you find someone to change that dressing tomorrow, and if whatever's chasing you doesn't find you first."

He sat up slowly, one hand braced against the woodpile, and looked at me with both eyes now. The swollen one had opened enough to show the same gray. "And if it does?"

"Then you'll die. But you'll die with a clean wound, which is more than most men manage."

He laughed. It was a broken sound, more cough than laugh, but it was real. "You're strange."

"I've been told."

"What's your name?"

I should have lied. I usually did, in towns like this, where names traveled and I didn't want to be found. But he'd held my wrist and not screamed, and there was something in the way he looked at me, like he'd already decided I was worth remembering, that made lying feel pointless.

"Sage."

"Sage." He tested it. "Like the herb."

"Like the herb."

"Fitting." He got his feet under him, swayed, caught himself on the woodpile. "I'm Cassian. And I owe you."

"You don't owe me anything. I did it because I'm a healer and you were bleeding. That's the whole transaction."

"That's not how debts work."

"It's how mine do." I shouldered my satchel. "There's an inn two streets over. The woman who runs it, Mira, she won't ask questions if you pay upfront. Go there. Sleep. Don't move tomorrow."

I turned to leave. That's what I do. I fix what's in front of me and I walk away, because staying is how you get attached and attached is how you get people killed. I'd learned that lesson in a village a long way from here, and I'd been paying for it ever since.

"Wait."

I stopped. Didn't turn.

"The men who did this," Cassian said. "They're going to come looking. They'll ask in every town. They'll show my face around. And when they get to this one, someone's going to remember a healer with ash-brown hair and a green-eyed stare who helped a stranger behind the blacksmith's shop."

My stomach dropped. I turned around.

"You're saying I should have let you die."

"I'm saying you made a choice." He was standing now, mostly, one hand still on the woodpile. The bandage was already spotting through. "And I'm telling you what it costs, because you didn't ask before you paid it. That's all. I'm not asking you to do anything else."

"That's very noble of you."

"It's not noble. It's just true." He looked at me the way he had before, weighing. "You could come with me. Two people draw less attention than one. And I've got a horse."

"I don't want your horse."

"You want to live."

I did. That was the problem. I'd spent three years not wanting much of anything, and here was this stranger with his gray eyes and his broken nose telling me I'd just put a target on my back, and the worst part, the part that made me angry, was that he was right.

"I don't even know you," I said.

"No," Cassian agreed. "But you know my blood's on your hands now. That's a kind of knowing."

Somewhere down the street, a dog started barking. The light was going gold. I had a bed waiting for me at the other inn, the cheap one on the edge of town, and a plan to leave in the morning, and none of it mattered anymore because a man with a knife wound had just told me the truth and I couldn't unhear it.

"One night," I said. "I'll see you to the next town. Then we're even."

"Even," he said.

He was lying. I knew it when he said it, and I think he knew that I knew, and neither of us said anything about it. That's how these things start, I've learned. Not with a promise. With a lie you both agree to believe.

I picked up my satchel and walked toward him, and the sun went down behind the blacksmith's roof, and somewhere behind us, in the dark, men with knives were already asking questions.