Page 38 of Remmen

I couldn’t move. Every survival instinct went out of my head and I stood there frozen.

Mestyn lunged in front of me.

He put his ruined body between me and that mouth, both arms out. At first I thought he was protecting me. Instead, he was reaching for it and speaking in a low, crooning voice like it was a scared dog and not a killing beast.

Behind me, close, Remmen roared my name.

“Anne—”

The gorrel’s head snapped to me at the sound, and it charged.

My legs wouldn’t work. I stood in the open and watched it bear down on me and understood I was about to die.

Then Remmen tore off the tavern step faster than anything that big should move, drove himself between me and it, and caught the whole charge on his own body. The collision slammed up through the ground and into my teeth. They crashed down in a boil of dust, and I lost him in it.

Get up. Please get up.

The dust thinned. He’d locked both hands in the loose hide under its jaw, forcing the teeth off his own face. It bucked and clawed and screamed, and he held it off at arm’s length and gave it nothing, and did not let go.

I lunged toward him. I don’t know what I thought I’d do. I had nothing, no weapon, no reach, and I’d only get us both killed.

I stopped.

My hands hung in front of me, grabbing at air, ready to tend a wound I couldn’t reach. Blood flew off both of them and I couldn’t tell whose. I stood thirty feet away with my useless hands out and could not do one single thing to help him.

“Don’t kill it!” Mestyn threw himself onto Remmen’s back, an arm across his throat, hauling him backward. “It’s mine! We can still cage it⁠—”

For one sick second the three of them tangled into one thrashing mass, and the gorrel dragged a leg back under itself.

Rauf hit Mestyn like a falling wall, tore him off Remmen, and pinned him in the dirt with one arm and all his weight. It bought Remmen the half-second he needed.

Remmen took it.

He shifted his grip, one hand up under the base of that flat skull, the other still fisted in the throat. He set his shoulders. He wrenched. The sound was wet and heavy and final, and the screaming stopped all at once. The legs fell slack. The gorrel dropped out of his hands into the dirt and didn’t move again.

Silence dropped over the square, and I didn’t breathe until I saw him straighten up, still on his feet.

Rauf knelt on Mestyn’s back, grinding his cheek into the dirt, and Mestyn snarled and clawed one hand toward the dead beast anyway. Remmen stood over the carcass, chest heaving, splattered head to foot in blood, but planted on his feet like nothing on the planet could put him down.

He didn’t look at the crowd. He looked at Rauf.

“Get him out of my sight.” His voice was low and gravelly and dead level.

I was already moving.

I didn’t stop to think about who was watching, and everyone was watching, the whole square lined with faces, brides and bulls and the two counselors I worked beside. A man bled in the middle of the road, and he was mine, and I reached him at a dead run and put my hands on him.

“Sit down. Sit down, you enormous idiot, before you fall down.” I was already pulling his arm across my shoulders, already running my hands over him, braced for the wound that had to be under all that blood. Most of it wasn’t his. What was his ran shallow, a set of claw tracks torn down his ribs, bleeding steadily and nowhere near deep enough to do the job. Scrapes on his forearm, bruises coming up dark under the rest. He was battered and winded and mostly whole, and I let out a breath I felt in my knees. “Look at me. Eyes here. Good. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”

Remmen’s eyes focused on me. He leaned into me a fraction, this male three times my size, letting me take a little of his weight in front of the whole settlement.

“Get Otho,” I yelled and hoped someone obeyed.

The order was unnecessary. Otho pushed through, bag slung over his shoulder, and already wrung out. Rauf rolled off him and Otho dropped down in his place. One glance at Mestyn’s belly made him swear.

“Get this fool to the clinic before he bleeds out.” He was already packing the wound, hands moving. “And strap that thigh before you carry him anywhere.”

Two bulls got Mestyn up between them and started him across the square, still swearing at the dead beast over his shoulder.