Page 53 of Keldori By Daybreak

“Is that good or bad?”

“I’m not sure—” Ciarán broke off in a grunt, and I tried to pass him what was left in my bottle of Skal. “What’s that supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But you’re hurt and tired, and it’s magick, so…”

I trailed off with a wild gesture. He replied with a half smile and took the bottle.

Sticks clattered to the rocks beside me, and I looked up to see the onchú retreating.

“Does it want to play fetch?” I picked up one of the sticks and turned it in my hand.

“I think it wants you to light a fire before I die of cold,” Ciarán said. “Unless your kisses can heal hypothermia as well?”

“Wasn’t a kiss.” I went to work stacking the sticks the way I’d seen Mom pile them in our backyard fire pit.

“Our lips touched.”

“I don’t know about Skalterra, but in Keldori, when we kiss, we don’t vomit into each other’s mouths.”

“It’s not really the custom here, either, I’ll admit. Besides, Grimguards aren’t supposed to kiss Saergrims.”

“Has that been an issue in the last four hundred years?” I snorted. “With the one Saergrim frozen in a glacier?”

“No, it’s been a relatively easy rule to follow actually.”

“You’re very welcome for that.”

I took back the Skal bottle, helped myself to a sip, and let the magick pool beneath the skin of my palm. A blue flame sparked to life, and I held it against the piled sticks until they burned blue too.

“You really shouldn’t do that without goggles,” Ciarán chided me.

“I’m fine. Also, your clothes are wet.” I cleared my throat to hide the nervous hitch to my voice. “Even with a fire, you won’t be able to get warm with them—”

Ciarán gave a low laugh, and I looked back in time to see his eyes shift back to orange and black. Steam hissed and rose off his cloak, clothing, and leather armor in white wisps.

“Don’t worry about that, Blue. You will have to take my armor off, though. That rotsbane got me good.”

I grimaced and shifted in the rocks to get closer to his side. I balled my own cloak up to shove under his head as a pillow and then went to work unbuckling his armor. He hissed through his teeth as I pulled it away and lifted his tunic.

The rotsbane had got him good, and I tried not to wince at the four ghastly wounds carved into his flank. The sheer amount of torn skin dyed red by congealed blood made it hard to tell exactly what I was looking at.

“That bad?” he asked.

“Nothing Sorcha wouldn’t be able to fix, I’m sure.” I hovered a hand over the wounds. I’d practiced healing magick on myself the last couple of days, but healing myself would be different from healing Ciarán. I’d been using my own pain to guide my magick to where it was needed the most. With Ciarán, I’d be working in the dark.

Unless…

“Blue?” Ciarán’s voice had a nervous lilt to it.

“I’m thinking.”

“That’s what’s making me nervous.”

I held a finger against his lips and leaned closer to better inspect his injury.

A proper doctor would know and understand the layers of tissue the rotsbane had cut into, but the injury didn’t look that deep. In Keldori, he probably would’ve gotten some nasty stitches, but unless there was some hidden internal wound I couldn’t see, he wouldn’t have needed anything as extreme as surgery.

I didn’t need a medical degree to fix this. What I’d learned in Sport Medicine would suffice.