Darkness carved in bone

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Ten started with the bandage, touching the clean fabric with his dirty and bloodied fingers, staining and destroying the fabric. The way he handled the bandage made Helen nearly cringe inside. She put aside the thoughts of the prophecy for now and focused on the bleeding man in front of her instead.

"If you don't want that to get infected, I would clean it before I put that on."

He glared at her for a moment before he sighed and put the bandage down. Instead he leaned down and grabbed a handful of snow that he intended on putting on the wound.

"Are you crazy?" Helen asked in shock as she took a step closer to him on instinct, as if she could not stand to watch him put dirty snow on a bleeding wound and stopped his hand rather clumsily with her bound hands. A bolt of something between hot and cold shot up her arm, momentarily startling her as her skin touched his. But she ignored her own body and reactions, she couldn't have such useless reactions right now. She had to help the poor man. "That will only make things worse." Her voice came out a bit harsher than she had intended to.

Ten let go of the snow and just ended up staring at her, his pale green blue eyes intense.

"If you'll let me, I can fix it."

He looked at her with a hard gaze, but after a while he gave her a slight nod. She held her hands up in front of him, asking him with her eyes if he would untie her. He did, although a bit reluctantly. Helen could feel the roughness of his fingers and palms as they graced her skin as he untied her. Her body reacted again with that bolt of cold and warmth across her skin as his skin graced hers, sending shivers across her body. But she again tried to ignore it by focusing on Ten's wound instead.

Helen walked over to her backpack that had been put neatly up against the trunk of the tree. She pulled out her medical supplies from the backpack, gathering the things she needed to fix Ten's wound. But before she could do anything with the wound, she would have to clean it. She pulled out a small metal kettle and took some clean snow from one of the branches and put it in the kettle before she put it over the flames. As soon as the water melted and boiled, she damped a clean cloth. She gestured for him to sit down, and to her surprise he sat as he laid out his cloak and sat down on it without protest. She sat down on her knees next to him on a space he had left for her on the cloak.

"This might sting a bit," she said carefully and put the cloth to the wound.

He instantly withdrew from the cloth, pain obviously overwhelming him, which made Helen give him a look, that suggested that he just had to get over that. She put the cloth to the wound again, and as she managed to get some of the blood away, she saw where the wolf had managed to pierce his skin. She studied the wound closely as she had been trained to do by her mother, searching closely for dirt and other things that could be as deadly as the wound, and blocked out the world around her for a moment. On both sides of his arm had the monster sunk its teeth. Some of the wounds were deep, where the fangs had settled in his skin, others were shallow and needed just cleaning and a bandage.

"This will need stitches," she said. Before she started working on his skin, she made sure the wounds were clean. She took out a small glass vial from her supplies that contained a golden liquid, intending to put it on his wounds, but paused; this was all she had. But if his arm got infected, he could die. And if he was as important to the prophecy as she believed he was, then he couldn't die.

"What is that?" Ten asked as he looked down at the vial.

"It's a liquid that the sun-bees gives us. It makes infections stay out of the wounds."