The King's Gamma (#Wattys2024)

One Hundred and One

Harley's POV

The first thing I knew was the taste of salt—thick and metallic, crusted on my lips, choking my throat. The second was pain. A deep, throbbing ache that pulsed through every limb, as if my bones had been shattered and hastily glued back together.

I wasn't drowning anymore. That was something.

But I wasn't safe either.

Hands gripped me under the arms, dragging me across wet sand. My worn boots—Hal's boots—scraped over pebbles, my head lolling like a broken doll's. I tried to open my eyes, but the world was a blur of searing light and shadow. A voice muttered something in a language I didn't recognize—guttural, sharp. Dekaten.

Shit.

I'd overshot Trellis entirely.

My fingers twitched toward my hip out of habit, finding only the rough fabric of Hal's patched trousers. No weapons. No hidden blades. Just the clothes on my back and the lingering warmth of the bond in my chest.

Deimios.

I tried to speak, but my tongue was too heavy, my throat raw from seawater and blood. The hands hauling me didn't care. They dumped me onto something hard—wood, maybe a cart—and the impact sent fresh agony lancing through my ribs.

Then darkness swallowed me again.

Consciousness came in fragments.

A spoon pressed to my lips. Something bitter and thick—medicine or poison, I couldn't tell. I swallowed anyway.

A rough hand tilting my head back. A cup of water, lukewarm and tasting of iron.

A voice, low and unfamiliar: "Still breathing, boy?"

They thought I was still Hal. Good.

I tried to answer. The world slipped away before I could.

Days passed like that.

I woke in flashes—sometimes to the sting of a needle stitching my skin, sometimes to the weight of a scratchy wool blanket being pulled over me. Once, to the sharp scent of burning herbs, a healer's trick to ward off infection.

They'd left me in Hal's clothes. The loose linen shirt was stiff with salt, the trousers torn at the knees. My short hair—cropped unevenly with my own dagger weeks ago—was matted with sand and blood. No one had bothered to clean me up. No one had looked close enough to see past the disguise.

A blessing. A danger.

The first time I woke fully, it was to the sound of waves and the creak of wooden beams.

I was in a small, windowless room, the walls rough-hewn stone slick with damp. A single lantern flickered on a barrel, casting long shadows over the straw pallet beneath me. My body still ached, but the worst of the pain had dulled to a bearable throb.

And I wasn't alone.

A figure sat slumped against the far wall, head bowed in sleep. A man—tall even seated, his shoulders broad beneath a salt-stained coat. No weapons in sight, but his hands were calloused, his knuckles scarred. A laborer's hands. A fighter's hands.

I shifted, and the rustle of straw made him stir. His head snapped up, eyes—one clouded with an old injury—locking onto mine.

For a heartbeat, neither of us moved.

Then he smiled—slow, knowing.

"You heal fast for a farm boy."

I kept Hal's voice, rough and young. "Where—?"