When he lifted the dagger out of the paste, he flicked his finger again to spin the crystal hilt, and the glowing in the crystals of the blade faded.
He removed the mug from the heat and set it between them. Then he reached back and grasped the dart gun still sticking out of his back. He yanked it out with one hard pull. His expression barely twitched, though every muscle in his body tensed.
Blood spilled from the wound, staining the leather where the lacquer had cracked from the impact of the makeshift weapon. He dropped the broken blowgun and unlaced his armor, shucking off one pauldron with a shift of his shoulder, while dragging the other off with his opposing hand.
“Do you want help?” She lifted her hands, showing them to him before pointing to his bleeding wound.
His gaze fell on her scorched palm, his brow ridges coming together. “Iv-olar zula.”
Ignoring her offer, or perhaps not understanding it, he unlaced his armor breastplate, then shucked off the damaged pieces as easily as she might drop a button-up shirt off her shoulders.
The hard, ridged scales of his back had been penetrated despite their apparent durability, and his blood poured rapidly now from his wound, as red as her own. His movements only made the bleeding worse. She wanted to offer to help again, but figured it would be wasting time and might draw his attention away from tending to his own wounds while he tried to understand her.
Instead, she watched with interest and concern as he opened a pouch he’d taken from a cleverly concealed pocket in his armor, hidden beneath one of the layered strips on his greaves. He pulled a large pinch of dried moss from it, then dipped it in the cooling paste, coating the moss. Then he reached back and stuffed the moss into the wound, contorting his body in a way that would be painful for a human spine.
As she stared at the stuffed wound, where the blood immediately began to clot, she noticed movement by the bite in his neck. Glowing ichor mixed with his blood at the holes in his neck, and at first she didn’t see the fat, grublike worm that crawled out from beneath his skin, because it still glowed weakly, blending into the ichor. It was small—a little larger than the tip of her pinkie—and it moved sluggishly, dragging a trail of blood and ichor as it crawled down his neck to the heavy scales of his back.
Sarah yelped and jerked away, instinctively horrified and disgusted.
Jotaha noticed her reaction, his head spines fully erecting as he reached back and gently plucked the glow worm off his upper back. He cradled it between his fingers as he brought it around to his front, looking down at it with sagging shoulders. His head spines also dipped along with his upper body, and his body language spoke of sadness.
“Vaelin rin itov Zigaro Yan, chanu zayul.” He carefully placed the worm, which had stopped moving, onto a glowing stone. It sizzled briefly, before crisping up, then disintegrating.
Though his words were incomprehensible, his tone sounded solemn, rather than horrified with fear that he was being eaten from the inside out by glowing maggots.
Sarah shook her head, reining in her disgust to stop her shudder as she avoided looking again at the vicious bite. Sometimes, she almost forgot she was dealing with an alien. Then something like this happened to remind her exactly how different she was from Jotaha.
16
After stuffing some of the healing moss into the holes in his neck, now reassured that the last of the mortally wounded chanu zayul had left his body, Jotaha managed to communicate to Sarah that he wanted to treat her wounds.
The ones he could treat. There was little he could do for the marks around her neck that were already darkening into ugly purplish stains on her soft flesh. He was certain they had to bring her pain, because her breathing seemed more labored and she would wince from time to time as she spoke. Her hand would also rise to touch her throat as if she was unaware of the movement.
The healers might know a treatment for the marking of the skin, but Jotaha was no healer. He only carried with him treatments for staunching blood that also helped speed healing, and a pain inhibitor. The yan-kanat did not experience such visible damage to their flesh.
The marks also served as another reminder of how close she had come to death, and that would haunt him for the rest of his life. To find his drahi, only to lose her because of his failure to reach her in time would have destroyed him. He owed her survival to her own ferocity. The nixir that had attacked her had suffered for it, with one of his darts buried in its eye and a face further burned by one of the yan sutaz—inferno stones. Her fierce self-defense had slowed the creature down enough for Jotaha to reach her.
He studied her as she turned her back to him, taking a seat on the ground right in front of him. She removed her shirt and the strange garment beneath it that strapped around her mounds with a pained sound that filled him with a sense of guilt and failure. The fact that she bit off the sound only made him feel worse. She was ashamed of her pain and sought to hide it. A female yan-kanat would be far more vocal if she was so wounded, knowing her mate would seek to attend to every one of her needs without her having to move a muscle in a way that might cause more pain.
He wondered at her stoicism. It was the kind a warrior would have, a Jotaha like himself who trained for many years to battle the nixir invaders. Did the nixirs demand silence from their females when they were in pain? His opinion of them sank even lower, when he hadn’t believed there was a level beneath where it already was. Only Sarah herself impressed him, but then again, he had never encountered a nixir female before.
He was strangely proud of his nixir female, though he never would have thought he would appreciate such traits in his drahi. It was his role as her mate to fight for her and protect her. She was to be his delicate gem, his harzek, kept comfortable and safe. A drahi should never have to fight, especially not in a battle so deadly that it had left the terrible slashes across her back, or the marks on her neck where the nixir had attempted to squeeze her life from her.
She flinched and made a small hissing sound when he first touched the healing paste to one of the angry slashes that scored her soft skin. He pulled his hand back, debating whether to give her some of the yanhiss to help distract her from the pain until the pain inhibitor kicked in, but it could be dangerous for her to consume too much of it in such a short time. He would prefer to avoid that. After he treated her wounds, he would give her some xirak to comfort her instead.
She straightened her spine, reaching up to pull her long, tangled head fringe to one side, exposing all of her bared back. It was a sign that she wanted him to continue. She was visibly bracing herself for the pain.
Like a warrior.
He was as careful as he could be in spreading the paste on her wounds. She remained silent, though he could feel the tension in her muscles through the brush of his fingers against her delightfully warm skin. He could also see the ripple of tightened muscle in her shoulders and back. She trembled slightly, but did not break down as she had when he’d first met her. She was handling the aftereffects of her near death far better than he would have expected.
There was nothing he could say that she would comprehend to even soothe her, or reassure her that despite the terrible appearance of the slashes, they did not cut deep enough to do more than surface damage to her flesh. With the paste laid thick over them, all bleeding had stopped and the pain inhibitor would soon numb the area, bringing her more comfort.