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Blood. Rain’s no stranger to the sight of it. How could she be, when she’s been a knight for years, and grew up on the road before that? How could she, when the thing about her that caught her mentor’s attention was violence?
But it’s different, now, with this blood on her hands. With his blood.
Leon slides off his horse: limp, boneless, with a shower of red in the air behind him. His arm…the hand that had gripped hers and pulled her to her feet when she was directionless and spiraling…his arm falls to the ground on the other side of the horse. There is so much blood. So much blood, and Rain had turned away for only a moment. She’d thought she heard a scream of terror—a child’s voice—and she’d turned away. She’d left Leon on his own, when she was supposed to be there. When he expected her to be there, watching his back. And now the greatest man she’s ever met is on the ground, and all around them are the tramping of horses’ hooves, and armored boots, and screams and dust and blood.
Rain runs. A dagger digs into her side and leaves a weeping gash, but she pushes through the fray, through clashing blades, through chaos, to fall to her knees in the dirt at Leon’s side. Blood seeps in through the joints of her armor at the knees. It’s still hot from his body.
Leon’s chest is heaving, his left hand clutching at the stump of his shoulder. His eyes meet hers. They’re hazy, clouded; not a clever, piercing blue.
“Rain, my dear,” he murmurs, and she shushes him, pressing her hands over top of his, on top of the wound that’s pumping his blood out onto the dusty earth to become thick, reeking mud.
“You are going to be fine,” she growls fiercely, tears stinging at her eyes. “I’m here.”
“Don’t…” Leon croaks, and his glazed eyes trail over the fighting going on above their heads. “Don’t…waste your time on me…it’s…a distraction…the enemy…is all around us.”
“Just this once,” she says, “I can’t follow your command.” She closes her eyes to the screams and the shrieking of blades, and pushes all the energy she can muster into his shoulder.
Live, she demands. She bares her teeth into a snarl.
Heal.
This is her fault. It’s all her fault for leaving her post, for not being at his side, for not reaching him in time when she’d seen the enemy at his back. All the years he’d looked after her, taught her, been her friend, her family. After all of that, she’d let him fall. She won’t let him die. Not even if she has to die herself in order to ensure it.