Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 607 of 619

At first light Ajax led his crew up out of the ridge. The nine freed men waited in the grass where he had left them. They looked worse in daylight. Ribs showed through torn skin. One lay flat, breathing shallow, too weak to sit. The god was dead, but these men would die on the road if no one healed them. "Elara," Ajax said. "Look at them before we ride." Elara knelt by the man lying flat. She was the healer who fought with light, and she had spent most of her band killing the god below. Her hands still shook. She pressed two fingers to the man's throat. "His heart runs slow," she said. "He won't reach the coast. Not without help." "Then help him," Ajax said. She looked up at him. "Healing costs me the same as fighting. I'm near empty." She did not soften it. "If I spend what's left on him, I have nothing for the rest." Chalam pressed his staff to the ground and read it. "Nothing follows us," he said. "The passage is dead. You have time." Elara nodded. She laid both hands on the weak man's chest. Light gathered under her palms, thin and pale, not the hard white of the chamber below. It sank into him. His breath deepened. His color came back slow. When she lifted her hands, sweat ran down her face, but the man's eyes opened. "One," she said. "Eight more." Ajax watched her work down the line. She cleaned a rotted wound on one man's leg. She eased the swelling in another's cracked hand. She fed a little light into each of them, only what they needed to walk. By the fifth man her hands trembled so hard she could barely hold them steady. "Rest," Ajax said. "They can't wait a full day," Elara said. "The rot in that leg spreads. I finish now or I finish never." Ajax crouched beside her. He remembered her pattern. She always gave past what was safe, then paid for it later. "Then you ride in the cart," he said. "You don't walk. Rowan carries what you can't lift." She did not argue. She moved to the sixth man. By midday all nine could stand. The weak one leaned on Kael but held his own feet. Elara sat back on her heels, gray and spent. Her band was dark. "Done," she said. "They'll live to the coast. After that they need real rest, not me." Ajax pulled her up by the arm. She swayed and caught his shoulder. "You held nine men together on an empty band," he said. "I held them," she said. "Barely." Ajax turned to his men. "We ride," he said. "Slow, for their sake. Torren, watch the sick one. Rowan, mind Elara." The freed men walked out of the valley on their own legs. Ajax rode at the head, the healer behind him in the cart, and the dead god's hide bound across a horse for the trade to come.