Lydia the Siren's Arc

Chapter 14 of 37

Gregorio's sword hand rose. Lydia braced for the blade. Then hooves struck stone behind them, fast and close. A second knight burst into the cavern mouth. He was young, his cape white with road dust, and he took in the scene in one glance: a man crushing a woman to the ground with a gauntlet at her throat. He did not ask questions. He drew his sword, gripped it by the blade, and swung the heavy pommel hard into the base of Gregorio's neck. Gregorio dropped. He hit the stone beside Lydia and did not move. His hand slid off her throat. Lydia gasped. Air rushed into her crushed windpipe. She had spent a year hunting this man, and now he lay senseless, freed for her by a stranger who thought he was saving her life. She almost laughed. Her plan had failed a dozen ways, and chance had handed her what her song never could. "You're safe," the young knight said. He knelt beside her, quick and gentle. "Can you stand?" Lydia looked up at him. His eyes searched her face for fear, and he found it, because she was starving for breath and shaking. He read it as a woman's terror at a violent man. He had no idea what she was. "He would have killed me," she rasped. It was true. She let the tears keep falling. "Not now," the knight said. He glanced at Gregorio's fallen shape without pity. "I've seen men like him. I'm sorry I came late." Before Lydia could answer, her body gave out. The choking, the wounds, the long climb down from the cliff, all of it caught her at once. The cavern tilted. Her sight went gray at the edges. The last thing she felt was the knight's arm sliding under her shoulders as she went limp. She woke to a wooden ceiling and a soft bed. No stone. No cavern. Sunlight lay across a plain, clean room. A hearth crackled low. She was tucked under a blanket that smelled of cedar. On the floor beside the bed, the young knight lay with his back against the wall. He had given her his bed and taken the ground.