Hammer & Air by Amy Lane Read Free Book Online

and pulled out a blanket, then, and walked him, trembling, back to the tree he’d been leaning against so casually just moments ago. I settled him down, and his teeth were already starting to chatter, and I remembered all I could about watching him build a fire.
    I did well, all things considered, and soon had a pot of melted snow boiling away. I added yarrow, five-finger, and agrimony to the mixture, and then some rose hips for health. I poured a mug of the mixture, straining the herbs out of it, and made him drink it. He didn’t complain about the bitterness, which were good since we had no honey left in our stores, and I took the pulped herbs and a strip of Hammer’s shirt and started cleaning out his wound.
    “What were you thinking?” I muttered, peeling back the original bandage. “I’m the one who had the knife, dammit!”
    “I were thinking I liked you with your guts in,” Hammer snapped back, and I sighed.
    After dipping my cloth in the decoction, I worked gingerly at the mess of deep scores on his arm. “I prefer you with your skin intact myself,” I muttered, the tenth time I made him wince.
    “Look, Eirn,” he said after he hissed and I retreated again. “It’s going to hurt. You can only make it last longer if you don’t just buckle down and do it, right?”
    The thought made me shudder, but it were winter, and we were cold enough, and dammit, Hammer were wounded and needed me to be brave. I weren’t often, but this time, I had no choice.
    With a grim set to my jaw and a hand red from the boiling water and the herbs, I took that pad of cloth and ground it into Hammer’s flesh, looking for all the dirt I could find.
    He didn’t scream, gods bless him, but his head did loll back, and his eyes glazed over. I guess, sometimes, the body just quits responding to anything so it doesn’t have to respond to pain. I used that time to scrub deeply, and to layer a boiling poultice on the arm to draw out any sickness in it.
    When that were done, I pulled out Hammer’s other shirt, and the sweater he’d turned his nose at and bundled him up, dressing him like a child and then throwing another blanket over his shoulders and making a pillow for his head with my clothes and the rucksack. He came to a little as I were settling him down, and tried to tell me I needed to let him finish the deer, and I told him sure, in a bit, after he’d rested a little.
    I finished the deer. It were growing dark by this time, so I set up the tent without the fourth wall of blanket, and used the light of the fire to finish skinning the corpse. I kept the skin. I figured we’d probably taken out the one predator for a bit of territory, and knew I’d have time the next day to boil some water and use it to scrape the skin, then use the deer brains to tan it. By the time I were clean and ready to go sit by Hammer and tend him some more, the deer were on a stick, roasting at the fire, ready to be made into jerky to feed us for the next few weeks.
    Hammer’s wound were clean, but the skin around it were hot, and I treated it once again. For perhaps the first time in our lives, I heard him complain about something.
    “It weren’t permission to go rooting around in my skin, Eirn.”
    I tried a smile, but he were pale, and the smile were hard to dredge up and harder to hold.
    “Well, you get inside my body most every night. Figure this were returning the favor.”
    “Yeah, but I hope it feels better than this,” Hammer grunted, and he sounded fretful and insecure. I kissed his cheek—an odd gesture for us. We did not hold hands nor nuzzle nor touch at odd moments as I’d seen other people do. We lay down together. We fucked. There were some sweetness then, some softness in our touches, but standing, shoulder-to-shoulder on any given day, we were more likely to be mistaken for brothers.
    Hammer surprised me. He leaned into the kiss, so I smoothed the hair back from his forehead and kissed him again, and kept our cheeks together