Hammer & Air by Amy Lane Read Free Book Online Page A

for a moment.
    “You’re wonderful at fucking,” I whispered. “It always feels good. Every night. And I wish I could make this thing on your arm feel better, but I’m not a healer. I’m stupid, and I don’t know what I’m doing. We need to get you to shelter, Hammer. You’ve got to sweat this out in a real bed, and I need to wash you down and keep you from getting too hot or too cold.”
    Hammer shook his head and gave me a weak shrug. “You’re not stupid, Eirn. If anyone can get me better, it’s you.”
    I tried. We spent the next day and night at the camp, and I washed and poulticed his arm as often as I could. I also used the brains to tenderize the deer hide, but I thought it might have needed more soaking and scraping than I had time to do that day. It didn’t matter. I needed it to help me shore up Hammer’s pack, because we couldn’t live here in this little hollow by the tree. There were no water, for one thing, and the ground were too clustered with stones and trees for another. No. We had to find a better place—a place where Hammer could get well.
    We had no idea how deep the woods went, or how close we were to some of the towns in the western kingdoms, but west we’d started and west we continued. I carried as much of Hammer’s gear as I could, and I’d tend to his arm every time we stopped, keeping a store of herb infusion in the skin at my hip. (Since I were drinking this, too, I can tell you the taste were nothing to throw a parade about, but Hammer never complained.)
    By our fifth night, I almost despaired. The snow had gotten worse, and the trees had gotten thicker until it felt like I were kicking and ripping at an impenetrable wall of white-splintered-wood, just to make any headway.
    If it had been myself alone, I would have burrowed under the brush and covered myself with the blankets and let the warmth of the ground and the coating of snow insulate me from the cold. But Hammer were with me, and his skin were hot to the touch, and the night before lying next to him were like lying next to a furnace, and I couldn’t help but wonder when even Hammer’s enormous vitality would burn out from throwing all that heat.
    On that fifth night, Hammer started to babble.
    “I didn’t lose my hammer, did I?”
    “No, it’s in your hand!”
    “Good. That old bugger in the smithy used to hide it so I’d bend over. Hated that game. Getting buggered weren’t so bad, but losing my hammer… first thing I ever cast. It’s a good hammer, you think, Eirn?”
    He stumbled in the twilight, and I wrapped my arm around him, hoping for anything—a canopy of trees, a trickling stream, an old dead tree—anything, anything that would make camp easy for me, so I could tend to him. His arm had actually healed, but the fever that shook him like a brittle branch in an ice storm might be the end of him.
    I had a plan to curl around his body and never wake up, if that happened, and had the poor sense to say so.
    “Bloody horrible idea,” he muttered. “Didn’t kill that buggering fucker and haul you out into the middle of nowhere so you could curl up and die.”
    “Didn’t get hauled out here to the middle of nowhere to watch you do the same,” I snapped. “Now put one gods-be-damned foot in front of the other and keep going, dammit!”
    He did. I begged, I cajoled, and prayed—oh, gods, I prayed. I prayed to every god I’d ever heard of: the god of sunrise, the god of children, the god of clouds, the god of joy, and the more I prayed, the more I hoped the gods would simply see my Hammer for the bloody great man he were and save him from sheer merit, because my prayers were angry and for shit.
    Any world that would do this to Hammer didn’t deserve my prayers, but Hammer did, so I kept praying.
     
     
    The sun had gone down completely and I were about two steps from dropping to the ground and burning the choking underbrush around us, just to keep us warm, when I saw the glow of a lamplight in the