Jonas could have chased and killed the fleeing swordsman, but he was just a man caught up in a family feud he had no part in. He wouldn’t return, not without significant backup, anyway, which would take time to muster.

He turned back to Llew. She was still sitting in the grass, but there was something wrong. A black stain spread across her white shirt and she held a hand in front of her. Then she toppled to the ground. He ran to her, his heart in his throat.

‘Llew!’

He gathered her to him. So alive moments earlier, now limp. All he could see was blood. It covered her hands, soaked her shirt and pooled on the ground. He clasped her chin, turning her to him. The touch sent a tingle through his fingers even as more blood gushed from her open throat and he jerked his hand away, letting her head fall back. His eye was drawn by movement in the grass. One of Llew’s hands had fallen to the ground and the grass around it was dying in an ever increasing circle.

Jonas swallowed down his revulsion and dumped her unceremoniously on the ground, jumping to his feet as her body settled face down. In a daze, he reclaimed his knives from the corpses, taking them to the water’s edge to clean with vigorous sweeps of his fingers down the blades. He berated himself for even toying with the idea of getting involved with her. What did he really know about her? He knew her name. And now he knew all he needed to know.

He wiped the half-clean blades on his thigh, sheathed them in his vest and drew the big knife at his hip. He cradled it in his hands, watching the moonlight fly off as he tilted it back and forth. There was one purpose to this knife’s existence: to kill the unkillable. And there was no safer time to make an attempt on the life of an Aenuk than when they were already half dead.

Jonas turned from the water. The meadow was now like a hayfield. Each blade of grass, each leaf of clover, each dandelion had given its all to provide but a tiny fraction of the energy – jin, as it was known in Turhmos – needed to bring a person back from near-death.

She lay unconscious, but her breathing was steady now. He had limited time to act. He crouched beside her, knife hovering over her back right where her heart should be, assuming Aenuks had a heart. But this was Llewella. She wasn’t like the Aenuks he had faced on the Turhmos killing fields. She wasn’t trained to fight, to continue to fight, and to take the enemy with her when she faced final death. She was merely a girl doing what she had to do to survive.

And she smelled good, and felt nice to hold.

Her back rose as she breathed, her spine beneath her shirt pressing into the point of the knife. Jonas wavered, cursing softly. He shouldn’t have got involved with her. Llew. Llewella.

He needed to hit something, something solid. The nearest tree was a hundred yards away, and while he could run there and back in seconds, the exertion would replace most of the relief one good punch would achieve. Swapping the knife to his left hand, he crouched and punched the ground below him in one smooth movement, leaving a fist-deep crater and filling the air with a cloud of dead grass, roots, and dirt.

Standing once more, he looked down at her. One of her fingers twitched. She would wake soon. She was Aenuk. But she was Llew.

He rammed the knife into its sheath and turned away. It was tempting to leave her there, to wake the others and get out of Stelt. But that would leave an Aenuk free, and that wasn’t something he could live with. He should have killed her already. It was what the blade was designed to do with its core of Ajnai wood, a tree once abundant in ancient Turhmos, coated in the hardest steel.

He was growing concerned that she hadn’t stirred yet. It had been a grievous wound, certainly, and she must have almost died. He knelt by her again. Had she died? She couldn’t have. Even Aenuks didn’t come back from death. But she was taking a long time. He peered into the dark again. Their side of the river was pale in the moonlight as dead, yellowed grass spread out from where she lay, while the other side was dark with lush green grass. Was there enough life within the perimeter of these dusty roads to bring her back?

Cursing even as he made the decision, he knelt and took up one of her hands. There was the gentlest of squeezes back. Then her grip tightened with the involuntary Aenuk reflex. If he was anyone else, he might lose his fingers before pulling free. As a Syakaran, he wasn’t so trapped, but he didn’t fight it; he also had more to give than others. The tingle that began in his fingers wasn’t a result of her grasp, and it soon spread up his arm, across his chest, and from his heart, radiated throughout his core.

And then she stirred.