Royal Captive by Shannon West

Author:Shannon West [West, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781946379672
Publisher: Painted Hearts Publishing
Published: 2019-07-30T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Larz awoke with the smell of smoke clogging his nostrils. It was an acrid, burning smell, leaving the taste of sulphur in his dried-out mouth. He tried to open his eyes, and for one horror-stricken moment, thought he must be blind. Then he realized his eyelashes were simply stuck together like glue, and he rubbed hard at them to get at least one eye to creak open. His hand came away sticky and wet with blood. He sat up groaning, feeling like his head was about to pop off. He held onto it with one hand to make sure that didn’t happen and looked around himself to try and figure out where he might be. He was still on the hill at Lityba, but it was now eerily deserted, the army gone, leaving nothing behind except the pockmarked, bloody ground, fallen trees and bodies piled up around him in heaps. He could see now that he had been lying on the edge of one such grisly, twisted stack. Probably pulled there and left for dead. He rolled farther away and lurched to his feet, still holding to his head, which was pounding with an unrelenting ferociousness.

He began to climb back up the hill, stumbling aimlessly at first, so intent on finding water that he couldn’t think straight. Near the top, a dead captain was stretched out, his face hidden against his arm. Farther up the hill there was another jumble of four or five corpses keeping the captain grim company. They lay in a blood-soaked pile, their limbs tangled and twisted together. Larz staggered over to a big rock and sat down hard on top of it, trying to take stock of his injuries and make sense of what had happened to him.

He could feel a huge knot on the back of his head and figured one of the explosions from the cannon fire must have sent some rock or other projectile flying into him. He was literally bloody all over from scrapes and scratches. Some of it wasn’t his blood, but a lot of it was. Beyond the various small wounds, there was a larger scalp wound, a huge gash, near the top of his head, which had bled down all over his face and chest. With so much blood, and in the heat of battle, it was easy to see how someone had thought he must be dead and dragged his body over to the pile of corpses he’d found himself in, ready for burning. Whether that had been by the Herkons or the Athelonians, he had no idea.

There was no sign of either of the armies, and for a long moment, Larz vaguely contemplated that fact, wondering for one wild moment if he could have died and this was one of the four hells his people believed in—maybe the one for soldiers killed in battle. He didn’t think that was it, since he could feel the roughness of the rock against his ass and his head still ached abominably, and he was pretty sure he wouldn’t hurt like this even after he was dead.

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