He feels it, like a shot to the heart, when Selkie takes the sword to the side, when it cuts deep, and he’s shuffling looking for his Physic, only to remember that it’s broken, that his other staves have been replaced with tomes, and the field is busy - everyone is busy defending their own lives, their own partners, relatives, family, and Kaden didn’t notice Selkie take the hit.
The Mjolnir strike the swordsman who hurt Selkie is overkill - he had barely been standing anyway, and it doesn’t make him feel any better.
He should pay attention, he knows - the battle isn’t over - but Selkie.
Selkie, who had thought this was a game, who had only wanted to have fun, Selkie is in pain and he can hear the way her breath gurgles in her lungs and the way her face contorts, the set of her ears, the tenseness in her face, he doesn’t know when she became so important to him that he could read her face as easily as a book, and he falls to his knees at her side, aware she’s still conscious.
He tugs his gloves off, roughly, pale skin untouched by the sun and time and weather, and his fingers thread through her bloody, muddy hair - it isn’t the time to care about it.
“Selkie - Selkie, you will be fine, do you hear me? I tell you this as a prince, it is an order!” His voice is mildly hysteric, despite the way he tries to keep it calm, for her, and he keeps petting because he has no way to ease her pain, no way to make it hurt less, no way to heal. “Aunt Elise will be over here in a moment, you hear? And when she comes, and she heals you, we will go out to the forest - you can show me the stream you always talk about, and I won’t complain about my clothes, not for a second.”
He hears her breathing growing weaker, more strained, hears her cough and sees bright red blood on her pale face and he wipes it away, the red staining his fingers even deeper, and he doesn’t know why he does it except that he draws Selkie - carefully, so carefully, careful not to jostle the severe wound biting into her waist, into his lap, fingers still through her hair. Her eyes close, her smile gone, and he can’t breathe - he doesn’t know why he says what he says either, except that it feels right.
“If it hurts too badly,” he says, aware of the sound of combat in a far away sense, that Elise is not coming, that Dwyer is not either, “If it hurts too badly, Selkie, you can let go. I won’t leave you. I’ll stay with you.”
