Chapter 6 · Miners Want Blood

"Kill the ledger man!" somebody screamed, and the pickaxe was already coming down.

I didn't get my arms up in time. I didn't get anything up in time. One second I was standing in torch smoke with forty miners packed around me in a half-circle, and the next Bram had the pickaxe over his head and it was falling toward my skull like something out of a nightmare, and I thought, stupidly, this is it, this is how the accountant dies, in a hole in the ground, over three months of wages I never touched.

Ivy caught it with her forearm.

Not the flat side. The haft, an inch below the steel head, and I heard the crack of wood against bone and then I heard her make a sound I never wanted to hear again, something between a grunt and a scream bitten in half.

The arrow wound in her shoulder — the one she'd taken for me two days ago, the one still wrapped in bandage gone brown at the edges — tore open right along the seam. Blood ran down her arm in a line, fast, and dripped off her elbow onto my cheek. Warm.