Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
The days bled together after that. We trained and we fought and we ate and we didn’t talk about the things we weren’t talking about, and the silence between us filled with bruises and bark dust and the particular exhaustion of two people working toward something they couldn’t name.
I lost count around the second week. Mornings started before dawn, me in the clearing throwing Forceweaving at trees until my nose bled, him circling at half speed while I tried to thread the power tight enough to hit a moving target.
Afternoons I spent with the grimoire. Evenings he built things, a second shelf, a rack for drying herbs, repairs so quiet and steady they felt like apology and penance rolled into one.
Nights we slept on opposite sides of the cottage and pretended the distance was a choice.
His ribs were still mending. Werewolf wounds from another werewolf didn’t close the way a human cut would.
He moved better each day but I caught the flinch when he twisted wrong, the shallow breath when he reached too high.
The wolf in him was stitching the damage together from the inside, but it was slow work.
Whatever magic his kind carried, it had limits when the teeth that made the wound carried the same curse.
Then the rain came.
The first rain since I’d arrived in the forest, warm enough to melt the top layer of snow and turn the clearing into a patchwork of white ice and dark, churned earth where weeks of Forceweaving blasts had stripped the ground bare.
I didn’t notice until I was already moving.
Dietrich came at me from the left, half speed, still favoring the healing ribs, but fast enough that I had to pivot hard to track him. I gathered the threads, aimed where his feet were taking him, and released.
The blast connected. Caught his shoulder and spun him sideways. I was already gathering for a second strike, my weight shifting, my back foot turning on the muddy ground.
My boot hit ice beneath the mud. Both feet went out from under me and I went down hard, face first, arms too slow to catch myself.
The mud was cold and thick and it swallowed me, hands, chest, face, hair.
I slid three feet before I stopped, the Forceweaving scattering into nothing as my concentration shattered.
I lay there for a moment. Face down in freezing mud. The taste of earth and ice in my mouth.
“Talia ...” His boots appeared in my peripheral vision, crunching through the muck.
“Don’t,” I warned, spitting mud. “Don’t you dare laugh.”
He didn’t laugh. He reached down and pulled me to my feet and his face was perfectly, carefully neutral, though a muscle in his cheek was doing something suspicious.
I looked down at myself. Grandmother’s mended dress was ruined — soaked through with black mud from collar to hem, the fabric heavy and cold against my skin.
My hands were caked. My hair was matted with it, dark clumps hanging in my face.
I could feel it in my ears, between my fingers, inside my boots.
“Training’s done for today,” I muttered, scraping mud off my chin.
He nodded. The muscle in his cheek twitched again.
“I saw that,” I snapped, and stalked back toward the cottage, leaving a trail of muddy footprints in the snow.
By the time I got through the door I was shivering so hard my teeth rattled.
The mud was drying in patches against my skin, pulling tight and cracking, and the parts that were still wet were turning my body to ice from the outside in.
I stood on the stone floor and dripped and looked at the ruined dress and wanted to scream.
I heard him come in behind me. Heard him cross to the hearth without a word, add wood to the fire, fill the kettle and set it over the flames. Then fill it again. And again.
He was heating water. Without being asked. Without making it a negotiation or a peace offering or anything other than what it was, a practical response to a woman covered in freezing mud.
The wooden tub sat in the corner near the hearth.
I’d seen it there since my first day in the cottage but had never used it.
He dragged it out, positioned it close enough to the fire that the heat would reach the water, and started filling it from the kettle.
Trip after trip, kettle to tub, the water steaming in the cold air.
“There’s a cloth screen in the back room,” he offered, not looking at me. “I’ll set it up.”
He found it behind the medicine shelf, a folding screen of stretched linen over a wooden frame, spotted with age but intact. He set it between the tub and the rest of the room, creating a barrier that gave me privacy from the chest down while still letting the fire’s heat reach the water.
Then he turned his back and busied himself at the far end of the cottage, sorting through the salvaged herb jars on the new shelf, making more noise than the task required so I’d know where he was.
I peeled off the ruined dress. The shift beneath was nearly as bad, mud had soaked through to the linen, staining it brown and black. I pulled it over my head and dropped it on the floor and stepped into the tub.
The water was perfect. Hot enough to sting, deep enough to cover me to the waist. I sank down and felt the warmth hit my frozen skin and for a moment nothing existed except the heat and the relief and the loosening of muscles I’d been clenching against the cold.
I scrubbed. Arms, chest, stomach, legs — the cloth and the hot water turning the mud to brown rivulets that ran into the tub and turned the water the color of weak tea. My face, my neck, behind my ears. The mud came off in layers, revealing pink skin underneath that stung where I’d scraped it raw.
But my back was a different matter. The mud had soaked through my dress and my shift and dried against my skin in a solid sheet from my shoulders to my lower back. I twisted, reaching behind me with the cloth, and got as far as my shoulder blades before my arms refused to bend any further.
I tried from the other direction. Reached up from my waist. Got the small of my back but not the center, where the worst of it had caked into the grooves of my spine and hardened like plaster.
I sat in the water and tried again. And again. The cloth scraped uselessly against my side while the mud on my back dried tighter and pulled at my skin.
“I need help with my back.” I pulled my braid over one shoulder.
The sorting sounds stopped.
“I can’t reach it,” I continued, staring at the screen and not at the space beyond it where he was standing. “The mud’s dried. I need someone to ...”
“All right.” He took a breath. A man being handed something fragile and knowing it.
I heard his footsteps cross the room. Heard him pick up a fresh cloth and dip it in the hot water from the kettle. Then he came around the screen and knelt behind the tub.
I pulled my hair over one shoulder, baring my back. The water covered me from the waist down. From behind, all he could see was my back, mud-caked and tensed and waiting.
The cloth touched between my shoulder blades and I flinched. Not from cold or pain but from the intimacy of it, the weight of his hand through the fabric, the careful pressure as he began to work the dried mud loose.
He washed my back the way he did everything, methodically, thoroughly, with a focus that left no room for anything but the task.
The cloth moved in slow circles, softening the mud, lifting it away in dark smears that ran down my spine and into the water.
He started at my shoulders and worked down, his knuckles pressing into the tight muscles along my spine, and I had to close my eyes against the sensation because the combination of warm water and strong hands was doing things to me that had nothing to do with getting clean.
“There’s mud in your hair,” he observed quietly.
“I know.”
He set the cloth aside. I heard him pour water from the kettle into a smaller basin, testing the temperature with his fingers. Then his hands were in my hair, working through the tangles, loosening the mud, his fingers against my scalp careful and slow.
I tipped my head back without meaning to.
My eyes closed. His fingers moved through my hair in long, gentle strokes, separating the strands, combing the mud free, cupping water in his palms and pouring it over my head to rinse.
The water ran warm down my temples and over my closed eyelids and I felt every callus on his fingers, every ridge of scar tissue, the impossible heat of his skin against my scalp.
His hands slowed. His fingers stopped combing and just, rested. Against the back of my head, threaded through my wet hair, holding me with a tenderness that made my breath catch.
I turned my face toward him.
He was right there. Kneeling beside the tub, his hands in my hair, his face inches from mine. Water dripped from his fingers onto my bare shoulder. His amber eyes were dark and close and full of something he was trying very hard not to let me see.
I kissed him.
I didn’t decide to. My body closed the distance before my mind could intervene, my mouth finding his, wet and warm, tasting of nothing except heat and proximity and the ache of weeks of denial.
He made a sound against my lips, soft, surprised, almost wounded, and his hand tightened in my hair and he kissed me back.
It was slow. Slow and devastatingly tender, nothing like the desperate collision against the wall or the tearful, trembling first time.
This was a kiss between two people who knew exactly what they were doing and exactly why they shouldn’t be doing it and couldn’t bring themselves to stop.
His mouth moved against mine and his hand cradled my head and the steam from the bath rose between us and I could feel his heartbeat in his fingertips where they pressed against my scalp.
He pulled away — just enough to break the contact. His forehead resting against my temple, his breathing ragged and uneven.