69. Arran
I held her tight against my body, shielding her as we fell. Shards of ice scraped over my skin, but none of them touched her. I refused. Not mine. Not Veyka.
We landed hard, the impact reverberating through us. Veyka did not moan or show any sign of life.
She had to be alive. She had to. If she was mortally wounded, if she was dying, I would know. I would feel it. I would have to. She was fae. She could not die. She was wearing the scabbard.
I expected the ground to shift beneath us, the snow to give way. But everything stilled. The only movement was the irregular up and down of my chest as I dragged in ragged breath after ragged breath. Veyka was still—too still.
Very slowly, I eased my hand up her back. She’d hit her head when I threw her out of the way of the solabear. That was before the solabear had dragged her a dozen yards and we’d tumbled down into the ice cave. But there was no blood on her. Thank the Ancestors.
I reached her throat. Her hair was matted with sweat and grime and cold snow. I slid my fingers beneath it, searching along her throat. Her skin was so impossibly smooth and soft. So fragile. A flick of my fingernail, and I could have punctured the delicate layer of skin that protected her lifeblood.
There.
Something inside of me released as my fingertips found the steady, resolute thump of her pulse. My eyes were burning. I must have gotten a shard of ice in them as we fell.
I eased myself up to sit, keeping Veyka in my arms. I tried to move her as little as possible, afraid of hurting her more. But then I saw her leg. Her calf hung from the knee socket at an unnatural angle, her shin exposed where the solabear had ripped through her leather leggings with its fangs.
Still, no blood.
Ancestors be praised.
I had been in situations like this before. Pinned down with injured soldiers. Injured myself. There was no place for panic. I summoned up the battle commander, and shoved down the roaring beast.
I forced myself to take stock of the situation. Veyka was not bleeding. Her pulse was strong. Her fae blood would keep her alive. But I needed to know where in the Ancestors-damned hell we were.
The realization took only a few painful seconds. An ice cave turned solabear den. Above our heads was the tunnel we’d fallen through. The angle was steep, but not so sharp we couldn’t have climbed out. But with her leg like that, Veyka was not climbing anywhere. At least until the next morning.
The solabear was dead. I’d ripped out its throat with my bare hands, my beast’s sharp claws poking right through my skin. I had never done that before—a strange, partial-shift. But I had not been thinking. When the solabear began to drag my mate away, thought and strategy had ceased to exist.
At least we would not have to contend with the solabear returning to its den.
The cave was about the size of a large bed. One way in and one way out, typical of a solabear. At our feet, there was a pile of freshly shredded snow and claw marks in the wall. No bones or half-eaten animals; the solabear had not been awake long before it attacked.
The ice around us glowed faintly blue, reflecting the light from overhead. But it would not last long. Veyka was still unconscious; that might be better for what I had to do.
I cut away her legging from mid-thigh down. She’d be cold later, but I needed to see what I was working with. It was worse than I’d thought, the bone below her knee was snapped in at least two places.
She did not make a sound when I set the bones back into place, securing them with a leather strip cut from the tatters of her legging. I checked her pulse again.
Da dum. Da dum. Da dum.
I listened to it for far longer than I needed to determine it was regular and strong.
I covered her with my own cloak—hers was providing a barrier between her body and the ice. Then I shifted into my beast form and curled against her side to share my warmth and to wait.
One hour turned to two.
Neither of our companions appeared. They might not realize what had happened. Even if they did, reaching us would be treacherous. Night came early north of the Spine in the winter. Already, the blue glow of the ice was receding.
Another hour passed. It was fully dark.
In the third hour, I began appealing to the Ancestors. It had been too long. She was still not awake.
She’d taken an injury to the head. Her body was healing itself.
But I needed to hear her voice.
Veyka. Veyka, please, I pleaded through that shared space in our minds that I’d ordered her not to touch.
The irony of it… I had been in an enchanted sleep for weeks. I did not remember what had passed between us before I awoke in Avalon, but Veyka did. Her feelings for me were strong, fully developed. She loved me.
This was the worst thing I had ever experienced.
Worse than my own torture, or hearing about my mother’s. Worse than the bloody battlefields, the innocents I had killed when I was new to my power and could not control it. The beating of my heart synced with Veyka’s. If hers stopped, I would know it because so would mine. There was no world that I wanted to live in, no realm human or fae, without Veyka Pendragon in it.
Is this what it means to love?
A low, pained groan slid into my consciousness.
Veyka.
I shifted in an instant, on my knees before her. It was fully dark. Even with the sharpness of fae eyes, I could not see anything. My wolf form was slightly better. But then I could not talk to her. But I could, through the bond.
Veyka hissed through her teeth. “I think it is broken.”
“We are trapped in a solabear den. It is night,” I said quickly, trying to assuage any worry or fear.
Veyka grunted, apparently unbothered by darkness. “How bad is my leg?”
“Worse than your head, I hope?”
She laughed softly into the darkness. I hated that I could not see her. But I felt that sound, softening the jagged edges of my soul.
“It all hurts,” she admitted. “But it is nothing to what I’ve endured before.”
I heard the soft sound of her laying her head back against the wall of ice. It was the last sound I heard as my blood rushed in my own ears.
“Who?”
Something deeper than anger clawed at my insides. Parents told their children stories of my beast to keep them in their beds at night. Nothing that anyone had seen, on any battlefield, would compare to what I would do to the ones who had hurt my mate.
“Hmm?”
“Who hurt you?”
Veyka swallowed, the sound too loud in the small space. I was sitting very close to her. She could surely hear the sound of my blood pounding through my veins. Could she scent the rage as well?
“I killed Gorlois the day I injured you, in the cursed clearing across the lake from Avalon,” Veyka said. Her voice was so tired. The tension inside of me loosened a notch. “The other… my mother. Igraine.”
“The Dowager Queen.” All the possibilities flashing through my mind, none of them made sense.
Veyka sighed. “I do not want to talk about it. Not now.”
I wanted to demand—I was her mate. It was my duty to avenge the wrongs done to her. Whatever the state of things between us—love, almost love, maybe love, definite duty—I owed her that much at least.
“Arran.” Her voice broke. “Please.”
I would not be the one to break her. That pain in her voice… I recognized it. I did not need to know the details to understand the torture of a soul.
I could not see her. Probably would have failed at offering an expression of comfort, anyway. But I touched her leg—the uninjured one. Her fingers settled over mine.
We sat in silence for several heartbeats.
“The scabbards really do keep you from bleeding,” I finally said. Me, as well. Exactly as she’d explained.
Her voice sounded distant, distracted, as she said, “They were a gift from my brother.” There was more to that than she was saying. But I didn’t push that either. She exhaled, half laugh, half sigh. “If only they prevented injury of any kind.”
If only.
“Can you use your power?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. Few things could hinder fae power. There were the natural limits of each individual. The cost—manifested as pain, exhaustion, sleep, and so on. And then there was illness and injury. We healed so quickly, that the latter were rarely an issue. But Veyka had dislocated her knee, broken her leg in two places, and hit her head.
I knew her answer would be—
“No.”
I could just imagine her pouting out her lips. But I could not see them.
She was leaning back against the cave edge, legs out straight before her. I’d knelt at her side when I first shifted, but I settled myself next to her now. As soon as I stilled, Veyka’s head dropped down onto my shoulder.
“I feel… naked,” she said quietly.
Fuck.
My cock thickened instantly, my beast snarling awake. Veyka was still holding my hand. I tried to pull it away, on instinct, to stop myself from feasting on my injured mate. But she held tight. I did not fight her.
“I did not have power, in the beginning,” she said into the darkness. “I was born without it. It was only after our Joining that the void power within me awakened.”
The darkness changed something between us. There were no nuances to interpret, no expressions to guard. Even as my body yearned for hers, I forced myself to remain still. I wanted every bit of herself that Veyka was willing to offer me.
She sighed, her breath warm against my cheek. She’d tilted her head up as she spoke, as if she could see me even in the dark. “I did not realize how much I’d come to appreciate it, to rely on it.”
To love it.
I caught the delicate sound of her tracing her lips with her tongue before she asked. “Do you love your beast?”
It was not that simple. “Do you?” I parroted back; he certainly was fond of her.
Veyka graced me with a low, sultry chuckle. “How could I not love that tongue?”
Oh, Ancestors. Was she implying that at some point, we’d actually… while I was in my beast form… Oh fucking Ancestors.
I felt like I was speaking through water, but I got coherent words out. “The beast is a part of me. Like my arm. I do not love my arm. It is another tool for survival.”
“I do not believe that,” Veyka said confidently.
Whether she meant that I loved my beast, or I loathed it, I was not certain. I was not certain I even wanted to know, either way.
But she did not press it, settling deeper into my arm. She nudged my shoulder with her nose. What—oh. She wanted me to put my arm around her.
I lifted my arm and she tried to maneuver herself into place. She tried to mask the soft hiss as she shifted her weight, but I was too attuned to every sound and scent. I squeezed her hand hard, and she stopped fidgeting, allowing me to be the one to arrange us.
She fit perfectly against my side.
Ancestors be damned.
This felt too fucking good. Too right.
There had to be a catch—a cost. I had done nothing to deserve this, to deserve her.
“We’ll bed down for the night,” Veyka was saying. “By morning, I should be healed enough to use my power to get us out of here.”
“I am not going to sleep while you are injured.” I doubted I could. My beast would never allow it. Neither would I.
She vibrated softly against me. “Then let’s do something else.”
I groaned. Loud, unrestrained. She laughed harder, groaned in pain, let out a very unqueenly snort as she tried to repress her mirth. Her hand started burrowing around between us, lower and lower—
“Veyka,” I groaned again. This female was going to be the death of me.
She withdrew her hand and pressed it back down into mine. But now, there was something long, hard and smooth between our palms.
“Communication crystal,” she said, her smirk evident in every syllable.
She’d mentioned them before—but I had never seen or used one. They were rare in Annwyn. A few of the continents I’d traveled to over the centuries had them in greater numbers. But it was only as good as the person who was on the other end. “Does Lyrena have one?”
“No. But Cyara does.”