Chapter 29
IT TAKES A few blinks before I understand what I see next. A ceiling tilts overhead. It looks familiar.
Ceiling.
Wait. I’m not in the labyrinth. He’s taken me to the fortress—to Rigor Gard.
“No.” I fight his hold, frustratingly feeble against his strength. “No, you can’t. Put me down.” The jolt of panic running through me is at least enough to drive my tongue to form full sentences.
“Definitely not.” As he walks, Drystan looks dead ahead, but I have a close view of his jaw from here and the muscle in it twitching. “You collapsed. I thought you were dead again.”
“But our bargain.” I sound pathetic. Childish.
I don’t care. Daylight is streaming through the windows, so I should be in the labyrinth.
This is eating into my time. I didn’t take the shortcut—I need every moment possible if I’m to stand any chance.
I can’t be stuck here forever. “I don’t have time. Take me back.”
“You need to rest, not wear yourself into the fucking ground.”
“Take me back.” I try to sit up, but my muscles are not on board, and instead I just flop around like a dying fish.
“Annon,” he growls, grip tightening like he’s trying not to drop me.
“Please.” It’s just one syllable, but my voice cracks all the same.
That muscle in his jaw tightens.
“I can’t lose a whole day.” I’m begging. Probably not something that’s wise in the unseelie realm, but I don’t care. “I need to tell him.”
The shoulder my head is pillowed against sags as he sighs. “What if today doesn’t count? Will you rest then?”
Despite the sluggish condition of the rest of my body, my heart leaps. But… “What’s the catch?”
He glances down at me, frowning in question.
“What do you get in return for giving me an extra day?”
“Oh, I don’t know? You not killing yourself through sheer fucking exhaustion?” I’ve never heard him sound quite so impatient.
“So I won’t owe you anything else?”
“No,” he snaps. “Have you never heard the phrase ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?’ It’s one of the few wise things I’ve ever heard a human say.”
I hold my tongue against telling him the story from my mother’s homeland about an attacking army who used a giant model horse to infiltrate their enemy’s apparently impenetrable city. That seems like a pretty good reason to turn down a gift horse, if you ask me.
“I rest today and it doesn’t count, so I get an extra day to work through the labyrinth and escape?” It’s always best to clarify the terms of any fae bargain.
“Yes.”
“Fine.” I stop struggling and instantly my body tries to drag me down into sleep.
I half fight it, eyelids drooping, flicking open, drooping until they snap open again to find him lowering me into a bed.
A massive bed of reddish wood, covered in gray velvet and draped in softly twinkling lights.
I must be seeing things because I can’t picture him having such a pretty bed.
There’s something familiar about it, too.
He sits at my side, muttering, “What the hells has been digging into my chest this whole time?”
I don’t think anything of it as he dips a hand in my pocket. It seems like a distant concern as I exhale and sink into the soft mattress, eyelids drifting shut.
“You’re ill.”
As I stir, it’s the first thing I hear in Drystan’s matter-of-fact voice.
It takes me a long moment of blinking up at the lights slowly dimming and brightening overhead before I register the words.
Shit.
Shit.
Gasping, I try to sit up, but he’s tucked the blankets so tight I can’t fight past them.
He shakes the jar containing the last of my tablets. Their rattle kills off any chances I have of lying my way through this. Why would I need medicine if I’m not ill?
“You’re ill,” he says again. “And yet you’ve been doing this for almost a week?” He turns wide eyes from the pills to me. “How?”
Not a question I was expecting. I open and close my mouth, then shrug, the blankets just about loose enough for me to do that. “I’ve had a lot of practice getting through things despite feeling… not so good.”
“‘Not so good?’ You collapsed—twice. I was this close to sending for the Physic even though it would damage your reputation. I nearly paced a hole in the carpet from trying to work out what to do—how in the world to care for a human who’s barely breathing.
And you shrug it off and call it ‘not so good?’”
I manage a sheepish grin. It’s oddly amusing to see his reaction to a situation I take for granted.
I can’t help wondering how he would fare if he felt this bad.
I doubt he ever has—from what Min’s told me, it sounds like fae rarely get ill, and their Physic is as much an honorary role as a practical one.
“And now she grins at me.” He sighs and looks at the ceiling like he might find support up there, then he sets off pacing, despite his worries for the carpet.
The ravens give a rattling chorus as if indignant on his behalf.
“What’s wrong with you? It can’t be something that’s started since you got here, because I know the Apothic hasn’t given you any drugs. ”
I’m not going to have this conversation lying down—literally.
So I battle the blankets until he comes and helps, and I sit up against the pillows as he goes back to pacing.
I hate telling people about this. I hate the pity and how hopeless it all sounds even to my own ears.
But I’ve had recent practice with Min. So I pick at the embroidered coverlet depicting ravens and spears and haltingly tell Drystan about my illness.
He listens, asks no questions. He doesn’t shoot me a look of pity when I tell him there’s no real diagnosis and no cure. He’s the perfect audience, really, just pacing up and down with his eyebrows knitted together.
Only when I’ve fallen quiet and have stayed that way for a long while does he finally speak. “I can’t undo our bargain, Annon, but if I’d known about your illness, I never would have made it.”
My hands fist into the velvet coverlet.
Scratch that “perfect.” He’s a middling audience and growing worse by the second.
“I knew I was ill and it was my choice to make,” I snap, making him stop mid-stride.
“I need to get home. Don’t you understand why now?
My illness is a weakness here—you and Min have made that quite clear.
If I go, you can marry someone who isn’t human or sick.
Surely it will reflect badly upon you to have a wife who’s so…
imperfect.” I sigh, shaking my head. “And even if none of that was true, I need my family. They care for me. They help me. If not for them, I wouldn’t have survived for this long.
And one day…” I swallow and will the burning of my eyes to calm, blaming my exhaustion.
I refuse to cry. “One day, I will run out of time. I don’t want to do that alone. ”
“You won’t.” He says it so quickly, I wonder if he understands what I mean.
But he’s the King of Death—of course he knows what I’m referring to.
He comes and sits on the bed, look softer than usual but not, thankfully, pitying.
I couldn’t take that right now. “You’re meant to be resting.
I shouldn’t have asked you to explain all this while you were still so tired.
Here.” He offers a glass of water, bringing it to my lips himself when my hand shakes too much to hold it securely.
There’s also a platter of food, and I manage to eat a few morsels of meat and vegetables.
The radishes are crisp and refreshing, their pepperiness a delightful reminder that I am, in fact, alive.
Then he tucks me in, giving me an opportunity to examine his face more closely. There are slight hollows under his eyes, reminding me that it’s daylight and he should be asleep. In this bed. That’s his.
But it’s damn cozy, and he doesn’t tuck the blankets quite so tightly, but I can feel the pressure of him sitting at my side, the way it dips the bed slightly, the warmth radiating from his thigh.
The idea of insisting he takes me back to my room slips from my mind as I slip from consciousness.