Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
CAIRN
The wind off the water and the sounds of the sea fill the silence left in the wake of her fury. Fine tremors rack her frame, vibrating against my palm.
The bond between us is still wide open, as it has been the entire time she raged, and I felt every sharp edge of her pain with every word she hurled at me. She truly believes me to be stone—unfeeling and cold—and the only one to blame for that is me.
If she’d been paying attention, she would have felt the rage that woke when she screamed Brennan’s name. The bond was open enough. She could have sensed the discipline it took to force myself to hold still and let her break.
But she had been breaking, with no room left to sense what I was feeling.
I pushed her to this. I knew exactly how close she was to the edge. I fed her fear, pulled that first string to make her unravel, then weaponized the vaelcait, all to force the Nightwild magic to break free.
The tremors under my palm slow, then still. She pulls in a breath, holds it, then lets it go. Her spine straightens, her chin lifts, then her palm hits my cheek hard enough to snap my head to the side.
“You bastard.”
Dubh-chrá is on his feet in a heartbeat, lips curled back from gleaming fangs. I throw out a hand.
“No.” I keep my gaze locked on Alleria, and let the hand cupping her neck drop.
She twists away, scrubbing the heel of her palm angrily across her face.
Her fury at me still hums down the bond, banked but not gone. Everything she threw at me is still pouring through it. Every furious, broken piece of her laid bare with nothing left to hide behind.
I’ve waited a long time to see this. I hate that I was the one who had to do it.
“I will not tell you I’m sorry for what I did.”
A humorless laugh breaks out of her. “Of course you’re not. Why would you?”
“I’m not sorry. This is the first time you’ve been completely honest about yourself.”
She makes a small, disgusted sound, eyes flashing as she glares at me. “It was a rhetorical question. I didn’t require an explanation.” She turns to look out over the water. “You scared me.”
“I did. I won’t pretend otherwise. And I would do it again. Tomorrow, and every day after, if I had to.”
She says nothing. She wanted the truth, and I’ve given it to her. I have given her another reason to hate me, and I have no defense to offer that wouldn’t sound like an excuse.
The sea fills the silence. Down the bond, her anger beats against me, and underneath that, exhaustion.
Her hand flexes at her side, as though she’s thinking about striking me again.
If she needs to do it, I will let her.
Beside us, Dubh-chrá has settled back down onto his haunches, watching us with bright, unblinking interest. Alleria’s gaze cuts to him, then back at me, as though she doesn’t trust either of us enough to look away for long.
His head swings toward her.
“Why is it looking at me like that?”
“He. And because he finds you interesting. You are human raised, yet fae-blooded, and threaded with Nightwild magic. To Dubh-chrá, you are a contradiction, and he wants to understand you.”
She wraps her arms around herself, shoulders tight. “Is it … he … Is he your pet?”
“He belongs to no one. He is wild and old, and answers to nothing other than his own whims.” The vaelcait blinks at me, and a quiet laugh escapes me.
“We have been together since I was a youngling. He knew me when I was something other than what I am now. Today is the first time he’s seen me since the Sealing. ”
“Is he going to attack me if I stand up?”
“Of course not.”
Her eyes narrow at the certainty in my voice, but she gets to her feet, keeping a wary eye on the vaelcait, and walks a few steps toward the sea.
The steed at her back follows her, and she startles, her head snapping around at the movement.
When her gaze finds the steed, she frowns, then turns fully. It tosses its head, ember eyes flaring.
“You couldn’t have known it would work.” She reaches toward the beast, then lets her hand drop without touching it.
“I knew you could do it.”
“How? How could you know? You said I was more than capable. But how could you have possibly known?”
There’s no reason left for me to keep the answer from her. “Because you’ve already done it once.”
“No.” She rejects my words entirely. “I would have remembered something like that.”
I rise to my feet and cross to where she stands next to the steed. When I rest my palm against its neck, the Nightwild magic hums in recognition beneath my skin.
“You think I summoned Selveryn to catch you on the scaffold.”
She frowns.
“And I let you believe that. But I didn’t. I was too far away. You were falling—” I take a breath. “You were falling, Aethryn. And I could not reach you in time. You reached out in terror, and the Nightwild magic answered. You called your own steed.”
The color drains from her face.
“I needed you to do it, with full awareness of what you were doing. I needed you to see that it’s real. That the magic answers to you.”
“So, you …” She licks her lips. “You pushed me until I thought I was going to die.”
“Yes.”
I drop my hand from her steed and turn to face her. I refuse to apologize for waking her power. I stand by the need to make her stronger. But her face is pale, her mouth tight, and the terror I deliberately fed her is still there.
She believed she was dying because I made her believe it.
“I am … unrepentant for forcing your magic to the surface. But …” The words stick in my throat, foreign and rarely spoken. “I would ask you to forgive me for the fear.”
Her gaze snaps to mine.
“Forgive you?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
I didn’t expect any other response. Maybe I would have been disappointed if she yielded easily. Still the word lands hard. She’s looking at me as though every answer I give her now has to earn the right to be believed. I deserve that.
I nod. “Fair. Then dismiss your steed, and summon it again.”
She blinks, thrown either by my acceptance or my pivot.
“I don’t know how.”
“Yes, you do.” I keep my distance. “Feel the thread connecting you to your steed. And let it go.”
She closes her eyes and a line forms between her brows as she fumbles down the bond looking for the thread that ties her to her steed. The line eases when she finds it, then her eyes snap open.
“It won’t hurt him, will it?”
“No. He returns to where he came from. Nothing more.”
Her eyes track over my face, searching for the part I’m holding back from her.
“I swear it.”
She nods, and closes her eyes again. The steed dissolves like smoke, unraveling into a wisp of heat and the smell of cinders, until the space behind her is empty. Her eyes open and she stares at the place it stood.
“Good. Now call it back.”
“What? Why? I don’t know—”
“You do.” I cut across her, refusing to let her bury herself beneath the lie. “You’ve done it twice without even trying. Now do it on purpose.”
Her chin lifts.
There she is again. The stubborn, powerful female I have seen glimpses of since the moment she put herself in my path in the forest.
She breathes in and reaches again. This time I feel the moment it catches. The Nightwild magic stirs, then pours out of her in a rush of heat and smoke.
The steed forms out of nothing, ember eyes flaring back to life, smoke curling from its flanks. It tosses its head and stamps, scattering sparks across the black sand. Then it turns to press its muzzle to her shoulder.
A small astonished laugh breaks free, and she lays her palm flat against its neck.
“It’s really mine.”
“It really is.”
Her hand moves down the steed’s neck, slow and careful, as though she can’t quite believe it’s there. “Does it have a name?”
“That’s for you to decide, or for him to tell you. No one names a steed but its rider.”
“Did you name Selveryn?”
“Yes … and no. You’ll understand when it’s time. The name will come to you.”
She turns and presses her forehead against his neck, closing her eyes and breathing quietly. Her fury and grief and fear give way to something quieter—wonder and a fierce joy. And the bond, open as wide as it is, catches it.
I take a step closer. Then another. The sand shifts under my boots, and at the sound she pulls back from the steed’s neck. She turns, her eyes finding mine, and the air between us thickens.
The anger is still there, but now something else is waking beneath it. Color climbs her throat.
“Don’t.”
I stop.
Her eyes flash, as if that irritates her more than anything else I could have done.
“Don’t what?”
She looks away first. “Don’t stand there like you know exactly what I want.”
“I don’t.”
Her gaze cuts back to mine.
“I know what I want.” I lift my hand, but stop short of touching her. “You can tell me no any time you want, and I will accept that answer.”
She doesn’t. The bond is wide open between us. Her anger is still there, but beneath it is want.
I touch my knuckles to the line of her jaw, slow enough that she can turn away before I reach her mouth.
Her breath turns shallow. Her pulse is fast and uneven beneath my fingertips. Down the bond, I feel the fight in her. The anger. The want. The last ragged edge of fear.
I let my thumb trace her bottom lip, and I wait.
“You’re insufferable.”
“And yet.” I tilt her chin up with two fingers. Her lips part, her gaze dropping to my mouth.
Her eyes narrow, then she fists a hand into the front of my shirt and her mouth crashes against mine.
There’s nothing soft in the kiss. It’s fury first, want second, and every word she didn’t get to throw at me. I let her take it out on me. Let her kiss me like she’s still pummeling my chest.
Want bleeds back and forth across the wide-open channel that I really should close and can’t. I want all of it—every furious, hungry piece of her she’s holding back. Her fingers leave my shirt and slide up my chest, over my shoulders, and bury themselves in my hair—
A fist in my hair. My head wrenched back. Iron biting into my wrists. A voice at my ear telling me to be still, to take it. The sting of a whip across my back—
My body locks, and I throw my head back, fighting to draw air into my lungs.
This isn’t then. This isn’t her.
I force the words to the front of my mind the way I have ten thousand times before. The hands in my hair are hers. There is no iron. There is no collar. The voice has been dead for fifty years, and the woman in my arms would put a blade through anyone who tried to make me kneel again.
I ease my grip on her hair, and force myself to breathe.
“Cairn?”
I shake my head. Her fingers loosen in my hair at once. That almost undoes me more than the memory. I turn my face and press my mouth to the inside of her wrist, then her palm, until the tension eases out of both of us. Only when her fingers slide back into my hair do I move again.
I back her up a step, then another, until her steed shifts aside with an irritable snort.
“Dismiss him,” I grate out.
She glances at the steed, then back at me. It dissolves again into mist and smoke.
My arm wraps around her waist, and I keep moving until her back meets the rocks. Then I take her mouth again. She arches into me with a sound that turns the blood in my veins molten.
I pull my mouth from hers to kiss along her jaw, the soft skin beneath her ear, the rapid beat of her pulse at her throat. She arches her neck to give me more. The bond sings with it, opening wider.
Her heat. My hunger. The two feed off each other until I can’t find the edge of where either one ends.
My hand finds the curve of her hip and slides lower, gripping her thigh and hitching it over mine until she’s pressed flush against me. The sound she makes when she feels how much I want her nearly undoes me.
She doesn’t pull away, dragging me closer, her hips rolling against mine, her fingers dipping under the hem of my shirt. My mouth is on her throat, her breath coming in those short, desperate gasps I’ve dreamed about.
When we finally break apart, we’re both breathing hard.
“I still haven’t forgiven you,” she whispers unsteadily.
My lip curls. Defiant to the last.
“I know.”
And because I am the bastard she named me, and because I want her forgiveness more than I’m willing to admit, I offer her the one type of bargain she might be reckless enough to take.
“Then let me earn the chance.” I bring my mouth to the shell of her ear, and her breath stutters. “A bargain, Aethryn. I will make you scream in pleasure—in every way I know … and I know a great many.”
Her fingers tighten in my shirt.
“And in return …” My tongue runs along the line of her ear.
“In return?” Her voice is breathless.
“In return, you’ll let me try again tomorrow. And the day after that.” I draw back enough to meet her eyes. “Until you decide whether I have earned anything at all.”