Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
Just be with me.
Iawoke to a tune that felt like home.
To the crackle of a merry fire, the whistle of winter wind over roof tiles, and a pair of bickering voices.
I was content for a while to rest and to let the voices wash over me like rain. The sound of my name amid the tangle of words sharpened my ears.
“... check her pulse again.”
“I checked it a minute ago,” grumbled Lorell. “She will wake soon.”
“You cannot know that.”
“She has survived much worse.” A long silence, a nervous shuffle. “Remember when you brought her? She was pale as snow, bleeding out. I thought you had returned with a corpse, boy. I still thought so two nights later. She should have died, according to all sense, but she did not.”
Another silence, a soft snarl. “Do not remind me, Lorell. Not while she—”
I pried my eyes open just to glare at them. A poison-tongued remark caught in my throat when I spotted Adrik, kneeling beside me.
“Ana,” he breathed.
His concern softened my temper, and I managed a small smile.
“I told you,” huffed Lorell.
I gave him a warning cough, stopping him before he committed another blunder. Adrik was too busy searching me with frantic eyes to pay heed to the old man. He clasped my hand and pressed it to his lips. I drew a sharp breath, my skin tingling beneath his lips.
“Ana,” he murmured. “Ana.”
He whispered just that—the name that rang like a caress through me—over and over. I noticed Lorell had left us only by the sound of his fading steps in the hall. We were in the castle chamber. I lay amid a ravel of precious silk and feather-soft blankets.
“Do not tell me you have grown fond of this place,” I said with amusement.
Adrik huffed a quiet laugh. “I tend to have a fondness for places that speak of good times.” He paused for a breath. “I seem to have the greatest fondness for those that speak of you.”
Heat sprawled to my cheeks. “The castle speaks of me?”
“The spirits have taken a liking to you. I hear them swoon over the wild queen who danced beneath the moon.” Another pause, a tender smile. “I cannot blame them.” His tone was light and teasing, but there remained a heaviness in his features—such shadows beneath his cheeks.
“Are you alright?” I asked, flinching as I recalled the snap of his arm.
“Not a scratch. I am half of a faerie, remember?”
“Zora?”
“She will be fine,” he said. “The frost lingers, but she is awake and eating. I think—” He swallowed sharply. “I think we found her soon enough. That whatever happened to the others was about to happen to her, but it did not quite come to it. Thanks to you.”
“Thanks to me?” I sat up, stung by his words.
Death followed in my wake. I had led it here. I had led him here.
The forgotten lands, a haven and a refuge, until I had lured the hounds.
One of them must have escaped Adrik’s fangs that night in the snow and alerted the lordling.
He had come to Wildemire, wearing a human face.
Put a glamour over the townsfolk to make them think he’d always lived here.
He’d clawed his own eyes out to hide the hollowness.
When he did not find me, well-hidden in Lorell’s house, protected by the spirits…
He had found Zora, instead. Oh, how gleeful he must have been to unearth such a treasure.
“It is thanks to me Zora was lured into the forest in the first place. It is thanks to me the lordling found her and wished to own her. It is thanks to me that he discovered this place. I should have never—” My voice broke. “I should have never agreed to stay. I should have known—”
“Do not do this,” Adrik said sharply. “We’d be dead without you, Ana. We’d be mindless beasts. Do not burden yourself with someone else’s crimes. Do not allow his vileness to sentence you to a life of guilt.”
Had I not said something similar to him, not long ago?
Had I not seen a sliver of that same guilt in him?
He understood. He knew what it meant to be thus haunted and hunted.
I tangled my fingers more tightly with his, craving his strength and his comfort.
I still reeked of the swamp, of the lordling’s vileness.
He had not touched me tonight, but his handprints lingered like burns on my too-tight skin.
“Come,” murmured Adrik. He unraveled me gently from the sheets and helped me to my feeble legs. “Let me draw you a bath.”
Motes of light flickered to life as Adrik led me through an arch hidden behind shimmering curtains.
Dusk shrouded the bath, brushing cool sparkles over moonstone tiles and gilded decor.
The mellow trickle of water danced around the ceiling.
A pool lay in the heart of the bath. It filled to the brim at the wave of Adrik’s hand, thick steam curling around pillars draped with silk.
Far below, framed like a drawing by a tall, curved window, Wildemire twinkled in the twilight.
“It is all yours,” whispered Adrik. “Take as long as you wish.”
A gasp fled my lips, startled from me by the delicate brush of his hand against mine as he made to leave. I could not keep my trembling fingers from chasing him, nor from coiling like vines around his wrist.
“Stay.”
I said it in a whisper as soft and fleeting as a breath, almost hoping he would not hear—but the echo cut clearly through the traitorous quiet.
Adrik stilled. The silence between us rang sharply in my ears, with things unsaid and things undone, and with the exquisite ache of almost. I should have let him slip back out between the curtains, but my heart was full of terror and my veins full of need, and I craved him with a violence that robbed me of all sense.
There was a word for this, I knew. A word for this flame within me. I refused desperately to think of it.
“Ana,” he said pleadingly. As if he meant to say have mercy. I had none tonight. I was feeling selfish, and I would rather torment him than be alone.
Gently, I pulled him with me into the mist. He did not resist. “You need not look.” I tried to say it lightly, but it came out terse. “Just be with me. Do not leave me to bathe in these memories alone.”
His exhale came sharp as a knife. “Never. In this life, and in all those that await us Beyond, you shall never be alone again, Ana.”
The steam gathered like clouds in my head, dulling my thoughts.
I was faintly aware that I slipped out of my shredded dress, and that Adrik guided me gently into the bath.
The water burned viciously as I sank into it.
I savored the pain. It sharpened my mind just enough to become aware of Adrik kneeling on the tiles beside me.
“He escaped,” I whispered.
Adrik brushed a curl, damp with steam, from my heated forehead. “He is injured. He might die in the swamp.”
“He will not. He is its lord.”
“Then I will hunt him down. He cannot fool us again. He cannot fool me again.”
That he could not. We knew his name and had tasted his blood. Adrik drew a soft cloth from a stool near the pool and soaked it with a trickle of sweet oil. When I reached to take the cloth from him, he only smiled.
“Allow me.”
I nodded tensely. Adrik drew the cloth gently over my shoulders, cleansing me of vileness and rot.
I shrank under his cautious, quiet observance.
There it was again, that watchful eye which had frightened me so in the beginning.
It frightened me no longer. I knew now that it held no judgment.
He wished to know how I’d escaped that night, ten winters ago.
“You can ask,” I said, voice thin and too high.
He brushed the cloth softly over my collarbone and through the dip at the base of my throat, drawing a thin gasp from me. “Do you want me to ask?”
I swallowed, heart racing as my mind unraveled with doubt.
“I burn sometimes with the words. Other times I wonder… If I speak of what happened, will it change me again? Will it become something alive and real—a stain on the world rather than one I bear quietly on my soul? After it happened, I looked differently at the world. I cannot bear that the world might look differently at me too.”
Adrik set the cloth aside to cradle my hand in his.
I had not noticed how cold I’d been, despite the scalding water.
“After the war, I burned the prince’s mark off my back.
I thought that if I erased all traces of him, I could pretend we’d never met.
” He smiled sadly. “It was a lie, of course. Whether I spoke of him or not, whether I refused to look at myself in the mirror or stared for hours at the monster I’d become—he haunted me just the same.
I did not tell Lorell of my past until I was eleven moons his apprentice.
He was utterly unimpressed.” Adrik drew breath, cupping my jaw softly in his palm.
“Those who matter know you now, Evana. I know you now. You are made of the stars and of wild and beautiful things. You wear strength and kindness on your tongue, in your eyes, deep within your heart.” He slipped his thumb from my curls to my jaw and traced his finger, so tenderly it felt like a kiss of the wind, over the bridge of my nose and my cheeks, spattered with freckles.
He whispered, "You wear it here, on your skin. The constellations of Moonfall and Everwild on eternal, brilliant skies. I see you, Evana. I’d find your heart among one thousand drumbeats.
I know that heart of yours, and it is kind and fierce and wild. That will never change.”