Chapter 27
I woke to Cillian’s soft snores. He was curled against my back with his arm lying across me. Torgrin watched us with one of his journals on his lap as his hand flowed over the page. He paused when he saw I was watching him back. What was going on behind those shadowy eyes?
I gently removed Cillian’s heavy arm and scooted up against the headboard next to Torgrin. Cillian gave an adorable little snuffle, and I snorted quietly, leaning over to kiss his forehead. He smiled in his sleep and rolled over.
‘Morning,’ I whispered to Torgrin.
I tugged at a blanket from the bottom of the bed, covering myself while he quietly watched me.
‘Can I look?’ I gestured to the journal he was drawing in.
He handed the open book to me without hesitation, and the gesture made me smile up at him. Our fingers touched as I took the journal, and a spark made us jolt apart. I laughed in surprise and Torgrin frowned down at his hand.
He had been sketching us while we slept.
My face became unbearably hot. On the crisp white page was the perfect outline of my body rendered in charcoal.
He had spent some time getting all the dips and curves right, the drape of Cillian’s arm along my hip, my hair draped over the pillow and my face soft in sleep.
It was unfinished, but his ability to capture this sweet moment in a few strokes astounded me.
‘Can I … ?’ I asked, wanting to look at the rest.
Torgrin shrugged and leaned his head back against the headboard.
I moved closer to him, resting my head on his bare shoulder.
I turned the page to see he had drawn me in my dress and mask from last night.
On another page was the stag in yesterday’s morning frost. The way he depicted the animal flawlessly showcased its majesty.
I was reluctant to turn the page right away.
‘I think I dreamed about a stag last night.’
‘Perhaps you did,’ Torgrin said, resting his chin on top of my head.
To my mortification, I soon discovered a multitude of drawings depicting me. I smiled at the one he had drawn of me sitting by the fire, combing my hair. I turned my head to look up at him, forcing him to lift his chin from its resting place. He arched his dark eyebrow in question.
‘I knew you were drawing me that time.’ I narrowed my eyes at him, pretending to be annoyed. He just snorted at me.
The last illustration brought me to a halt.
It was me, but it wasn’t. I was standing in the clearing Torgrin’s father had taken me to.
The trees surrounding me were bent and distorted, and shadows wrapped around my body, ash floating in the air.
My arms were lifted and my hair swirled around my terrifying face.
He had used his charcoal to give my eyes an eerie blackness, completely devoid of white, like peering into an abyss of the underworld.
‘Do my eyes look like this when I use my Curse?’
‘Yes, they turn black, like last night.’
‘Last night?’
He nodded to the walls.
Enormous scorch marks marred the white plastered walls. I don’t remember the dreams I had last night, just the echo of how they made me feel: desperate, afraid, hopeless. I seized the blankets bunched up at the end of the bed, only to see them marked by the burned outlines of my hands.
‘I could have hurt you! I could have hurt you both!’ My loud cries of panic echoed around the room. I cringed as Cillian instantly sat up.
‘You didn’t, and you wouldn’t. You were just dreaming,’ Torgrin said, trying to calm me.
‘What’s going on?’ Cillian asked groggily.
‘I lost control. What if I had hurt you both?’ Was my Curse taking over more because I had been using it too much? Was it because of how I felt last night? My intense feelings for these men scared me almost as much as losing control of my Curse did.
‘Why did I feel drunk last night?’ My fingertips rubbed the dull ache in my temples. ‘I only had two glasses of wine.’
‘It was the hoofah they were burning last night.’
‘That explains it,’ Cillian said beside me, kissing my bare shoulder reassuringly.
‘What is hoofah?’ I rubbed the smooth stone rabbit around my neck, trying not to look at the sooty walls.
‘It’s a hallucinogen. Hoofah can sometimes make you see things, but mostly it reduces inhibitions,’ Torgrin said, his unreadable eyes meeting Cillian’s over my head.
Guilt filled me as I reached for Cillian’s enormous hand. My eyes rested on his bare chest, worried I would see anger in his eyes.
‘I didn’t say or do anything I regret.’ He tipped my chin up, forcing me to look at his face. ‘Did you?’ Cillian winked playfully at me and dropped his hand to tug on the blanket covering me.
I held it fast to my chest. ‘No,’ I said shyly, thinking about the things we did before we succumbed to the effects of the hoofah. Well, Cillian and I succumbed. Not Torgrin.
Torgrin was still leaning back against the headboard, watching us closely.
‘Why didn’t it affect you like it did us?’
He shrugged, absently tapping his charcoal on a blank page. ‘I’ve built up a tolerance to it.’
Torgrin uses hallucinogens? ‘Why –’
The knock at the door caused me to jump. Torgrin rose to answer it, and I could hear Tomas’s voice but only caught a word or two. Cillian pulled me into his warm, naked embrace and kissed me softly. I knew he was trying to ease my anxiety.
Torgrin closed the door.
I waited, wrapped up in Cillian’s powerful arms. Torgrin gave Cillian a pointed look, and he squeezed me. It was time for Cillian to leave.
‘No, don’t go,’ I said sadly.
‘Don’t start that.’ Cillian untangled himself from me. ‘I heard enough from him yesterday.’ He gestured to Torgrin as he got off the bed and pulled on his leather breeches.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, looking between them.
‘Last night, he tried to convince me to return to Murus,’ Cillian admitted.
That’s what made them late for the celebrations. Torgrin had tried to persuade him not to be involved in the queen’s rescue. The look of pity Torgrin gave me told me he had failed.
‘Did you both plan last night as well? Was that supposed to be a goodbye, Cillian?’ I asked angrily, gripping the sheet to my chest.
‘No.’ Cillian refused to look at me as he gathered his things.
My heart ached, and I fought against the tears that threatened to spill.
‘Tomas and Rhett can do this,’ Torgrin ground out. ‘Caris loves you. She doesn’t want to risk losing you. Neither of us do.’
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ Cillian said, turning away from his bag to confront us.
‘I have been waiting years to seek retribution for what King Hared and the Order did to my wife. To my unborn child. This is it. This is how I can do something, even if it’s just a small part of a larger plan.
I want to be the one to free Queen Yaris from King Hared.
What he is doing to Cursed women must stop. ’
I got off the bed and threw myself at him.
Hearing the pain and anger in Cillian’s voice tore at my heart.
I knew what it felt like to need vengeance.
Had I not put my life at risk in the tournament for even the slim chance of finding my mother’s killer?
Cillian wanted to be part of changing things for Cursed women in Pedion, and we were trying to stop him.
He held me as I tried to cling to the memory of his arms around me. He was the one to finally break away. He grabbed his bags and headed to the door.
I followed Cillian out, wrapped only in my sheet.
The door opened in the next room, and out came a handsome young man with a fox mask in his hand.
A half-dressed Bethel came out to say goodbye to her nighttime guest. When she saw Cillian and I standing outside our room, she arched one perfect brow and pouted playfully up at Fox Boy, pretending we weren’t there.
But all pretense disappeared when a shirtless Torgrin appeared close behind me in the doorway.
Bethel took in Cillian and Torgrin standing on either side of me with eyes as hard as jade. She turned on her bare feet and slammed the door, bewildering the poor young man. He waved at us before walking down the hallway, whistling a merry tune.
‘When we have the queen, I will leave Capita – but I will wait for you in Murus, no matter how long it takes.’ Cillian squeezed my hand.
The ache in my heart worsened at the thought of being apart for that long.
He would travel back with the queen to Murus, where Atlas and the rest of Lord Warwick’s army would keep her safe until they could make more permanent plans for her.
Torgrin and I would remain in Capita protecting Bethel until we satisfied Lord Warwick that his daughter’s life and position as future queen were secure.
Cillian leaned in and kissed me slowly and tenderly. He let me go, then reached out a large hand to Torgrin and pulled him into a one-armed hug.
‘Look after her for me?’ he asked Torgrin.
Torgrin nodded. ‘I promise.’
‘She’s tough and brave in many ways, but not with her heart. So don’t fuckin’ break it,’ he warned Torgrin.
Their faces blurred in front of me as I fought back tears.
‘Same goes for you, Blacksmith. Don’t do anything that’s going to get you killed,’ Torgrin ordered.
Cillian gave him a stiff nod. ‘I’ll see you in Capita.’
Then he was gone.
?
This was our last day of travel. With Cillian and the others gone, our group felt smaller.
I found myself lost in thought as I rode next to Bethel, who kept her eyes on the road and refused to reply when I asked what growing up in Capita was like for her. Her recent warmth towards me had clearly faded.
Torgrin rode in front of me with the remainder of his soldiers. It had only been hours, but I already missed Cillian, Tomas and Rhett.
My feelings for Cillian ran deep, but I felt too afraid to dream of a future together, worried that fate would snatch it away before it came to fruition. And then there was Torgrin, who was invading my thoughts far more than he should.