Chapter Five
Time stretches until it loses shape.
I do not know how long I remain there. The pain comes and goes in waves, sometimes strong enough to pull a broken sound from my throat, sometimes distant, as though the fire has not gone but moved inside me.
My skin burns where it has been taken, the air itself a wound against it.
Each breath catches in my chest, thick with what the fire left behind.
The ravens remain.
They shift only enough to settle, their bodies pressed close where the cold tries to reach me, their wings a constant, living cover. Through them, the world is dim. I see only fragments of sky between feathers, pale at first, then graying as the day begins to sink.
I drift, in and out, the world fading, returning, fading again. At some point, something cold touches me. Soft. It melts against what remains of my skin, slipping into the heat, easing it for a moment before it is gone. Then another. And another.
Snow.
It falls lightly, catching in the feathers, slipping through to reach me in scattered touches. Each one stings, then soothes, a brief mercy that does not last. I breathe it in without meaning to, the cold cutting through the smoke still lodged inside me.
The light fades slowly, the sky darkening beyond the wings that still guard me. The world grows quieter, the village distant now, as though it has stepped away from what it has done.
Then—
Darkness deepens. The moon rises, and something shifts.
The ravens stir all at once.
A ripple passes through them, a sudden awareness, and then they lift, one by one, then in clusters, then all together. Wings beat against the air, a rush of sound that fills the space as they rise from me, leaving the stake, the ground, the ruined shape of my body exposed once more.
Cold air crashes over me. I gasp, or try to.
"Raveena."
The sound of my name shudders through the night, fractured, desperate. It reaches me like something remembered, like a dream breaking through the dark.
"Raveena—"
His voice.
I try to turn my head. I do not know if I succeed.
The world blurs, steadies, blurs again, but then he is there, his shadow falling over me, his presence filling the space the fire had left empty.
He falls to his knees beside me, his hands already reaching, trembling as they hover over me, afraid to touch yet unable not to.
"What have they done to you…" The words fracture as they leave him. His voice gives way beneath them, breaks open entirely. Tears fall freely down his face, unhidden, unrestrained, slipping from his eyes and striking my skin, warm against what remains of me.
"My angel… my love…"
He is weeping.
It shakes through him, through the way he breathes, through the way his hands move over me as if trying to find something that can be undone.
His voice is no longer the one I have once known. It is torn open, stripped bare, every word pulled from somewhere too deep to survive it.
"Pardon me," he whispers, his forehead nearly touching mine. "I could not come sooner. I could only send them… I could only send them to you."
He moves then, deliberate despite the tremor in him, his hands working at the rope that binds me. The tension loosens from my wrists, from my arms, and when the last of it falls away, I collapse forward without strength to hold myself.
He catches me at once. Lifts me. Holds me close in his arms, gathering what remains of me against his chest as though I am something precious still, something whole.
"Sunt aici… inim? mea[30]," he murmurs against my hair, against my skin, his voice trembling with something deeper than grief. "I am here."
I try to speak. My lips part, but my breath falters. The words dissolve before they can take shape.
I see his face. Or pieces of it. The line of his jaw. The darkness of his eyes. The way they hold me as though nothing else exists. His mouth moves, words spilling out, soft, desperate, but I catch only fragments, pieces that slip through me like water.
"…my angel…"
"…forgive me…"
"…I have you…"
He lowers me gently to the ground. Snow cushions me, cold against my ruined skin, yet softer than anything I have felt in hours. His hands remain on me, never leaving, tracing, holding, as though to anchor me here, to keep me from slipping somewhere he cannot follow.
His hands move to my broken leg, and I feel his hesitation there, the grief that tightens his touch.
"I must," he murmurs, and the words barely survive his voice.
His fingers close around the iron. When he pulls, the world breaks open again.
Pain tears through me, fresh and blinding, dragging a shattered cry from somewhere deep inside me. My body convulses with it, my hands grasping blindly until they find him, clutching at his shoulders, his arms, anything solid.
"I know," he whispers, his voice low, steady, anchoring me through it. "I know… forgive me… forgive me…"
The metal gives, then it tears free. The wound opens again, blood spilling hot against the cold of the snow, the sensation too much, too vast to contain.
I gasp, but he is there. His hands hold me, his voice wraps around me, pulling me back from the edge each time I slip toward it.
"Look at me," he murmurs. "Stay with me, my love."
I try. Through the pain, through the dark that presses in, I hold onto his face, to the sound of him, the warmth of his tears against my skin.
His hands move with purpose now. I feel the pressure of them at my ankle, firm but careful, as he pulls away what remains of the iron’s hold, as he wraps cloth around what is left of my foot.
The fabric tightens, binding, holding, his touch steady where everything else has been ruin.
My face rests against the snow, the cold seeping into my skin, numbing the places the fire had claimed. I let my eyes fall open.
The world has changed. At first, I think it is shadow.
Then they move.
Pairs of eyes catch the moonlight, scattered in the dark beyond him, low to the ground, unblinking. Yellow. Dozens of them. They circle at a distance, silent, their shapes barely visible between the trees.
Wolves.
For a moment I think they have come for me; the scent of blood is thick enough to call anything that hunts.
I wait for them to move closer. To advance. To claim what the fire has left behind.
They do not. They hold their ground, still and watchful, their gaze fixed not on me—but on everything around me. Guarding. Waiting. As though they answer to something unseen.
He lifts me again.
The motion is slow, careful, his arms slipping beneath me, drawing me close against his chest. I do not feel the weight of my own body as he rises, as he carries me as though I am something fragile, something to be kept intact despite all that has been done to me.
"I have you," he murmurs again, his voice close to my ear, low and certain despite the break that still lingers beneath it. "I will not let them take you. No one will take you from me."
Something moves in the dark.
A shape emerges between the trees, larger than the wolves, darker than the night itself. It steps forward without sound, its form resolving beneath the moon into something vast and wild—a horse, black as shadow, its breath rising in pale clouds against the cold.
It comes to him.
Stops.
Waits.
He carries me to it, his hands never loosening their hold, and lifts me once more, placing me gently across its back. The movement jars something deep inside me, a dull echo of pain, but it fades quickly, swallowed by the weightlessness that begins to take me again.
He climbs behind me.
"Stay with me," he whispers, his lips brushing faintly against my temple. "Just a little longer."
His body surrounds mine again, one arm securing me against him, the other steady on the animal.
"We are going home," he says.
The words settle into me like something promised long ago.
The horse surges forward, sudden and sure.
The ground disappears beneath us, replaced by motion, by the rhythm of hooves striking earth, snow breaking under their force. The forest opens, then closes again around us, trees slipping past in dark streaks, branches reaching and retreating as we pass.
Snow falls thicker here.
It clings to my skin, to his hands, to the dark shape beneath us. The cold seeps into me, but it no longer feels like something to endure. It feels like distance. Like the world I am leaving slipping further away with each step.
His hand tightens slightly around me, anchoring me.
The wolves follow.
I do not see them always, but I feel them there, moving between the trees, their presence threading through the night like something ancient and unbroken.
We ride through the forest, through the night, through something that feels older than both, the world shifting around us as though we no longer belong to it.
The mountains rise ahead, dark against a darker sky.
My head falls back slightly against him. My breath grows shallower, slower, each inhale a quiet effort. The world slackens around me again, slipping, loosening its hold.
I hear him still.
"Inim? mea… stay… stay with me…"
His hand tightens slightly.
"Stay with me, Raveena…"