Chapter 17 #2
“Freyda was the one who told me you were gone,” Gareth said quietly.
“I was up late in the laboratory. Everyone else had gone to bed. And she showed up at the window, fussing like mad. I tried to quiet her, but she was inconsolable. She kept flapping around, trying to push me toward the door. So I finally gave up and let her lead me to you.”
“All the way to Ghorlock?”
“All the way to Ghorlock.”
I blinked back tears as I met Freyda’s eyes. “Our familiars know when we’re hurt. She must have panicked when she couldn’t find me. I’m sorry, Freyda.” I held out my hand to her again. “You’re right to be angry, but will you please come here?”
Freyda was not one to forgive easily, especially when I was the transgressor, but I must have looked truly pathetic, because she came to me with only a few soft chirps of irritation. She pressed her beautiful head to my shoulder, and I put my arm around her, scooping her gently against me.
“Does anyone else know I’m here?” I whispered.
“Perhaps the Warden,” Gareth replied. “Even I can’t claim to know the full breadth of her abilities.”
“And you decided to come and fetch me without anyone to help you?”
“I didn’t think you’d want anyone else.”
“You think very highly of yourself.”
“That’s true,” he said lightly, “but I also can’t imagine you’d want the other Roses to see you like this.”
“Like what?”
“Half alive and crying, with that horrible dead look in your eyes.”
I chuckled softly. “Not dead enough.”
Gareth was quiet for a long moment, then shifted a bit closer to me and rummaged around in an oilcloth bag.
“I did bring some supplies,” he said. “Food, medicine. As you can see, I haven’t built a fire. There’s no wood to be found, and I don’t much like the idea of attracting the attention of curious titans. But I did bring one of your starstone beacons.”
He pulled out a palm-size metal casing and set it carefully on the stone between us. A soft white light shone through its elaborate tracery of roses and briars, casting gentle shadows across the cave walls.
My surprise was faint. I barely felt it. I barely felt anything.
“Did you just march into the supply room and take one off the shelf?” I asked.
“With the approval of Brigid, thank you very much. I told her that I wanted to study the beacon’s properties, perhaps adapt some of its design for our tracking stations.”
“And she believed that?”
Gareth hesitated, glancing up at me. “Brigid is very astute.”
“Meaning she let you, a librarian, venture out into the Old Country to find me on your own?”
“I wasn’t alone. I had Freyda.”
Freyda chirped in agreement, the sound muffled by my sleeve.
“And maybe Brigid didn’t think she could bear what she might find,” Gareth added softly.
That took the breath out of me, and I had very little breath as it was. When I closed my eyes, fresh tears rolled down my cheeks.
“Has she come to find you before?” Gareth asked.
Fragments of memories tickled the tired edges of my mind. Years of memories.
“No,” I whispered. “But she has seen me after. I’ve never explained myself to her, but I haven’t had to. At least she has never told Cira.” I dragged a hand across my eyes. “That’s a kindness I don’t deserve.”
After a moment, I heard him move closer to me. “Will you tell me why you came here?”
“I already have.”
“Yes, but why this time?” He paused. “Brigid told me about Posey.”
The sound of her name was a dagger to my heart. “Then you have your answer.”
“What happened to her was not your fault.”
“It was, but that’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
His gentle voice tore something open inside me, something furious and exhausted.
“It hurts to be alive,” I said, an aching sadness lodged in my throat.
“I’m tired of it. Today it’s Posey. Tomorrow it will be someone else.
And someone else the next day, and on and on.
And somehow, I’m never the one who dies.
I’m the one who has to watch it happen and keep going.
And I’m tired of that. I’m tired of having to keep going.
” I glared at him through my tears. “There. You’ve dragged it out of me. Are you happy?”
“Happy? No, Mara.” Gently he picked up my hand and folded it between his. He looked at me as if I were something rare and precious, something to keep close, to protect. “But I am glad you’re still here.”
I shook my head slowly. I couldn’t seem to stop crying. “You shouldn’t have come after me. Why couldn’t you just let me be?”
“Because I couldn’t imagine having to tell Farrin and Gemma the news and see the heartbreak on their faces,” he replied.
“Because Cira needs you, and so does Brigid, and so do all the littles who adore you so much it makes them miss their families a bit less. But most of all, because I’m a selfish bastard and I can’t bear the thought of losing you. ”
The hoarse passion in his voice, the way it cut like a serrated knife, quieted me a little.
When he leaned closer to wipe my tears, I stared hard at him, examining his face—for what, I didn’t know.
For confirmation, perhaps, of this thing stretching unsaid between us.
For a closer look at his bright green eyes.
“You’d be much better off without me storming around being mad at you for no good reason,” I said quietly.
His gaze locked on to mine, and he raised my unhurt hand to his lips and kissed each of my fingers—softly, reverently, each brush of his mouth a quiet prayer.
“I would rather you storm around being mad at me for the rest of our lives,” he murmured against my skin, “than live in a world without you in it.”
My heart pounded an entire symphony against my breastbone.
The rest of our lives was a terrifying phrase that should have made me rip my hand away from him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I watched him lift my other hand to his lips just as tenderly, even though its bandage was soaked and tattered.
Freyda scuttled away with an annoyed flutter of feathers and retreated to the shadows to preen.
“I brought medicine for this,” Gareth said, cradling my hurt hand in his. “A stronger pain salve than Nanette has been using.”
“And where did you get that? Don’t tell me you’ve also taken to robbing apothecary shops.”
He released my hand with a smile and turned to his bag.
“As fun as that sounds, I’m afraid the answer is much less exciting.
The Committee of New and Emerging Magics back at the university has been working on stronger variations of the standard medicines the armies stock at their camps.
This one is meant for burns.” He held up a small tin. “May I?”
I held out my hand to him, and he cut through the bandage with small scissors he took from his bag.
As he pulled the fabric away, it tugged at my wounds, and I hissed in pain.
He stopped at once, but I nodded at him to keep going, and when the cold air hit my mangled skin, it was like plunging my hand into the moss all over again. I barely managed to stifle my scream.
But then Gareth began smoothing his salve over my fingers, my knuckles, my palm, and wherever his touch went, a tingling coolness bloomed soon afterward.
I couldn’t look at my hand—feeling his fingers trace the contours of my blisters was nauseating enough—so instead I looked at him.
His hair had begun to dry; damp blond tendrils framed his face.
His brow was furrowed in concentration, and the starstone beacon painted him silver—his cheekbones, his glasses, his lower lip.
The longer I looked at him, the better I felt.
The salve was part of that, certainly, but the warmth, the calm that came over me as I watched him work was far more than just that.
When he finished, he sat back to examine the result. Losing his touch made my body ache.
“It’s not the prettiest bandage,” he said, frowning, “but it’ll do what it’s supposed to, I think. How do you feel?”
When he looked up at me, I wanted to cry—no longer from pain or desolation, but from the sheer tenderness coursing through me at the sight of his hopeful expression. He looked at me as if I were the first bloom unfurling after a long winter.
The proper words failed me. Instead I reached for him, shivering a little, and said, “Gareth, please come here.”
Without another word, he settled beside me and drew me into his arms, and I’d never felt anything as wonderful as this: his body fitted snugly against mine, his hand cupping my head, his arm firmly around me.
He trembled with cold, as did I, but I clung to him, my fists full of his coat, and breathed, and breathed, and soon my sentinel blood roared back to life.
I rested my cheek against his chest, listened to his racing heartbeat, and imagined pressing all my body’s heat into his.
When his trembling ceased, I pulled back to look at him.
I didn’t realize I was still crying until he took my face in his hands and dried my cheeks.
When one of his thumbs brushed against my lips, I took it softly in my mouth and sucked once, gently.
His sharp intake of breath warmed me more completely than any fire.
“What do you see when you look at me?” I whispered.
I didn’t mean to ask the question, but once I said the words, I felt desperate to know the answer.
I had beaten the fae Luthaes to a pulp and seen the revulsion on Gareth’s face.
I had condemned Posey to torture and then killed her with my bare hands, and if he’d witnessed that, I knew he would have stared at me with the same kind of speechless horror.
Daughter of Kerezen.
Monster of Rosewarren.
But in that cave, with the roaring curtain of rain just outside and everyone we loved an entire world away, Gareth looked at me with an expression of such devotion that I lost my breath.