Chapter 25 #3
“I can walk.”
“I know.”
“Then stop carrying half my weight.”
“No.”
Emrin sighed.
Dax looked at me. “You good?”
It was such a stupid question that I almost laughed. “No.”
He nodded. “Yeah.” No joke followed. Somehow that made the question hurt more.
“Go take care of your sister.”
“I am.”
“I’m standing right here,” Emrin muttered.
Dax looked at her. “And doing a terrible job of it.”
“I hate you.”
“Love you too.”
Her irritation gave way to affection before he guided her toward the corridor. Lidia lingered behind them. Her eyes dropped to my bandaged thigh. “You scared the shit out of me.”
I looked at her. She seemed irritated by the admission. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.”
“You just said—”
“I know what I said.” She stepped forward, and for one horrifying second I thought she might hug me. Apparently she thought so too. We stared at each other. “No,” she decided.
“Agreed.”
Instead, she gripped my shoulder. Hard. “Don’t do that again.”
“I don’t think it was my idea the first time.”
“Lyra.”
“I’ll try.”
Her fingers tightened once before she released me. “Better.”
Raiden stopped in the doorway. He looked back at me, and there was none of his usual amusement in his face. “You know we would’ve gotten you out.”
My chest tightened. “I know.”
His gaze lingered as though he was deciding whether he believed me. Then he nodded.
Lidia grabbed the back of his shirt. “Stop having emotional breakthroughs. I’m hungry.”
“I said one sentence.”
“One too many.”
Their voices faded down the corridor. Vareena shut the door. Locked it. Then turned toward me. “All right.”
I knew that tone. “No.”
“Take off the leathers.”
“You could at least offer to buy me dinner first.”
She pointed toward my bed. “Sit.”
I obeyed, mostly because standing had become ambitious.
Getting the leathers off was worse. The first buckle came free easily enough.
The second did not. Blood had dried along the leather near my ribs, stiffening the material against my skin, and Vareena had to work it loose a little at a time.
I bit down hard enough to make my jaw ache.
“Talk,” she said.
“What?”
“About anything.”
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“That has literally never been true.”
She peeled another section of leather away. Pain burned across my thigh, and I sucked in a breath.
Vareena immediately started talking. She told me about dinner.
About Dax. About the healer she had apparently terrified into surrendering half the infirmary stores.
About the fact that Lidia would most likely attempt to murder Halos before morning regardless of what anyone told her.
Anything that kept me from thinking too hard about the fact that my blood had dried to the inside of clothes that had been torn by weapons that never should have been real.
Eventually, the leathers came free. Vareena looked at my thigh. A second passed too long.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Vareena.”
“I’m deciding whether telling you how bad it looks would be helpful.”
“Is it?”
“No.”
“Then don’t.”
“Excellent.”
She helped me pull the ruined trousers the rest of the way down, and I kicked them weakly toward the floor. They landed in a bloody heap.
“Burn those.”
“I was planning to.”
“I liked those.”
“They’re approximately forty percent blood now.”
She turned toward my waist. Then stopped. The Shadow rune curved across my left hip, perfectly intact. Black at its center. Silver shimmering faintly along the edges. Vareena exhaled. “Thank the gods.”
“You were worried it changed?”
“I watched a version of you walk around wearing it like jewelry while shadows practically worshipped her.” She glanced at me. “Yes, I was worried.”
“She wasn’t evil.”
The words left before I thought about them.
Vareena went still. I looked down at the rune where it disappeared beneath the edge of my underwear.
The woman in Shadow hadn’t frightened me the way she should have.
She had been terrifying. I knew that. There had been a lethal ease in the way she carried herself, the kind that said she could have filled that ruined hall with bodies and slept perfectly well afterward.
But she had also looked comfortable. Not with the darkness.
With herself. There had been no shame in her.
No panic. No desperate attempt to shove half of herself somewhere no one else could see.
“She was…” I searched for the word and couldn’t find one that didn’t sound ridiculous. “I don’t know.”
Vareena studied me for a moment before returning to the wounds. She didn’t ask. That was one of the things I was beginning to understand about her. Vareena knew when silence was kinder. She cleaned the cut on my arm first and then moved to my thigh. That one made me nearly kick her in the face.
“Sorry.”
“You’re not.”
“No.”
Finally, she reached my ribs. The wound was deeper than I’d realized. Not catastrophic, but deep enough that Vareena stared at it for several seconds without speaking.
“What?”
Her eyes lifted to mine. “This came from the projection?”
“The Mourner.”
Her gaze returned to the wound. Neither of us said what we were both thinking. The Mourner had never existed. Her blade had. Or at least the wound it left behind had.
“This might need stitches,” Vareena said.
“Can you do stitches?”
“Nope.”
“I thought your grandmother was a healer for the Elyndorian throne.”
“She was.”
“And apparently passed none of that knowledge to you.”
“She taught me plenty.”
“Not the useful part?”
Vareena glared at me.
I smiled.
It hurt.
“Keep insulting the person currently holding the medicinal alcohol.”
I immediately stopped smiling. “That feels like an abuse of power.”
“It absolutely is.”
“I can do stitches, but I don’t know how well that will go over.” I looked toward the mirror on her desk and then back to Vareena. “Just wrap it.”
Then she cleaned the wound, and I discovered several new gods to curse.
By the time she finished wrapping my ribs, exhaustion had settled so deeply into my bones that even breathing felt optional until morning.
Vareena stepped back and surveyed me. I sat on the edge of the bed in my underwear and what remained of my undershirt, feeling less like someone who had survived the Crucible and more like someone who had been dragged behind a horse.
“You’re disgusting,” Vareena decided.
“Thank you.”
“I meant the shirt.”
“That somehow feels worse.”
“It should.”
She crossed to my wardrobe.
“What are you doing?”
“Finding clothes that don’t have your blood on them.”
“That eliminates half my wardrobe.”
“Today alone.”
She found a loose cream tunic and tossed it toward me. I caught it against my chest.
“Your aim is terrible,” she said.
“You threw it at an injured person.”
“And yet somehow I’m the problem.”
Getting into it should have been easy. It wasn’t. The moment I lifted both arms, pain tore through my ribs badly enough that I stopped. Vareena reached for the tunic without making anything of it. “Here.”
“I can dress myself.”
She took the tunic anyway. The way she said it caught at me. Not you can’t. Not let me. Just I know. I let her.
She gathered the fabric and carefully lowered it over my head. I pushed my arms through one at a time, trying not to pull against the bandage wrapped around my ribs. The tunic settled loosely around me, long enough to fall partway down my thighs. Vareena adjusted it carefully over my side. “There.”
I looked down. “No pants?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I feel exposed.”
“That wound on your thigh needs to breathe, and I’m not peeling another pair of trousers off you if it starts bleeding again.”
“I could wear a skirt.”
“You could also lie down and stop making everything difficult.”
I considered it. “No.”