Chapter 39
The smell of cooking meat dragged me awake.
My eyes opened heavily, the pounding in my head intensifying beneath the light filtering through the trees and the low clouds gathering beyond them. For a moment I simply lay there, wrapped in the pleasant scent of woodsmoke drifting through the air.
Then I turned my head.
A pang went through me at the sight of Neeken, hands bloody as he skinned a rabbit while another lay atop a small cooking fire.
I sat up too quickly and immediately regretted it.
"Easy." The command was smooth, deep.
My hand flew to my head as the world slowly steadied.
It wasn't Neeken sitting there.
It was Rìan.
I blinked, and the illusion vanished immediately. The comparison seemed absurd now. What little I'd seen of Neeken had been all easy grins and boyish charm. Rìan possessed neither.
He radiated intensity. I saw it in the set of his shoulders, the perpetual furrow between his brows, the grim concentration etched into every line of his face. A storm held unnaturally still, its power restrained beneath the surface. It lent something stark and arresting to his features.
He finally looked up and caught me staring. For a long moment our eyes locked across the fire.
I looked away first, dropping my gaze to my hands. My face felt inexplicably warm.
Did I have a fever?
I lifted a hand to my forehead. The cuts across my palms were gone.
My gaze snapped back to his. "You healed me?"
For a moment he said nothing, his lips pressing into a thin line as his attention returned to the rabbit in front of him. The knife resumed its steady motion.
"No," he said at last. "Your magic healed you."
I stared at him blankly. Since when did my magic do anything it was supposed to? It rarely responded when I reached for it, and when it did, it acted entirely on its own terms.
"The Eidrae possessed considerable healing abilities." He hesitated, then cleared his throat. "And your magic... responds to mine."
My cheeks burned. “It does not.”
He paused, the hand holding the knife dropping loosely over his knee as he lifted his gaze to mine. The silver in his eyes brightened, and then I felt it—a careful thread of power unspooling from him. It stopped just short of my skin. Close enough to leave it tingling.
Immediately my magic responded. It stirred deep within me before rushing to meet his in a sweeping tide, slipping beneath my skin with startling eagerness until faint light shimmered along my arms and throat.
"Stop that," I snapped.
His magic withdrew at once, vanishing back beneath his skin so quickly it might never have been there at all.
Mine did not. It remained close to the surface, restless and agitated at the loss, and with it came an uncomfortable awareness of every inch of my own skin.
I hated it. Hated the way my magic reacted to his.
Hated the way some traitorous part of me had anticipated its touch.
With it this close, squirming just beneath the surface, I tried to seize hold of it, but it thinned like smoke, refusing once again to answer to the person it belonged to. I huffed in frustration.
"You needed to heal," Rìan said at last, turning the knife over in his hands. "Your magic simply needed… encouragement."
I balked.
Rìan tracked my expression. His face darkened. "I didn't touch you, if that's what you're thinking."
My shoulders sagged with relief. That was exactly what I’d been thinking.
I remembered the first time Aedric had pulled my magic forward, remembered the feeling of his power pushing into mine and brushing against my soul as he forced the sleeping parts of me awake.
At the time it had felt like a violation, like an assault upon something deeply private.
I hadn't understood our bond then, hadn't accepted him as my mate, and the experience had left me furious and wounded, like he’d reached across a boundary he had no right to cross.
“What were my injuries?” I asked quickly. Anything to change the subject.
He didn't look up from his work. “Broken rib. Concussion. The cuts in your hands.”
“Thanks for those,” I muttered, remembering the merciless slice of the knife through my skin, the way he'd seized my hand and forced our joined palms over the well. Yet when the memories had come, his grip had tightened around mine, holding me steady as the horror threatened to pull me under.
Those deaths… Both entirely my fault.
When I looked up, Rìan was already watching me, something unfathomable in his expression.
"I'm sorry about your father."
The words hit me with such force that I simply stared. He was offering me condolences? I couldn't have been more shocked if he’d reached through the fire and slapped me across the face. That, at least, would have been in character for the Dark Prince.
"Thank you," I managed.
I didn't know what else to say. He’d seen the worst of me. The worst thing I’d ever done. I almost preferred an unwanted touch from his magic than to bare myself like that to my enemy.
The thought made me wince. There was something deeply unnerving about what we'd shared at the first Gate of Othyr—I knew something about him no one else did, and he now knew the same of me.
He turned back to his work, adjusting his grip on the rabbit. Beneath the slick sheen of blood coating his knuckles, dark bruises still mottled the back of his hand.
The cuts had healed. The break had not.
His lips compressed into a thin line as he worked, the pain apparently nothing more than an annoyance to be endured rather than a reason to stop.
"Your hand..." I startled.
He grunted. For a moment I thought that was the entirety of his answer. Then, without looking up, he said, "My healing magic is not like yours."
"The cuts are gone—"
"Bones take longer." He flexed his fingers as though to demonstrate, only to have the motion stall halfway. I didn't miss the brief tightening around his eyes before he bent back over the rabbit and pulled away the last of the hide. "A few days." I watched him set the pelt aside. "I've had worse."
I chewed the inside of my cheek as he reached for a sharpened stick to skewer the rabbit, then struggled to guide it through the carcass.
I shouldn't have cared. I certainly shouldn't have wanted to help.
This was the Dark Prince. The villain of every story. The male responsible for countless deaths, who was currently leading me across Elantis to break a bond he despised so he could exact terrible revenge upon the world.
If his hand hurt, good. He deserved far worse than a little pain. And yet—
"I could try," the words tumbled out before common sense could intervene. "To help. I mean—your hand…" I trailed off and rubbed the back of my neck awkwardly.
Perhaps I hadn't healed the concussion after all. That would certainly explain why I was offering assistance to the most dangerous male on the continent. Maybe I had lasting brain damage.
Rìan looked up, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. Then, after a long moment, "No."
He switched hands and forced the skewer through the flesh.
I bristled. My kindness was something he neither deserved nor appreciated, and somehow his refusal left me feeling foolish. "You do realize there may be more fighting in the days ahead? That we might have to defend ourselves before we reach the next well?"
He leaned forward to rotate the rabbit cooking on the coals. "Then we'll wait it out," he said. "Two days at most until the bones set."
Bones. Plural.
I scoffed. "You want us to wait two days in the Wildlands?"
"We're not in the Wildlands."
The words stopped me cold. For the first time since waking, I truly looked around.
The forest stretching beyond our camp was nothing like the tangled nightmare we'd escaped.
A soft bed of pine needles blanketed the ground beneath me while tall conifers sighed gently overhead, their branches swaying in the cool morning breeze.
To one side, a rocky ridgeline rose sharply above us, shielding the campsite from the worst of the elements while concealing the smoke from our fire from anything that might be passing by.
"Where are we?"
"The Mirrorlands."
I stared at him. We'd crossed into the Mirrorlands?
A ripple of unease slid through me. "How? Did its wards fall?"
"No." That was all. No explanation. No elaboration. Nothing.
"But..." I struggled to make sense of it. "I don't understand. With the Firstborn returned, every Court has strengthened its wards. Lady Elyndra will know hers have been breached."
Something moved across his face then, gone before I could decipher it. "Indeed."
My frustration immediately returned. I pushed myself to my feet, and planted my hands firmly on my hips. "You're going to let me heal your hand," I said through clenched teeth, "and then we're going to keep moving."
One dark eyebrow lifted. "Is that so."
"Yes.”
He didn’t answer for what felt like an eternity. Finally, he bit the inside of his cheek and released a slow breath through his nose. "Fine."
Satisfied, I crossed the short distance separating us and lowered myself stiffly onto the log beside him. I needed us moving again. The sooner we reached the next Gate, the sooner we could break this bond, heal Aedric, and put an end to all of this.
Without a word, I held out my hand. Rìan immediately moved to place his atop mine.
I snatched mine away again, and his brows drew together.
"Wash first." His hands were covered in rabbit blood.
A low sound of annoyance rumbled from somewhere deep in his chest, but he unhooked the skin hanging from his belt, uncorked it with his teeth, and poured the remaining water over his hand.
Blood streamed over his knuckles and down his wrist before dripping into the pine needles below, revealing the bruising beneath in all its ugly glory.
Tentatively, he lifted the hem of his shredded shirt to pat it dry.
My eyes betrayed me. Only for a moment. Just long enough to catch the hard ridges of his stomach and the sculpted muscle spanning his torso before I jerked my attention elsewhere. The shirt fell back into place.