Chapter 48
HARK
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
‘Open your gods-damned eyes!’ he shouted, tapping her cheek which was now the colour of snow. Her eyes didn’t so much as flutter as she lay in his arms.
He was shaking, but not with the cold, because she’d found them a gods-damned dragon and the fire burning in its belly was heating his bones despite the bite of the wind tearing through them. He was shaking because she wasn’t opening her eyes and she wasn’t talking to him anymore.
But her chest still rose and fell, and he could feel the faint beat of her heart where his hand rested against the wound in her side.
He didn’t dare look at the red liquid coating his palm.
He didn’t think he could stand to see her blood, so sticky and warm between his fingers.
So he kept his eyes fixed on the golden brooch on the front of her jacket, a symbol that had been a constant in his life because he had always believed and now … now she did too and it was too late.
She had come back for him.
He still didn’t know why. He had been vile to her for years, and it was delusional to think that those years of animosity and resentment could be undone in a few short weeks.
Though, if he thought on it hard enough, that resentment had been unravelling faster than either of them could have imagined.
He’d felt the softness of her skin beneath his fingers, had learned of the things that plagued her mind, had begun to understand that they co-existed quite comfortably when they weren’t fighting.
And it wasn’t actually so strange at all that she would come back for him, was it? Because in every fibre of himself he knew he’d have done the same. He’d have moved the very mountains to come back for her if it had been her as his father’s prisoner.
His heart eased slightly at the fury that had taken hold of his father at the discovery of what they’d done.
How, after every last slave had been rescued, the rest of the magic-wielders had gone underground where they would be undetectable.
He would not spill another drop of magical blood, and the inability to use the magic he had been so desperate to harvest had wound his father so tight that Hark had thought the vein in his head might burst as his father had struck him.
And Arla… She’d come back for him.
Had he ever known such a loyalty? Was that the right word for it? He knew his crew would defend him to his death, but he had explicitly ordered them not to come after him if he was taken.
But Arla had.
And now she wasn’t opening her fucking eyes and it was going to be all his fault.
She had fought like … like something he’d never seen before.
Like she was made of fire, and flame, and stars.
Like she was wrath, and bloodshed, and death’s own companion.
And she had taken a sword in the side for him.
He couldn’t even smell the jasmine on her anymore.
He choked back a sob, a wretched, broken sound as he pulled her closer to him.
Had she always been this tiny?
He could feel each of the perfectly defined muscles on a body that was thin, and in places, bony. When had she last eaten a proper meal? Had she stopped in Hadalyn to rest and gather her strength?
He doubted it. She had been at his side quicker than he thought physically possible, and she had managed to find a dragon!
A dragon that had roared into the clouds that masked them.
A dragon that had flown her from Hadalyn to Kastonia.
A dragon that had been waiting for her to jump off the battlements of Larkire Palace like a madwoman.
If … if anything could help her, if Arla Reinhart was going to open those coffee-coloured eyes and call him a name that definitely shouldn’t come from a lady’s mouth, he had to try, didn’t he?
Clearing his throat, he called out to the beast, not knowing if it could hear or understand him, ‘Take us over the northern border. I know somewhere she will be safe.’
He could have sworn the dragon rumbled in reply.