Chapter 35
It’s pouring rain by the time Elegy and the others land at Naarm Stronghold. After the walk from the landing pad to the door, she’s soaked to her skin.
Chaos greets their arrival, as Elegy figured it would.
Theren radiates a kind of foreignness even when he isn’t wearing febra armor and carrying the unconscious form of Primary Avka Becken over one shoulder like a bag of potatoes.
Soldiers surround him, and he seems too tired to be bothered.
He sets Becken down on the floor, and looks up at the blades pointing at him with a deeply unimpressed expression that almost makes her laugh out loud.
“He’s with me,” Elegy says to the soldiers, her voice weary even to her own ears. “But this woman”—-she nudges Becken with her toe—-“needs to be taken to a holding cell immediately.”
“I’ll go with them,” Parekh says. She nods to Theren. “He’s still bleeding.”
“I can take care of it,” Theren says, but Elegy shakes her head. She wants to get away from the wide--eyed stares of the soldiers in the entryway, and beyond that, she needs to see that he’s patched up.
She just does.
They walk behind Arias and Julia Martin to the hospital.
Arias has a steadying hand on Julia’s elbow, and he has his head bent toward hers, listening.
Elegy gives them space. Arias is good at taking care of people in aftermaths, maybe because the aftermath he himself endured—-wounded, close to death, surrounded by the bodies of his entire team—-was so horrific. He knows what not to say.
It’s so early in the morning that no one intercepts them on their way to the hospital, and there’s only one nurse working in the ward itself.
Even with the storm raging, the room is so bright it’s blinding, with tall, arching windows and every surface of the room white, white, white.
The nurse takes Julia and Arias back right away, and Elegy beckons Theren toward the supply closet across the hall.
Theren tries to object again. She doesn’t need to hear it.
She knows he can patch himself up, even if the gash on his arm requires stitching—-he can probably do it with a sewing needle and fishing line, knowing him, and he certainly wouldn’t bother with any kind of painkiller.
But the thought of leaving him alone in some stark hospital room to stitch his own arm after everything he just did because she told him to—-and she knows he did it because she told him to—-makes her chest ache.
“Just let me,” she says to him, and he complies.
The supply closet has shelves and drawers on every wall, floor to ceiling, each one labeled and neat.
It’s large enough to accommodate both Elegy and Theren, but she didn’t think about how it would feel to be in an enclosed space this small with him—-tall, broad--shouldered, and still wearing febra armor.
Her mouth goes dry, looking up at him, so she focuses on finding everything she’ll need: antibiotic spray, wound sealant, healing ointment, a painkiller, bandages.
She saw him put on the febra armor in the forest with practiced hands, not realizing how complicated it is to fasten.
She watches him with his fingers on the chest straps for a moment before she pushes his hands gently away.
Tugging at the straps, she tries not to think about how immovable he is—-tries not to think about sitting behind him when they fled Valla on horseback, how his muscles moved.
She tries not to think about how they move now, shifting beneath her fingers with each breath he takes.
She manages to get the febra armor—-a cuirass, she thinks it’s called—-off, and guide it over his head. There’s a dark red mark at the side of his neck where it dug into his skin, too small for him; without thinking, she touches her thumb to it.
“What does it feel like? The armor?” she asks him, her thumb still touching his skin. He’s too warm, the Fever heating his blood. She can feel his pulse. Or hers.
He says, “Like when you hold two magnets close together, and you can feel the energy between them.”
The answer comes to him so easily, she thinks he must have given it before.
“Your arm,” she says, after a moment.
Theren reaches over his head to grab the back of his shirt, but it’s too wet; it sticks to his abdomen, and Elegy finds herself peeling the fabric away from his sides, her fingernails scraping at his damp skin.
He tugs it over his head, and drapes it over one of the empty shelves, and she goes still at the sight of so much of him.
It’s quiet. They’re quiet. She stares at his defined shoulder muscle, at the fine dusting of rain that sits on his collarbone, at the white line of scar tissue that follows his hip. He’s bare and warm and within reach of her, and when his eyes meet hers again, there’s heat in them.
He’s never looked at her like that before.
She forces herself to focus on the cut on his arm. It’s still bleeding, but not so deep they need to find a doctor. With unsteady hands, she sprays it with antiseptic, then uses a square of gauze to wipe it clean.
“It’s shallower than I thought,” she says, because the silence has become strange, and she needs to fill it. “Might not even scar.”
“I have so many, one more scar won’t make much of a difference.”
“Trust me. No one who looks at you is going to be thinking about them.”
A moment too late, she realizes what she said, and her cheeks burn.
She sprays the gash with wound sealant, careful with the nozzle.
It’s only human to crave contact after so long without it, she reminds herself.
For years, she couldn’t stand a body near hers that wasn’t Shir’s.
And then, once she could have tried again for some meaningless satisfaction, she was already in the habit of being alone.
Theren lifts his hand, and brushes the lock of wet hair that’s stuck to her cheek back behind her ear. For a moment, his fingertips linger on her earlobe, and that heat is still in his eyes, and God—-
She slides a hand behind his head and brings his mouth down to hers.
His response is fervent, almost frantic: his arm wraps around her back to pull her hard against him, and his lips part beneath hers.
Desire lights up her body like elixir, and she lets out an embarrassingly eager sound, crowding him against one of the shelves.
It creaks, and a bottle of antiseptic spray falls, but she doesn’t care; she doesn’t care; she doesn’t care.
His hand gathers her shirt into a fist, and she does what she’s wanted to do for days, without articulating it even to herself; she runs her fingers along the line of his jaw and down his throat to his collarbone.
He kisses her harder, deeper, and she feels like every inch of her is prickling and sparking with desire; it’s too much but she’s not sure how it could ever, ever be enough.
Her hand drops to his shoulder, firm with muscle, and her finger brushes the still--sticky wound spray.
Reality floods back in as she remembers the gash, and then how he got it, and then who he is, as in, Theren Forint, breaker of oaths and survivor of Valla and deadly sword--wielding almost--Talusar. Not some man she met at a bar, not some chance encounter on a mission—-
Not Shir.
Breathless, she pulls away, her hand hovering over her mouth. She feels too warm. Too unsteady.
“We should find some dry clothes,” she says.
Theren straightens. Runs a hand through his hair.
“Okay,” he says.
When she wakes, there’s rain drumming on the windows, which is the first sign she’s not at home. It doesn’t rain much in Losan.
Last night, after—-well, after, a helpful deputy of General Saetang showed them to the guest apartments, where Elegy and Parekh took one room and Arias and Theren took the one across from them.
She thought it would be easy to fall asleep, but of course it wasn’t, not with her body flushed and her thoughts racing.
Memories of fighting for her life faded into the background.
All she could think about was Shir, and the deep well of grief inside her, and then something new: fear.
Fear that the well wasn’t as deep as it should be.
She listens to the rain for a few minutes, now, as Parekh shifts in the bed next to hers. She’s only been lying there for a few minutes when there’s a gentle tap on the door. Then Theren steps into the room, a cup in each hand.
“Felt you wake up,” he says, and she’s too startled by the idea of that to do anything but nod. No one surprises him was Rava’s assessment, and she seems to be right, most of the time.
But Elegy thinks she surprised him last night.
Theren moves on quiet feet to Parekh’s bedside table, and sets a cup down there, then holds one out to Elegy. It’s coffee. And not just the synthetic approximation concocted by a lab in Losan—-actual coffee.
She takes the cup with a murmured thank--you, and sits up.
Her body aches in odd places, muscles she forgot existed.
She leans back against the wall, and cradles the cup against her chest. The blankets fall away from one of her legs, and Theren’s eyes trace it from hip to ankle, once, before he looks away.
She feels a line of heat all along that leg, like he ran a hand down it.
She tries to be casual, shifting the blankets back over her body. He leans against the wall.
“I found a coffee machine down the hall,” he says.
“I’ll recommend you for a medal,” she replies. “What’s going on out there?”
If he’s surprised that she’s determined to pretend nothing happened between them, he doesn’t show it.
“Julia’s wrist is sprained, not broken. She’s resting,” he says. “Everyone’s talking about us. Mostly expressing doubt that we just happened upon that ship, given that you’re the former Primary of search and rescue. And . . . there are some wild rumors about the Talusar soldier you made your ally.”
He gestures to himself, and Elegy laughs.