29. Kaedryn
Kaedryn
She goes limp in my arms.
One moment, she is staring up at me from within the armored shelter of my wings, her eyes open but already losing focus. The next, the pull between us flickers, her knees give, and every fragile thread of strength leaves her at once.
“Adelina!”
I tighten my arm around her waist before she can fall. Her head drops against my shoulder, too heavy, all the control gone from her neck. The last Varrow dies somewhere beyond the curve of my wings, cut down beneath the clash of steel and Sylas’s magic, but I barely hear it.
I feel only the sudden stillness of the woman in my arms.
“No!” I sink to my knees with her, ignoring the mud and melting snow soaking through my trousers. My wings remain locked around us, shielding her from the road, the bodies, and anything else that might still be moving in the trees.
Beyond them, the world quiets in broken pieces. Wind threading through branches. The ragged breathing of my men. A horse screaming somewhere behind the wrecked carriage. The slow turn of one shattered wheel above the ground.
Near the roadside, the Varrow she killed continues unraveling into blackened threads, the fallen guard’s sword still buried beneath its ribs.
Adelina lies cold and motionless against me.
I catalog her the way I would a battlefield wound because it is the only thing I know to do while the rest of me threatens to come apart.
Her lips have gone gray at the center and blue along the edges.
A narrow thread of blood runs from one nostril, already thickening in the cold.
Frost gathers white in her lashes and in the fine hairs at her temple.
Her skin, always pale, has taken on the color of tallow, and beneath it, along her jaw and throat, faint dark veins mark where the Varrow drank deepest.
There is no wound I can close. No blood that belongs to her beyond that single frozen line. Somehow, that is worse because it means the thing killing her is something I cannot cut out.
I reach for the bond.
It’s a thread pulled so thin it is nearly nothing, flickering like a candle caught in a draft. Every instinct I possess turns white with panic because I know that feeling. I have felt a life go thin before. I have knelt on cold stone before, willing someone to stay, only to be answered by silence.
Evander.
The name surfaces before I can stop it, and with it comes the memory I keep chained. The bier. The too-quiet hall. The weight of a hand that would not warm, no matter how long I held it.
I understood then that no title, no strength, and no amount of preparation could drag my brother back across a line he had already crossed. I had been too late for him. For all the ways I have been called controlling, unyielding, and too hard, I was not enough keep my brother alive.
Not again.
“Soren!” My voice tears out of me. “Soren, now!”
He is already dropping beside us, his satchel open and his hands moving. His fingers press to her throat, then her wrist, before he carefully peels back one eyelid. Pale light gathers above his palm, and I watch her pupil react too slowly.
He curses beneath his breath. “Varrow drain. They took her nearly to the edge. Her heart is slow.”
“How slow?”
“Too slow.”
“Fix it!”
“I cannot replace what they took. That is not how the drain works.” He uncorks a dark glass vial, releasing the scents of iron and bitterroot, then presses it into my hand instead of trying to take her from me.
“But we can keep her from slipping the rest of the way. Hold her upright. Tilt her head back and support her jaw. Give her a little at a time, or she will choke.”
I cradle her head in the bend of my arm and bring the vial to her lips. Her mouth is slack, and her lower lip is cracked at the center where she has bitten it too many times. It is an old habit I have watched her fail to hide at every meal since the temple road.
My hands have wielded a sword through three campaigns without shaking.
They shake now. I still them by watching them, by refusing to allow the tremor to become stronger than my will.
“Adelina.” I keep my voice low and level, the way I would speak to a frightened horse or a bleeding soldier who must not understand how close death stands. “Listen to me. You need to swallow.”
Nothing. The liquid gathers at the corner of her mouth and threatens to spill.
“You have survived this far.” I tip another drop against her lips. “Do not stop now.”
Her body remains slack.
“Swallow, Adelina!” I lace the words with command.
Her throat moves once, a small, weak contraction beneath pale skin. Relief breaks through my chest so sharply it hurts.
“That is it,” I murmur. “Again.”
I tip the vial, allowing only a few drops at a time. I wait for each swallow to work down her throat before giving her the next.
One.
Then another.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
I count without meaning to. Each swallow is proof that she remains somewhere inside this terrible stillness, reaching, choosing to stay even without knowing she makes the choice.
By the twelfth swallow, the faintest trace of color returns to her lips.
I fixate on it like a man watching the horizon for sails.
Soren presses a second vial into my free hand. “Warming draught. The same way as before. Slowly.”
I do not go slowly enough. Half of it goes down.
The rest catches in her throat. Her body convulses.
A wet, tearing cough wrenches from her, arching her back against my arm.
The sound is horrible, a strangled gasp like someone drowning, and for one blinding instant, I am certain she is dying in my arms after all.
And I have done it. I poured too quickly and have knelt here only to watch another person slip beyond my reach.
“Soren!”
“Turn her onto her side. Now!” He is already guiding my hands.
I roll her toward me, against my chest, and spread my palm across her back. Even unconscious, she flinches. Her whole body tries to curl away from the pressure of my hand.
She guarded that same side when I first found her. Then, in Maralis, she appeared to move without pain, and I allowed myself to believe it had been nothing.
She does not move without pain now. Something happened before we left that northern castle. I force the thought aside because I cannot pursue it while she is still fighting to breathe, but I do not release it.
She coughs again and again, a fleck of the draught bright against her lip, before finally dragging in a breath. A whole breath. Ragged, but whole.
Her lungs pull, catch, then pull again.
“Easy,” I tell her, though my own voice is ruined. “Breathe. I have you.”
“She aspirated a little. That is all.” Relief lives beneath Soren’s steadiness now. “Her lungs are clear. She is breathing, Kaedryn. Look at me. She is breathing.”
I realize I have stopped breathing with her. I make myself begin again, one breath and then another, my hand still flat between her shoulder blades. Her cheek rests against my collarbone, and each uneven exhale brushes my throat. It’s warmer now.
I focus on that change because it is measurable. Measurable means real.
I close my eyes for the space of a single breath. When I open them, she is still breathing.
“Do not do that again. Breathe,” I murmur, too quietly for Soren to hear.
Soren sits back on his heels, watching me with an expression I have no patience to interpret.
“She needs to be off this road,” he says, gentler now as he gathers his vials.
“Warmth, rest, and no more fear feeding into her. Otherwise, the little I have done will not hold. We need to get her to the ship.”
I am already rising with her. She weighs almost nothing. Far less than she should. I file the fact away beside all the others.
I carry her toward the second carriage while my men close ranks around us and the cold wind whips through the trees.
That’s when I feel it.
With her held against me, chest to chest and her cold cheek tucked near my throat, the bond steadies. Not much, but it steadies.
The thin thread grows firmer by a fraction. Her next breath comes a little easier. I feel the exact moment the small hitch smooths away, and I do not imagine it.
I stop walking.
I do not intend to. I simply stop because the moment I shift her weight to lift her into the carriage, preparing to let Soren take her, the thread thins again. I feel it loosen like a hand losing its grip.
I pull her back against me. It steadies. I ease her away. It thins and starts to flicker again.
Cause.
Effect.
Twice is enough. I have built my life on recognizing patterns, and this is not one I will ignore.
Sylas reaches my side. Blood darkens one sleeve, though he does not appear to notice it. “Give her to Soren, Kaedryn. Let him work.”
“No.”
“You cannot hold her the whole way.”
“I said no!” The words come out rougher than I intend. I force my voice lower because Sylas is not the enemy and my hands are still shaking.
“When I hold her, the bond steadies. When I let go, it weakens.” I look between him and Soren. “I don’t know why.”
Sylas glances at Adelina.
“I don’t care why,” I say. “I’m not letting go.”
He does not argue. Whatever he sees on my face stops the protest before it forms. He pulls the carriage door open himself, and I climb inside with Adelina still in my arms. I settle onto the bench and arrange her across my lap, her head against my shoulder and her cold hands folded between us where my chest can warm them.
They are small, the nails bitten nearly as badly as her lip.
An old silvered scar cuts across two of her knuckles.
Soren climbs in after us, then Sylas, and the door shuts against the wind.
The thread holds. Thin, but holding. I keep one hand spread against her back, avoiding the place that made her flinch. The bond hums low and steady between us, and something inside my own chest unlocks by a degree.
She is alive.
The relief is so violent that it leaves room for nothing else. Then, because I am a coward in precisely one way, it does leave, and what floods in behind it is not gentle.