Chapter 10
Veiled Truth
Chyr
I
wake beneath rough-hewn rafters in a chamber thick with peat smoke and the scent of herbs.
Disoriented, I need a moment to recall that I’m at the empty steward’s house at Dunhaelic.
The same steward who, as Flora explained with her eyes turned mist-soft, died with his two sons and Flora’s father and older brother in the first battle of this cursed war. Them and too many others.
I’m a Rider, the Master of the Anvar’thaine.
I’ve taken lives when I must. Most oathbreakers and criminals choose to fight the Hunt when we come for them, hoping for a clean death instead of facing an eternity of torture in the Pit.
But even for me, this war—the cost of these battles and the lives snuffed out—is impossible to comprehend.
We Siorai have little experience with the death of someone close.
I still cannot fathom the loss of Tuirse and Oran.
Death is different on this side of the Veil. The dead lie on the battlefields by the hundreds, leaving broken families behind them and holes that will never fill. Wrongs that can’t be righted.
Pain scrapes like a knife through my chest as I try to sit up. My body trembles like a cub’s, sweat beading on my skin.
“Easy.” Flora bends over me, strands of her flame-bright hair escaping from a braid as thick as her wrist that falls across her shoulder. “You need to conserve your strength. You looked half-dead when I left.”
“I was half-convinced you weren’t coming back,” I say without thinking.
It’s no more than the truth, but admitting that aloud makes me sound like one of the useless boot-lickers at court. The other Riders would pound me into pulp for letting myself sound so weak.
Flora pulls a chair close to the bed, alongside a table that she must have placed there while I slept. The table holds a mug, a lamp, a small but lethal-looking knife, and a variety of bandages, cloths, herbs, salves, needles, and threads—all scrubbed clean and laid out on a crisp white cloth.
With a hand beneath my bare shoulders, Flora steadies me. Her touch is cool against my fevered skin, and our eyes meet as I slowly swing my legs around to face her.
She ducks her head and gives me the steaming cup. “Drink this for me. It’s tea brewed with willow bark, yarrow, and meadowsweet. Nothing more, I promise, but it will bring down your fever and help with pain.”
My hands shake, and drops of pungent tea spill onto my breeches. Flora places her hands over mine, helping me raise the cup to my lips.
The tea is bitter and scalds my throat, but the warmth of her hands on mine makes me shiver. I’d already resolved myself to dying alone, and her kindness cuts that away, leaving me raw and exposed.
She pulls back quickly, and I drain the cup. Then she replaces that with a bottle of amber liquid. “Now this. Drink as much as you can manage. The cleaning and stitching I need to do to the wound will not be pleasant.”
It smells like spirits, so I push it aside and turn my head away. “I can’t drink that.”
“It’s only whisky.”
“Only, she says. Are you trying to finish me off?” I push the bottle back at her.
“You don’t drink?”
I shouldn’t be surprised that she doesn’t know. Siorai are careful not to share anything that can be used against us.
“Human spirits don’t agree with us,” I say, leaving out most of the truth.
She stares at me, and a blush seeps into her cheeks. “They don’t agree with you in the same way that your Ever wine makes us unable to control ourselves?”
I must be feverish, because seeing her blush like that makes me think of the way her body felt beneath mine, and the warmth and scent of her in my arms as she kept me from falling off the horse.
“If you’re asking if your spirits make us lose our inhibitions and long for sex, then no.
That’s a human reaction to the magic contained in anything grown in Tirnaeve.
Drinking your spirits merely makes us sick enough to wish that we were dead.
But before you feel guilty for the whisky you poured down me earlier, I doubt the drink made much difference. I had all the same symptoms earlier.”
She turns and crosses the room, her back and shoulders betraying tension that accentuates the sway of her hips.
I’d love to understand why she’s helping me.
Apology or not, she can’t have forgiven the way I attacked her.
Despite that, she brought me here, and I don’t know what to make of her kindness.
She ladles steaming water into a basin from the pot heating on the fire and carefully carries the basin back. Setting it down on the table beside her herbs and implements, she stands a moment, frowning at me.
“Where did you learn your healing skills?” I ask her.
Her lips tighten. “My grandmothers taught me. The art has been passed down in my family for generations.”
“Yet another reason to be grateful that you found me.” I smile, wishing I could make her more comfortable. “I’m aware that I haven’t thanked you adequately—or apologised enough for my behaviour earlier.”
She pauses a moment, then gives a stiff nod. “I thought ‘thank you’ was one of the things Everfolk never said.”
“You shouldn’t believe all the stories.”
Her eyes widen. “How do I know which ones to believe?”
“I don’t know. I suppose you could ask.”
“You could lie.” She lifts one eyebrow in challenge.
I find myself smiling back. Any other time, I’d give an easy answer, but given what she’s doing for me, I owe her more.
“Avoiding a lie isn’t the same as telling the truth,” I say. “Siorai are masters at walking a blade’s edge. We always have been.”
The oathbands around my bicep give a twinge, more of a warning nudge than outright pain. I feel the runes slithering as they search the various oaths for the words to catch me out.
I’ve been faithful to every promise I’ve made for centuries. Before learning what I recently uncovered about Chulainn and Fionn, I never tried to work around any of them. Even now, I’m still testing the limits, seeing how hard I can push my deeds and thoughts.
Flora tips her head slightly, studying me and uncertain how to respond. Then her manner turns brisk.
“Take your boots and breeches off,” she says. “Can you manage that, or would you rather I cut them off?”
“I can undress myself, and I’ve no particular desire to walk around barefoot and naked when you’re done.”
“I won’t risk having any of your old clothing found if someone searches. I’ve brought other things for you. Unless you can use magic to disguise yourself?”
“Even if I could summon the power to create an illusion, I couldn’t hold it long. And there are some Greys with magic-sense. I wouldn’t be strong enough to keep the magic from being felt. Though that would be a problem anyway.”
She studies me, then bites her lip and looks away. “All right, so no magic then. But we can work around that.”
Something in the determined thrust of her chin makes me hesitant to ask what she means, and I don’t have the strength to argue.
I bend to remove my boot, and grit my teeth through a wave of pain.
It’s not as bad as earlier—whatever Flora has done to the wound, even thus far, has helped.
Pain itself isn’t unwelcome. A hard-fought battle, sparring with the Riders, the hardships of a Hunt—they’re all proof I’m still alive.
After centuries of mostly feeling numb, the more pain the better.
It’s something I can throw myself against, something I can fight.
This is different. This is the sort of pain akin to the first sharp slice of a celestial blade that takes too long to fade. Rethinking the wisdom of contorting myself to remove the boot, I snatch up the knife Flora left lying on the table.
She catches my hand and pries the knife from my fingers with surprising strength. “Don’t be stubborn. Twisting and straining will only make the bleeding worse.”
There’s something maddeningly vulnerable about not being able to undress myself. I bite back my frustration and remind myself that she doesn’t have to help me at all.
And she is helping. I’m still feverish, but I don’t feel as depleted of magic.
That may have less to do with whatever Flora has done to my chest than to the additional power I’m able to pull through Tuirse and Oran’s Veilstones.
Indirectly, I have to give Flora credit for that as well.
If she hadn’t taken the rings for safekeeping, I would never have thought to try and use them. That’s another debt I owe her.
After she finishes slicing my boot from calf to heel, she removes it with one deft pull, then moves to cut the other boot. Her head is bent, leaving the nape of her neck exposed, and though I’ve never considered a nape particularly interesting, hers is as strong and graceful as the rest of her.
Throwing the remnants of the second boot on the floor, she straightens. “There, and the breeches next.”
She grows more interesting by the moment, but I’m wearing nothing under the breeches, so I protest. “I can do this part.”
“Don’t worry. I grew up with three brothers. You don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.” She leans closer, and her fingers graze my skin as she reaches for the buckle of my belt.
My breath stutters, and I still her hands. I’m injured, but I’m not dead, and the evidence of my body’s natural response is too close to Flora’s fingers to hope that she won’t notice. I doubt that’s something her brothers ever showed her, and I feel a sting of shame as colour floods her cheeks.
She pushes back her chair and crosses to a chest across the room to remove one of those endlessly long plaids the Highlanders wear like a skirt wrapped around their waists.
Unfolding the woollen cloth partway, she drapes it across my lap.
Only then does she reach underneath to undo the remaining buttons.