Chapter Twenty-One
TWENTY-ONE
I am nothing but pain.
Endless fire scorches the blackness drowning me.
My limbs jostle, useless and hanging.
Voices, muffled and impossibly far away, barely reach me. None of them are clear enough to pick any words out, except that neither are strangers’.
My lips part, and something acrid feels like dust over my tongue.
Is this how Finn felt?
This has to be what dying is. Nothing else explains the agony, the torture of burning alive inside the scaffold of my own flesh and bones.
I simmer. I smolder, like coals banked for hours, for eternities I can’t possibly survive.
Let me go, I ache to whisper.
Old Ones, I’d carve the words into my own skin if I could, to make the pain stop. But I can’t even move my fingers. Can’t even scream.
I feel myself slipping, feel the shift of air inside my lungs and weight bearing down on the impossible scorching place where my heart lies. I feel it struggle, feel the fluttering quiver of it in my chest as it tries to give out.
I always was stubborn, and a surge of fresh fight licks inside me.
It carves a path through the pain, vanquishing the flames and dousing the burning.
It’s just enough to rouse me, to stir the fight lodging in my heart.
“Maeve?”
My name pierces the shadows and lures me up and out of the scorching darkness.
I follow the sound and let it lead me up into the light.
Cool, soft hands wrap around mine, soothing burning flesh.
Light filters through the suffocating darkness behind my eyes, dappling orange as I fight to blink. I start to open my eyes…
And a burst of white blinds me.
I hiss.
“Easy,” a calm, deep voice says, the hands on mine letting go.
Cold liquid brushes over my lips, easing the cracks and chapped skin there. Old Ones, every inch of me feels raw and tingling and tender, scorched to the damn bone.
“How long?” The words come out sounding scraped over coals, but at least they’re mine.
“Three days.” The deep voice is steady but tired.
“Three days?”
My eyes fly open, and I instantly regret it. Sunlight pours in, blinding white at the far edge of my sight, flooding everything around me. Pain flares, and I press both hands to my eyes, biting back a cry as agony radiates through my palms at the touch.
“You didn’t miss much. Nobles scheming. Court politics. A couple fancy dinners. The usual.” The hazy outline of a lean figure takes shape against the bright light. “Careful. Everything will hurt for a while.”
Hurt is an understatement, but a single, pressing need consumes me.
“Water,” I croak, and squint. Brilliant sunlight flashes on white marble, on gold and silver and obsidian set into the walls rising high around me.
The gleam catches on gilded bedposts on either end of the exceptionally huge, exceptionally soft bed beneath my aching limbs—and on the sapphire eyes fixed on mine.
Prince Cashel stands against the wall just a few feet from me, a knife flipping end over end in his hand.
One of my knives.
“What—” Racking coughs tear my lungs apart. He reaches out the ringed hand without the blade, offering a silver cup.
“Drink,” he orders, sapphire eyes lingering on my face. “All of it.”
I want to refuse. But I’m so damn thirsty, and the promise of sweet relief for my blistered throat is too tempting to ignore. I gulp the whole thing down, and he offers a matching silver pitcher polished to a high shine.
I nod in answer.
He fills the cup back up, and I sip at it slowly this time, savoring the way the water chases away the worst of the aching thirst. My skin feels sunburned, hot to the touch and tingling.
I inch myself up on screaming limbs, eyeing him warily. “What do you want with me?”
The prince shakes his head. “I had thought the first words out of your mouth might be thank you, but perhaps that was too optimistic.”
“And were you expecting a bow or a curtsy with that, Your Majesty?” My eyes narrow up at him as I test out my muscles. But beneath the instinctual fear at the sight of him, there’s a current of something darker, near hypnotic, about being this close to him.
He catches the flipping knife by the tip without even looking at it. “Only my father and stepmother are called that.” The space between us feels as fragile as thin ice. “Though usually, warning someone about danger and saving their life in one afternoon might warrant a thank-you.”
I guess I wasn’t imagining things. He was hinting about the ice.
“Why would a prince help a peasant?”
The prince takes the empty cup from my hands and places it on a side table, one thumb looping through the pocket of his rich brown hose just where the velvet tunic meets the straight cut of his hips. “I think the words you’re looking for are ‘Thank you, Cashel, for saving my life.’ ”
“I know the words I meant!”
Old Ones, the nerve of him.
All I want to do is smack the infuriating smile spreading across his mouth. I clench my fists, but pain rips over my palms again. What is that?
He glances down at my hands. “Nerve damage. It won’t ever fully heal, but it should fade in a few months. Probably. You’re lucky I was there to help you right away.”
Months? Probably? Fuck.
“Is that right?” There’s no hiding the bitterness in my voice as the pain sears through me.
Hurt and fear mingle at the edges of me, but I push the feelings away and turn them into something useful.
Something that bites. “Because from where I’m sitting, it feels like all of this is your fault. Making everyone compete over you.”
The whole set of his lean body tenses. “You think I want any of this?”
“I think you’re a prince.” The word comes out like an insult.
“Exactly,” he snaps.
Silence stretches between us, completely at odds with the brilliant sunlight bathing the room.
He lets out a terse breath. “Look. If it was up to me, none of this would be happening. I could choose a partner for myself.” His eyes snap up to mine, and I shiver at the cold resignation there. “I think we both know who’s pulling the strings on this isle right now.”
There are too many insinuations behind his words. Too many lethal questions I can’t dare voice.
I start with an easier one. “Where am I? Who else is…” My throat scratches, and I cough. “Who else is dead? And where is…” I almost say Talon, but something stops me. “My guard?”
Cashel’s eyes narrow. “My own gardai are outside the door, like always. You can bet your ass I’m not having you plus a guard I don’t know and don’t trust in a room with this many daggers in it.”
He taps at the side table, spread out with every one of my blades.
Damn it.
I’m completely defenseless, lying here in his bed. My palms feel like they’re made of thorns, and my eyes sting at the pain. I shift topics. “It was creatlach, wasn’t it?”
“How do you—?” Cashel startles, then rubs a hand over his face. “Yes, it was creatlach. It’s one of my stepmother’s favorites.”
A tiny flicker of pride flares in my chest. I was right. But the implication behind his words dangles in the air. “And you just happened to have the antidote handy?”
“Live long enough with her trying to poison you, and you’d learn what to keep on hand for the next time she bribes a healer to be indisposed too.”
He scowls, memories darkening his navy eyes. I hate that I’m learning how to decipher the shifting colors. I don’t want to know that they gleam a lighter sapphire when he teases me and turn the exact shade of storm clouds when I hit a nerve.
Still, a look I can’t read ripples over Cashel’s features. His midnight stare turns probing. “Well… if you aren’t going to thank me, then I have some questions.”
Warning bells ring in my head.
There’s no one here to help me. He could have one of the knives Wolf gave me at my throat in an instant. No gardai would come running in for me.
I meet the exacting chill of his gaze. “I’m an open book.”
“You’re not, but let’s ignore for a second the fact that you seem to lie as easily as you breathe.” His intent stare chills me. “Who brought you here?”
The knot that’s lived in my stomach since I got here clenches painfully. “The gardai.”
“No. Don’t play games with me.” He steps forward from the wall. A harsh light snaps in his gaze. “I know the girl who was here first isn’t here anymore. Someone cleared a path for you to take her place. I want to know who.”
I sit up higher in the bed—a little farther from him, in case I need to roll to the other side and put the mattress between us, fast. “You can’t possibly prove that.”
“You think I wouldn’t have wanted a look at the sacrificial lamb they brought in for this?
” Cashel’s eyes turn stormy. “I bribed a guard. I saw that light streak in her dark hair. I know she waited in that cell for days before the others paraded up here. Imagine my surprise when it wasn’t her coming down the steps at the First Look, but you—right after you mysteriously showed up in my mother’s garden. ”
“You ripped the roses out of your own mother’s garden?”
A vicious glint chills his eyes. “The roses weren’t hers. Why do you think my stepmother planted them there?” Cashel laughs, but it’s not soft. “She knows it’s my favorite place to go.”
And white is one of Cymrea’s colors.
He lowers himself to sit at the edge of the bed. “Someone swapped you for her. And that someone gave you all these daggers, too.” Excuses form on my lips, but he cuts me off. “Do not lie to me.”
Cashel plucks one of the blades from the table. “That’s Málmar steel.”
I scoff but never take my eyes off him. Wary nerves prickle under my skin at the certainty flaring in his gaze.
He taps one finger along the swirling hue to the flat of the blade.
“Oh, it’s real.” My heart thrums faster, and I have to fight to keep the shock off my face.
“I’d bet my life on it. You can’t get that swirl without the heat from their forges, right on top of volcanic rock.
Half the nobles in this court can’t afford one, but multiple?
” He shakes his head. “Someone gave these to you. Someone planted you here. Very conveniently, I might add, one month after my father—who’s always been a tyrant—turns into a full-fledged fucking monster and starts massacring his own people. ”
He’s dangerously close to the truth now.
I need to get him off this trail. “We aren’t his.”
Outside the windows, the light shifts, catching his gaze. “Distracting me isn’t going to work. But just for the record, under the Charter of Eireann, you are. Like it or not, we all are.” Cashel pauses, letting heartbeats draw out. “Unless something changes for us.”
My chest tightens. “Us?”
He moves closer, putting down the blade.
“You’re working with someone. Plotting something. And since you don’t strike me as an adulterer,” he says, dark stare hardening as he references his words from the night in the garden, “my guess is that you’re an assassin.”
My lungs constrict, but I won’t flinch from him the way he probably expects.
I won’t back down, not now that I know what’s really at stake. I won’t betray the Whisperers, or Wolf, even if they’ve been hiding the truth about there still being magic left in the Seven Wells. Raw fury rips through me, remembering.
What else don’t I know?
I need the truth. And if I betray them, I’ll never get it.
“And what would you do if I am?”
My words come out breathless and rough. Everything in me coils at his nearness—both to me and the secrets he shouldn’t be this close to.
Cashel’s lips curl into a slow, victorious curve. “I would help you.”