Chapter Twenty-Six
TWENTY-SIX
Stepping through the worn door feels like stepping back in time.
It’s as if time itself could freeze here, and no one outside these walls would be any the wiser. Every inch of the stone room somehow reminds me of dried leaves skittering in a late-autumn breeze, the crumbling fragility hollow and haunting in the same breath.
“What is this place?”
No one’s here, so I don’t know why my words come out as a whisper. But anything louder feels like shouting on hallowed ground.
Wolf untangles his fingers from mine and steps away. When the warmth of his touch flees from my skin, something in me protests.
He turns his back to me and crosses the wide sweep of the carved stone room in long, familiar strides. My eyes follow him, skimming over the leather shielding the broad expanse of his shoulders, as he approaches a cupboard lining the far wall.
Wolf rummages inside it, digging through the shelves stocked with an impossible variety of dried herbs in glass jars.
There are fragile heads of white yarrow, bundles of velvety sage, and delicate, tiny roses—not white, not crimson, but a golden yellow with silvered stems—hanging upside down from rough yarn, along with baskets of bandages and wide glass bowls like the apprentices in the temples used to light incense, to keep the ash off the altars.
Another table has a terrifying array of metal instruments laid out, as if for surgery.
Or torture.
Nope. Not going there. The risk is all too real.
If the Lady of Shadows ever gets her hands on me, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
Wolf turns back to me, his arms full of heaps of bandages, a spool of fine black thread, and a pair of silver scissors that shine menacingly even from across the room. He lays the supplies on a wooden worktable in the middle of the room and lifts his gaze to mine.
“Just a memory everyone wants to forget.” His answer sounds so weary. “Don’t worry. We’re safe here.”
I take in the still, quiet space. A narrow glass window thick with grime lets in a dreamy kind of light. There’s an assortment of little tables and chairs scattered all around, with arcane glass vials and baskets of fraying papers, and leather-bound books on every available surface.
Their titles hint at histories I’ve never read and battles I know next to nothing about.
Battle Songs of Tara: A History of Mage Warfare
The War of Wasted Blood and the First Fight for Succession
Cymrea, Resurgent: Strategies and Tactics for a New World
I thumb a finger over the second title, curiosity battling with the pain in my side. The War of Wasted Blood was after Berach the Cunning, the first High King, seized power from the Old Ones. But there was no fight for succession—he only had one child, Fachtna the Unwise.
Didn’t he?
“I’d offer you another one for a bit of bedtime reading,” Wolf ventures, his eyes taking me in. “But these are all… mildly treasonous.”
A rumpled cot lies just under the window, and there are two narrow doors on either side of the cupboard. Storage rooms, maybe, or a washing chamber.
I risk a small smile. “How out of character for you.”
The tight slant of his lips cracks, a curve teasing at the edges.
A portrait leaning, unhung, against the workbench next to the cot draws me in.
The frame is blackened with something thick and stuck into the ridges of its carved gilt, but the varnish on the painting itself is fully intact, as if someone’s taken the time to wipe any spatters clean from its surface.
Each brushstroke is still clear—expensive, I bet—coaxing out the expressions of a dark-haired man with eyes like coals and a grizzled beard.
A woman stands at his side, radiant with features that remind me of a hawk, strong and cunning and wise.
Her hands dig tightly into the shoulders of a young boy, no older than his early teens, and a small girl beside him, maybe…
seven or eight? I’ve always been a terrible judge of age.
My breath catches—the boy’s eyes are exactly the same green as Wolf’s.
“Who are they?” I ask softly, hovering one finger over the outline of them.
I don’t know if I’m really ready to hear the answer. To see their faces here, like this, knowing what happened to them. This must be his family.
Wolf draws in a deep breath. It only partly releases in a pained exhale, and a flash of something wounded and hollow tears across his features. “So many questions.”
My fingers move to trace the edges of the frame. “It’s not like you ever give me any answers.”
“Are you sure you really want them?”
His words are ragged and hard, and I can’t help but think he expects me to walk away. To turn my back from him and flee.
I lift my eyes to find his. “I know you think I’m a coward.” The word stings. “But like it or not, I’m still here. I haven’t run yet.”
Long, callused fingers trail the edge of the worktable.
“I don’t think you’re a coward.” Wolf’s voice lowers.
“You’re the very opposite of a coward, Maeve.
You burn. Every time I let myself look at you, you’re burning.
” Yearning sears in his fiery green eyes.
“And it’s getting harder and harder to make myself look away. ”
His words leave me grasping for understanding.
We would never work. We could never work, Wolf and me.
Even so, the words are a flame in the darkness, and I can’t resist the lure—the reckless hope in the shadows.
The moment feels like standing on the edge of a cliff, and one step will either pull us back or push us over—together.
After a long moment, Wolf’s eyes drift down my body to where my hand presses at the wound in my side. “Go ahead. Ask what you want.”
“Seriously?” Surprise instantly turns to suspicion. “Why?”
“Because I have one condition, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to hurt like shit.” Wolf nods to the heap of bandages and stitches and supplies on the worktable, and my stomach twists. “You let me take a look at that wound so I can make sure it won’t get infected.”
I hesitate, but the memory of the creatlach and the nerve damage and the gut-wrenching, awful feeling of being too weak to help myself means it’s not a serious debate.
This place is too dangerous for me to be down for long.
The space between us is only a few feet, but his eyes fix on mine and time seems to slow as I step toward him. I’m entirely too aware of the way he watches me. Hunger and something dangerously close to longing turn his gaze molten, but he doesn’t reach a finger for me.
He makes me go to him.
And for some reason, I do.
The worktable comes up to my waist. I have to shimmy myself up to sit on it, wincing where the movement tugs at my side, and sympathy furrows his brow.
Wolf doesn’t say a word. He just lets me settle back so my knees and feet hang over the edge, almost brushing the tops of his thighs where he stands, facing me.
“Okay. First question.” I draw in a breath as my fingers work at the collar of my bloodstained cloak and the shirt underneath. I let them both fall to the table and meet his eyes in challenge.
Cool air hits my exposed skin, bare except for the breast band wrapped around my chest, and sends a shiver down my spine. It takes everything in me to fight to ignore the fact I’m half-naked just inches away from him.
The way his eyes flash as they trace down my body to the angry slash from my ribs to my hip almost tricks me into believing he’s just as hyperaware as I am.
“You couldn’t have used that vial of magic in your jacket to kill all those assassins? Or kill the king from a safe distance?” The latter question has been clawing at me for weeks.
Wolf pours water from a heavy silver jug already on the table into a shallow bowl and dabs a piece of bandage into it. He reaches for my side and pauses.
“Can I touch you?”
“Yes,” I whisper, and brace myself.
His touch is impossibly gentle, working not on the wound but around it, dabbing at the smears and trickles of blood. The cool linen of the bandage raises goose bumps along my ribs, racing down my stomach at the closeness of him and the way his lips purse as he focuses.
“There’s a couple different answers to that question,” he muses. “I didn’t need magic to kill those assassins. So, safer to keep it for the rare instance my blades or my fists can’t take care of the danger.”
“You’re cocky.” I wince and look away from him. “Good to know.”
Wolf’s hand holding the bandage stills on my skin. A slow smile curves the edges of his lips, the bottom a little fuller than the top. “Is it cocky if it’s the truth?”
Shit. That damn smile. I force myself to look away before my cheeks can heat.
“And as for the king,” he continues, frowning slightly, “it doesn’t work like that.
Magic is… volatile. Especially with a balance as fragile as life and death.
That’s why the Martyr, she couldn’t save the High King’s first queen when she was being poisoned, but the vial I gave you worked for Finn.
Healer mages spend years training to gain some semblance of control over the elements in us: the blood in our veins, the air in our lungs.
They train just as hard as battle mages do, but becoming a mage…
” Wolf’s eyes darken. “That training demands everything in you. It’s why only the most powerful mages could ever work with caoranachs—they’re pure magic.
Their very existence is bound to there being magic left in the earth.
” His focus darts to my wound, and his forehead furrows as if he’s weighing a heavy decision.
He says softly, “And there aren’t many of them left now. ”
I blink.
No, I misheard him. There aren’t any of them left now.
Wolf’s eyes hold mine for a moment. “If we want to make sure someone is dead, we have to do it ourselves.”
Pain lances in my side, hot and fresh. “Fuck!”
“Sorry,” he murmurs, then brings the bandage back to the same spot, just a couple inches below the bottom edge of the slash, hovering right above the curve of my hip. “That hurts too?”