Chapter Eighteen #2
I take them in mine carefully. He sucks in a pained breath but doesn’t resist.
“Let me help you,” I whisper. I cannot keep the angry tremor from my voice, and he flinches at it.
I wait for him to resist, to pull away. But he only nods, and I see how hard he’s trying to hold himself together.
The pain in his hands must be terrible. After inspecting them, I set them gently upon my lap.
Taking a handkerchief from my pocket and finding it not too dirty with soot, I tear it in half and wrap each piece around his palms. He watches silently, still dazed.
My heart still burns as if I swallowed the fire. Ash and soot are smeared all over my gown, shawl, and arms. Even my hair smells like smoke. I look down at the braid hanging over my shoulder and see the ends are singed.
Plucking the needle I keep tucked beneath my collar, I tear off a length of silk thread with my teeth. Then I remove my shawl and begin embroidering it, quick, neat stitches.
“What are you doing now?” he asks cautiously.
“It’s a healing charm, slow working but with better results than those flashy, quick spells your usual cheap healers like to work. Makes them look good, to close up a wound all at once, but it’s not so impressive when you get gangrene a few days later.”
I stitch in silence after that, my thread illuminated by moonlight.
Conrad bears his pain stubbornly, his jaw rigidly set.
I pointedly say nothing of his Weaving, but I can sense the tension in him, waiting for the subject to come up.
He’s barely breathing for the weight of apprehension suspended between us.
The longer the silence stretches, the heavier it gets, until it feels the sky itself will come crashing down on our heads.
You’re a Weaver, is all I can think. You denied Sylvie her magic, while all along you were wielding it yourself.
He is a hypocrite and a bastard, and I should walk away now and leave him to tend his own damn wounds.
But he did just save my life.
“All right, it’s done,” I say at last, nearly ten minutes later.
I drape the shawl over him. The spellknot is cruder than I’d have liked, but I didn’t have hours to work on it, and he doesn’t have time to wait. It’s best to tend to these things quickly.
Once he’s covered, I place my hands on the embroidery and draw three deep breaths. Each one sends pain shooting through me, but I have to keep going or risk him getting infected and dropping dead in a few days.
The magic comes in fits and starts, my heart convulsing fitfully. I suck in a breath.
His eyes flick to mine questioningly.
“I’m all right,” I tell him. “I just . . . breathed in a lot of smoke.”
Conrad’s burned hand closes gingerly over my own. “I can help.”
He channels with me, holding my embroidery and exhaling slowly.
My magic trickles in from one end, while his flows brightly from the other.
He is nowhere near as strong as Sylvie, nor even as strong as I once was, before my debt to Lachlan took its toll on my heart.
But in my current condition, his strength is more than enough to compensate for my weakness.
The light of our combined magic flows through the threads and finally meets in the middle.
It illuminates us both and shines on the smoke still thick in the air, a ghostly corona all around us.
Threads of his magic entwine with mine, until they are indistinguishable from one another.
But I can feel his energy tingling on my hands, featherlight and warm.
It makes a shiver run down the back of my neck.
The sensation is as intimate as feeling his breath on my skin.
Does he feel my magic the same way? Does my power prickle over his wrists and coil up his arms?
My eyes lift to meet his, and for a moment, I cannot breathe.
For the second time tonight, I am held in thrall by a pair of eyes, but unlike Lachlan’s cold, immortal gaze, inscrutable as a lost language, Conrad’s is warm and human, filled with pain.
I expected anger, defensiveness, perhaps even hatred for my discovering his secret.
But instead, he looks haunted. There are whole paragraphs behind his eyes, and he gazes at me as if begging me to read them, to understand the secrets, explanations, fears, and hopes dammed up inside him.
Or perhaps that is a projection of my own swirling desires.
I want to peel him open and get all the answers to all the questions piling on my tongue.
You are a Weaver, I want to shout, if I could only find my voice. You are a Weaver who hates magic. Why, why, why?
Conrad blinks, breaking his gaze away first. He looks down. Between our hands, the embroidered threads begin to fade as the magic sinks in.
“There,” he says softly. “It’s done. Are you—Rose!”
With a sharp cry, I pull my hands back and clutch them to my chest, doubling over. Searing spasms of agony knife through my heart, radiating through my shoulders, neck, and stomach.
Conrad stiffens, the shawl slipping from his shoulders. “Rose!”
I shake my head, unable to speak.
Then I feel his fingertips, gentle and hesitant, on my shoulder. He can barely touch me for the burns on his hands. “You are hurt. I’ll go back to the house and ride for the doctor—”
“No,” I whisper. “It’s the smoke, nothing more.”
“Then here. You have more right to this than me.”
He removes the enchanted shawl and begins to place it around me. I shake my head, already knowing it’s useless. I’ve tried every healing spell there is, many times over, in an attempt to stop or even just soothe the pain. Nothing works, but I can’t exactly explain that to him.
“Let’s share it,” I say in compromise.
So we sit side by side, my shawl wrapped around us both, with the great, charred moor before us.
“Sylvie?” he asks.
“She’s at the house. She’s fine.”
He nods, starts to speak again, then closes his mouth. His eyes are dazed with exhaustion, pain, or both.
“So,” I begin, as the tension between us finally becomes too much to withstand. “You’re a Weaver.”
The corners of his mouth pinch downward. His fingers tense, as if he wants to curl them into fists but is stopped by the pain. “Swear you will say nothing of this to Sylvie. Tell her you put out the fire yourself.”
I watch him sidelong, half angry with him for keeping such a secret while denying Sylvie her own magic. Half pitying him, because he looks like a man whose soul is in ruins, as if the ability to channel were a disease eating away at his heart.
That doesn’t stop me from wanting to take him by the ear and shake answers out of him.
“I don’t know much,” he says. “Only a handful of spells, really. ’Tis not as though I went to a school as you did. Everything I know, my father taught me, at least until . . .”
“Magic took him from you?”
“Magic has taken everything from me,” he snarls. He nearly clenches his hand again, but with a grimace of pain forces his fingers to open. Captain whines beside him and puts his head on Conrad’s leg.
“Your mother?”
He nods. “I told you. ’Tis a curse in our blood.”
I turn to the scorched land and scan the night; the moon, though unseen, casts the smoke-filled sky in a surreal shade of lavender. All around, the hills roll dark and endless.
“What started the fire?” I ask, drawing thread from my sleeve and winding it idly around my finger. “You and I both know that was no natural blaze.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he replies too quickly, too casually. “We often burn the moors to clear the old, dead brush and make way for new crops.”
Is he seriously trying to deny what just happened? “Conrad, that was magic. I saw shapes in the flames that—”
“I don’t know what anyone could see through all that smoke. It was just fire, nothing more.”
My lips tighten, clamping down on the outburst simmering behind my teeth. Why are you lying, Conrad North? Controlled burns? In the middle of the night? I may not know much about country life, but I am not an idiot. I also notice he makes no mention of the supposed “missing sheep.”
My fingers begin to dance, tapping restlessly, drumming my kneecaps. I feel as if Conrad’s wind-wolves are trapped in my chest, howling into my veins.
Does he think me an idiot, to believe that fire was natural? I don’t look at him, but stare straight ahead, my face stone, my heart throwing itself against my ribs.
Dread and suspicion blacken my thoughts. I feel I will fly apart. I want to rattle the truth from him. But I cannot, not if there is any chance he is what my instincts are telling me he is.
So I look at him and smile, and let him see me accept his lie.
“Your secret is safe with me,” I say.
He glances sharply at me. “What, just like that?”
“Did you want to argue about it? I told you, I will say nothing to Sylvie.”
“Why not? Why aren’t you berating me with questions? Where is your infernal nosiness now?”
I shrug. “If I asked those questions, would you answer them?”
He looks away, the muscles in his neck flexing.
“I thought not,” I sigh. “I’m tired, Conrad. I don’t have the energy to drag answers out of you. I want to go wash my face and get in my bed.”
He inclines his head, looking as weary as I feel. “Very well. Can you walk?”
He leans on me, and we begin the journey.
My shawl is still draped over him, but his breath is ragged with pain.
Halfway to the house, Mrs. MacDougal and Sylvie meet us, fussing and frantic.
The housekeeper helps to bear his weight, and Sylvie tells us Bell and Ariadne arrived safely back at the stables, but that their empty saddles had given them both a terrible fright.
She hugs Captain tight and stares at Conrad’s burned hands, but the bandages I wrapped around them hide the worst of his wounds.
In the house, Conrad insists he is not that bad off, but lets Sylvie pat his sooty face clean with a damp cloth.
He tells them of the burn gone out of control, but I see Mrs. MacDougal’s lips purse, just slightly, and I know she knows.
Of course she knows. She’s run this house longer than he’s been alive.
She’s complicit in all of this, whatever it is, however deep it goes.
Later that night, I pace my room, as tense as a cat in a cage. Is there more to Conrad North? Perhaps I’m wrong about all of it, leaping to foolish conclusions. My suspicions could be nothing more than heightened nerves.
I should just ask him.
Blunt and to the point.
What do you know of faeries, Mr. North? Are you in league with their murderous queen?
A few minutes more of this, and I’ve summoned the courage to open my door—
Only to duck in again, as Conrad goes stalking past, the manor creaking around him.
I hold my breath until he’s gone down the stairs, and then, snatching my cloak, I follow.
Because no matter what explanation he might give, I know now that I could not trust it. I can only discover for myself who Conrad North really is, and what he is hiding.
And why he wove that mighty wind spell with spider’s thread.