CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO THE DOOR, NOT THE CURSE
E uan McFarland knelt before her, and Marion decided she had survived entirely too much to allow the man to make a habit of it.
The Grove had barely stopped howling.
Snow still drifted down through the torn branches, soft and careless as if the sky had not spent the morning watching wolves bleed.
The execution stone was cracked behind him.
The axe stood buried blade first in the snow.
Around them, the clan remained still, not certain whether they had witnessed a coronation, a miracle, a battle, or several varieties of madness stitched badly together.
Marion knew the feeling.
She stared at Euan’s bowed head.
His dark hair had fallen forward, hiding part of his face. Blood streaked one cheek. His shirt was torn at the ribs where Aldrich’s poison had tried to take him, though the black veins were gone now. The mark on his throat, her mark, glowed faintly beneath the drying blood.
One hand rested over it.
Not claiming.
Remembering.
“Marion,” he said again, and his voice roughened around her name. “I owe you more than a bow.”
Something in her chest tightened.
Oh no.
No, he did not get to sound like that. Not here. Not with his knees in snow and half the clan watching and her daughter looking worried enough to bite someone. Marion knew that voice. It was the one he used when guilt had found a holy-looking coat and convinced him it was duty.
She stepped close enough that her toes touched his knee.
“Get up.”
His head lifted.
The look in his eyes nearly ruined her. The old grief was there, yes, but it was different now. Not poisoned. Not frenzied. It was clearer and therefore harder to avoid. A man could be forgiven for madness. A man choosing sorrow with his eyes open was far more troublesome.
“I have not said it,” he said.
“You can say it standing.”
His jaw tightened. “I should have said it long ago.”
“Yes.”
The answer struck him. She saw it.
Good.
She was done softening truth because a man already bled. Half her life had been spent making pain easier for others to swallow. Not this. Not them.
Euan’s hand dropped from his throat to his thigh. “I hurt you.”
“Yes.”
He closed his eyes.
Marion wished he would not do that. She had spent so much of the last three books watching him close himself away from her, one noble inch at a time. He would shut his eyes and call it restraint. He would step back and call it protection. He would bleed quietly and call it keeping others safe.
“Open your eyes,” she said.
He did.
Gold caught in them, faded now to something closer to human. That was worse too. Wolves had excuses. Men had to answer.
Marion bent and caught his face between both hands.
Several wolves shifted nearby.
Euan went utterly still.
“You will not kneel while you tell me,” she said. “I will not stand above you while I answer.”
His throat moved. “Marion.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“Then act as if you do.”
For one second he looked as though a laugh might break through the wreckage of him. It did not. Not quite. But his mouth moved, and that was something.
He rose slowly.
Too slowly.
His body was still paying for every bad decision it had ever made, and from what Marion knew of Euan McFarland, there had been many.
She kept her hands on him because he looked as if he might sway.
He did not, because pride had clearly survived the poison.
Still, when he gained his feet, he did not step back.
They stood close enough that she could feel the heat of him.
Alive.
That word was becoming a place inside her.
Around them, the clan began to move again. Not away at first. They stared, uncertain, reverent, nosy. Wolves were apparently no better than village women after a funeral.
Morna clapped her hands once.
The sharp sound made three warriors jump.
“Are you all waiting for an invitation to bleed on my shoes?” she snapped. “Move. Wounded to the western roots. Those who can stand, carry those who cannot. Tavish, if you fall over, I will leave you where you drop.”
“I am wounded,” Tavish protested.
“You are dramatic.”
“I am also wounded.”
“Then be wounded quietly.”
Georgie, who had been hovering near Rhona, looked torn between running to Marion and supervising Tavish’s survival. Lorna solved the matter by putting a hand on Georgie’s shoulder and giving Marion a look that said she would keep the child for a moment.
Marion nodded, grateful enough that she might have hugged the young woman if every bone in her body did not feel borrowed and badly returned.
The Grove slowly loosened around them.
Aodh pulled the axe from the snow and carried it away from the execution stone. Marion noticed that. Euan did too. His gaze followed the old Keeper for a moment, and pain moved through the bond.
Not fear.
Memory.
Marion touched his wrist.
He looked back at her.
“Not here,” she said quietly.
He understood.
Together they walked to the far edge of the Grove, where the black trees thinned and the land sloped toward a frozen stream. The snow there was less ruined. Less trampled. It held only the prints of wolves and one dark smear where someone had dragged a wounded soldier away.
Very peaceful.
By the current standard.
Marion stopped beside a stone half covered in moss. Her legs wanted to give up. She leaned against it because falling over during a serious conversation seemed undignified, even for her.
Euan noticed, of course.
“Sit.”
She gave him a look.
He paused. “Please.”
“Better.”
His brows drew faintly together. “You are going to correct me forever, are you not?”
“Likely.”
Something warmed in his eyes then, small and startled. As if forever had been a word he had not expected to be allowed near.
Marion sat on the stone.
The cold came through her shift, but she hardly cared. Euan remained standing at first, then, after one look from her, sat beside her on the snow-covered ground instead.
Not kneeling.
Sitting.
It would do.
For a moment neither spoke.
The sound of the Grove faded behind them into wounded order. Low voices. Morna’s curses. Georgie asking questions someone was too tired to answer properly. A wolf coughing. Snow falling from branches in soft little sighs.
Euan stared at his hands.
That bothered her.
His hands had done such different things. Broken chains. Held swords. Clutched Marion’s dead body. Carried Georgie when she fell asleep in Castle McFarland’s hall and pretended she had not. Trembled when Marion first touched the bite he had left.
He flexed them once.
“I thought my love was a curse,” he said.
There it was.
No preamble.
No polished confession.
Just the wound.
Marion’s breath caught, but she said nothing.
His gaze remained on his hands. “From the first night I remembered the bite, I believed I had put death into you. Not at once, perhaps. Not cleanly. But I thought everything that followed came from that. Your pain. Your fear. Your body turning against itself.” His voice roughened.
“Every time I wanted you, I thought desire might be another blade.”
Marion folded her hands tightly in her lap.
She remembered.
God help her, she remembered all of it. The way he looked at her as if she were fire and injury in the same breath.
The way his hands would half lift, then drop.
The way he slept outside her door as wolf because distance hurt, but closeness frightened him worse.
She had thought, more than once, that he regretted her.
That had left marks too.
“I felt rejected,” she said.
He closed his eyes once, then opened them quickly, as if remembering her earlier command. “I know.”
“No, I want you to hear it. Not know it like a man trying to punish himself with facts.” She turned toward him.
“I felt rejected. I felt wanted and unwanted at the same time. I was changing, frightened, sick, and the one person my body knew was you. And you looked at me as if touching me might make you evil.”
His face tightened.
“I did not think you evil,” he said.
“I know that now.”
“I thought myself evil.”
“That still left me alone.”
He flinched.
She did not apologize.
The silence after that was not easy.
It was honest though.
That was better.
Euan bowed his head, but not enough to become a kneel. “I should have told you the truth of the bond sooner.”
“Yes.”
“I should have trusted you to choose.”
“Yes.”
“I should not have walked to the Grove.”
“Oh, we are absolutely speaking of that.”
His mouth pressed together.
Marion leaned closer. “You were going to die, Euan. Not in battle. Not because there was no other way. You chose to let grief make a decision for Georgie, for your clan, and for me.”
“You were dead.”
“I was very inconvenienced.”
A rough sound left him.
Not a laugh. Not fully. But close enough.
Marion’s own mouth trembled.
Then she grew serious again. “I know why you believed it. I saw enough through the bond. I am not blind to your pain. But you do not get to turn love into punishment and call it honor. Not anymore.”
He looked at her then.
Finally.
“I do not know how to forgive myself,” he said.
The words were so plain that they hurt.
Marion had expected resistance, perhaps denial, perhaps another apology wrapped in guilt and handed to her like a stone. She had not expected the truth bare enough to bleed.
She reached out and took his hand.
His fingers closed around hers at once.
Of course they did.
“You begin,” she said, “by not making forgiveness my burden.”
His brows drew together.
“I cannot climb into your chest and scrub every dark corner until you think yourself worthy. I would, perhaps, if I could, because I am foolish in familiar ways.” Her thumb brushed over the back of his hand.
“But I cannot. And I will not spend our life proving I am alive enough for you to stop grieving me.”
His throat moved.
“That is fair.”
“I was not aiming for fair. I was aiming for true.”
“Aye.”
The word was soft.