Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
Cara
The next morning, Fear left me to sleep too long, and I woke with that guilty sense that it was midmorning, and I had left others to carry my chores.
I quickly washed in the basin he had set out for me, the kettle of hot water beside it fresh and steaming.
Fear would not have let someone else into our tent when I was naked beneath the quilts.
Somehow it was most irritating to imagine him carrying in the basin, gathering towels and soap, warming the kettle.
Thoughtful bastard. It was a form of my anger that was ridiculous, and I knew it.
Then I dressed in a fresh tunic and leggings, boots and knives before stumbling out.
“Good morning, my love,” he said, expansively. A bit of pretend for the camp. “Did you have sweet dreams?”
There was a mischievous twinkle in his gaze. I should not have slept with him, this man who was the master of my nightmares and, apparently, of my dreams too.
I could not tell him to fuck off, not when someone might hear, so I settled for taking the cup of tea out of his hand. “We have work to do.”
“Yes. Your mother made that clear.” He gestured toward the far end of the row of tents. Probably far enough that she could not have heard the night before.
“You should have woken me.” My mother hated laziness. Not that it mattered. “We’ve so much to do.”
“You seemed too content to wake.” He was a smug bastard. I couldn’t entirely blame him, given I had kissed him and ground against his lap, and gods, I wanted to die. “It is going to be interesting getting to know your family. Who made you the way you are.”
If my mother liked him, I was going to die, for sure. Just to spite them all.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be too strange if Fear’s wife occasionally told him to fuck off. I could get away with it without ruining our cover, couldn’t I?
“Where are we doing it?” My hand went to the knife on my belt.
“Always with the knives,” he noted. “I asked Corbyn for a tent. He has us set up already.”
“Why did you let me sleep so long?” I was being unreasonable and grouchy, and I knew it. I pressed my lips together.
“You needed rest. There’s no shame in taking it.” He always sounded so sure of himself, though he didn’t need as much sleep as I did.
I only saw the rebels around us moving through the midmorning sun of the camp on various chores. None of Bismyth. “Where is everyone?”
“Bismyth has a mission from the queen. I sent the rest to join Asrael.”
The queen would want revenge. She had freed us from the Trials, despite my delinquent dragon, for a purpose. “Are they safe?”
“No.”
“We should be with them.”
“I would prefer that,” he admitted. “But we have our own work to do, and Anayla is a good leader. Better than me. She’ll bring them home.”
“Better than you?”
I had faith in Anayla, but I couldn’t quite make sense of him saying someone else was better than he. Though I supposed he had trained her, so perhaps Fear managed to work his arrogance into confidence in his followers.
Fear didn’t answer. “I’ll fetch the Nightwalkers.”
Soon, Fear and I were facing the first Nightwalker. Riven ducked his head under the flap to enter the tent, and his gaze met mine, dark and even.
The canvas ceiling of the tent felt too low over my head, making me claustrophobic as he regarded the room where I was going to cut out the enchantment.
“How does this work?” he asked me.
“When I did it before,” I answered carefully, because I had only seen this work once, “the enchantment crystallized under the skin, and I was able to cut it out.”
“Before?” he asked sharply. “Once?”
“Once,” I admitted.
He let out a sharp huff of a laugh. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Sit on the bed, please.”
He did. There was something not quite right about the Nightwalkers, as if something essential to who they were had been cut out of them. Their every movement was deliberate, as if they did not move unless commanded. He was still in that way now. His gaze was steady somewhere beyond my shoulder.
“I’m going to need to find it first,” I told Riven. “Before I cut. It’ll feel strange.”
“I feel little,” he promised me. “Just free me.”
Fear moved behind him, ready to act if he felt more than he realized and turned dangerous under the knife. I was not concerned about the Nightwalker when Fear stood waiting.
The knife wasn’t just a blade. It searched. It pulled toward the wrongness the way water found the low ground. I had only to follow what it found and keep my hand steady.
It found the enchantment immediately.
Not the same as mine had been. Mine had been crystalline and geometric, the queen’s work done precisely and just underneath my skin.
This was older. More settled, the way rot was made of the wood itself, and though I could see the lump of it pressing out through his skin now, it was buried in the flesh too.
Riven’s breath changed. Barely, just the faint catch of someone feeling something they had not expected to feel.
“We are going to need a healer,” I told Fear quietly, taking a step back.
Fear nodded and went out. A moment later, he was back. He had his hand on his belt, on the potion, but I could guess he did not want to use it unless he had to. Not when his dragon had to bleed for it.
“There’s a reason I’m first,” Riven said, sounding unoffended.
“You’ll be fine. I did it to myself.”
Riven’s gaze leapt up to mine, as if that were new and startling information. The healer came in behind, making the room crowded, then moved to Riven’s other side.
I cut.
The enchantment resisted. As I bore down, the warmth in the knife’s hilt flared into heat. Blood welled. Riven made no sound, but his hands found the blankets to either side and tore them loose.
The enchantment came loose the way old roots come loose, tearing, resistant, leaving something behind in the soil.
I gripped it with my fingers as I slid the tip of the blade beneath it as an anchor.
Riven made a sound for the first time, small and desperate, and I dared not look. I cut and ripped and pulled it free.
I looked down at the hard lump of the enchantment on my palm, glittering between the blood and clumps of gore. Bile rose sharp and bitter in the back of my throat. I flung the enchantment into a waiting bowl at the table. The healer was already working to fix the gap left behind in Riven’s flesh.
I stumbled out into the clean, bright morning, my hands covered in blood. Fear came with me.
“You’re all right,” he murmured, and then he was at the basin beside me, pouring water over my hands. His hands slid over mine, his fingers and thumb stroking over my palms, between the webbing of my fingers, along the base of my nails, working loose the blood in a foam of soap.
Then my hands were clean, and he had my wrists in his hands, drying my hands against his shirt, holding them against the warm expanse of his chest. The motion forced us close together, my gaze rising from his throat to his face.
“Another mortal can finish with the others,” he offered.
“No, they cannot.”
I owed it to Tesa and to Tay.
And I owed it to our story. If no one else wielded the knife, then the legend grew, just a little. The dragon-marked mortal who wields the unmaking knife. The dragon-marked mortal who undoes the queen’s enchantments.
I had not wanted to be a part of any legend, because every legend was a lie.
But the people needed hope.
Feeling more steady, I promised, “I’m capable.”
He touched my face tenderly, his thumb scraping over my cheek. If I had wept, he brushed the tear away before anyone could notice. “You are. And I am at your side.”
As always, I couldn’t quite see the seam, what was performed for an awestruck theater, and what was real between us. The damp of my hands had left impressions of my palms and fingers against his shirt.
We went in again together.
The healer bandaged Riven’s wound. The enchantment crystal was dissolving away into nothing, blue light wisping away from it as it came undone.
He looked away from the wound and from us, his dark hair long around his lean face.
I studied him, not able to tell if he was mortal or shifter or Fae.
What had he been before he was a Nightwalker?
“You’re free,” I told him.
“Yes. And now I remember everything I did for her.” He watched as the healer tied the last of the bandage. Riven stood to his feet, abrupt and eager. “I do not feel free.”
He went out into the camp.
Fear looked at me as if he were not sure of me. Given how he’d washed the blood from my hands only moments ago, the scent of poisoned magic sick in the air around us, it was entirely understandable. Unfortunately. I would have liked to hate him more.
“Let’s help Tesa,” I said, my words chosen carefully, because being released from the queen’s enchantment might not feel like freedom.