24
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My eyes peeled open to the familiar overhang of compacted dirt and swinging ivy.
Groaning, my whole body feeling scrubbed raw, I tried my best to lean against the wooden headboard behind me.
“Now who’s insane and stupid?” Raegan spat from where he stood against the opposite wall, his back pressed against it and his arms folded over his chest. “What were you thinking, Olivia?”
Oh, he was pissed.
Very pissed.
I opened my mouth to speak, but realized that the inside of my throat felt as if acid had been poured down it. Instead, I slammed my mouth shut and simply looked at him.
“You’re a fool,” he growled, beginning to pace back and forth at my bedside. “A damn fool.”
It wasn’t fair that I wasn’t able to speak, that I wasn’t able to defend myself or shoot his own anger back at him. All I could do was stare and try my best to speak through my eyes, which felt like they had been rubbed down with sandpaper. I also could not smell anything.
He finally stopped wearing a deep path into the floor beneath him and glared at me. “You disobeyed a direct order from me.”
My eyes said: I don’t care about your orders.
He scoffed, spinning on his heel to begin another burning of his soles against the dirt. “I’m furious with you.”
Trying to speak, all I managed was a strangled croak that made me instantly taste blood.
“Stop trying to talk,” he snarled, refusing to look at me. “Gods, Olivia. You fool.”
The angrier he got, the funnier it became. Which was terrible, because the first attempt at laughter nearly shattered my ribs.
“Killian is beside himself. He was just as ignorant as you when he dove in after you.”
My heart tightened at that. It was no longer funny.
Opening my mouth and forcing the words out, my voice was not my own. My voice was not a voice at all, but a tearing of letters put together and mashed into a sentence. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine.” Raegan continued to seethe. “I almost lost you both. Fools, absolute fools.”
He had said fool so many times I was struggling to believe it was even a part of the dictionary.
His face twisted into something not quite Raegan. “Killian has been many things, but never a fool. He cares about you.”
I stared at Raegan, wondering how his statement appeared so much like a question.
“You… You care about him too, I imagine.”
I knew where Raegan was going with this. What he was trying to ask, no matter how indirectly. What I wanted to say, what I would likely never bring myself to be able to admit, was something as simple as this: Killian made life exciting, Raegan made life real.
Yet all I did was change the direction of the conversation.
“The meeting?” It wasn’t even a sentence worth saying, for how much it flayed the inner flesh of my mouth, but I just had to know.
“Postponed. And I told you to stop trying to talk. Do you ever listen?”
Raegan was only getting angrier, the darkness returning to his hair beneath the tall canopies of Choilltean and painting him far more brutish than he was.
“The Queen was distraught, her people were distraught. We moved it ahead by a week.”
A week.
I’d only have two left after that. If I survived this injured state, that is.
“She’s furious. Absolutely livid. And craving war, from the sounds of it. I’m not sure what will become of tomorrow. Almost every kingdom has been hit now, I think they will come to some sort of agreement. I hope.”
Raegan was rambling, but I was happy to let him because second-by-second the wrath was steaming off of him.
Until I replayed his words in my head.
“Tomorrow?”
“Olivia! I will gag you if I must,” he hissed as he finally stopped pacing once more and turned to me. “Yes, tomorrow.”
“How long have I–”
His glare promised death if I didn’t stop talking, so I made a point of shutting my mouth.
“Days. Four, I think. I don’t know…” He began mumbling, and I picked up only a few words. “I don’t even know what day it is.”
I frowned at him in response, hoping he understood what I wanted to say. Either he did and refused to comment on it, or he was oblivious.
I began waving my arms wildly at him, earning me a curious stare.
“Pen.” I coughed. “Paper.”
“Quill, ink, and stripped bark will have to do,” he grumbled as he fled the room.
I was left staring at the ceiling once more, feeling increasingly more haunted by the fact I had wasted four days lying in a bed. Four days of the thirty I had been given.
When Raegan re-entered the room, a pooling of light followed him from the many fireflies in the hallway. It allowed me the briefest of proper glimpses at him, at how truly unkempt he looked.
He tossed me the quill, ink, and stripped bark.
In straggly writing, mostly because my hands were burning, I wrote out my words:
Let me attend the meeting tomorrow.
When I turned it around to show him, he scoffed and rolled his eyes. “You can hardly move.”
Scowling, I wrote more.
Bring me a healer and fix that, then.
As his eyes skimmed the words, the corners of his lips dared to stretch into a grin. “Not only do you not listen to a single thing I tell you, you also have the audacity to demand things of me?”
Raegan! I wrote.
He rolled his eyes a second time. “You’ve had a healer in here everyday. They’re trying their best. A few more days and you’ll be okay.”
Then drag me into that meeting if you must. I want to be there.
This time, as he read my words, his face shifted. He slumped down onto the end of my bed, his eyes narrowing as he looked at me.
“You truly care about our people, don’t you?”
Yes. I wrote and underlined six times.
“Why?”
Can’t we have this conversation any other time?
“Glad to see you have not lost any of your charm.” He smirked, but the normal gleam to his eyes was noticeably absent. “Killian wishes to see you.”
I grinned at him as I got to work with my quill, hoping he could detect the sarcasm through the slanted words.
Do I look as bad as I feel?
“Worse, even.” He laughed. “But I can’t be here tonight and I asked him if he would take over—” He cut his words short before the meaning sunk in behind them.
I swore that all I could hear was snoring. That was you?
It was a gentle prod, a layered question that I hoped he couldn’t detect.
“I don’t snore,” he huffed.
So not you then.
He knew exactly what I was asking, because he creased his brows and looked away from my paper. I finished scribbling one more sentence then chucked the quill at his head, my only option for earning his attention.
Killian can come in.
~
Killian arrived a few hours later, after I had drank enough lemon-tea to be sure that there were no more lemon trees left on this earth. While I absolutely hated the taste, it soothed the length of my throat and allowed me to speak words, though sparingly and carefully.
He crept into the room and shut the door behind him, leaning against it as he frowned at me. “For someone who claims to hate darkness, you sure were quick to jump right into it.”
It was supposed to be a joke, probably. But neither one of us laughed, instead just staring at the face across from one another as we took in the state of our skin. Killian’s face was red, not flush with heat but with a new layer of skin that looked about as tight and painful as my own face felt.
“You almost got yourself killed,” he sighed, moving further into the room and stopping at the end of my bed.
“The. Twins?” The healer had warned me not to speak, but I just had to know.
“Alive. Thanks to you.”
“Then,” I groaned as I shifted in the bed. “It. Was. Worth. It.”
Making a straight line of his lips, Killian shook his head slowly at me but refused to take his eyes away from mine. “You’re really something else, you know?”
“Laughing,” I coughed, trying my best not to actually laugh. “If you have. Just come in. Here to yell at me. You can save. Your–” I began hacking, my hands wrapped around my throat, “ – your breath. Your patronizing–patronizing Prince beat. You to it.”
“Oh for all that is heavenly and good, please stop talking,” Killian laughed as he crossed the space halting at the edge of my bed.
“May I?” He motioned to the opposite side of the bed, the gaping space between me and the edge.
Nodding, I watched as he awkwardly fit himself into the space, capable of hosting another me but perhaps not someone of his width.
After maneuvering himself in various directions, he gave up and with a sigh sunk into the material beneath us.
“I’m not here to yell at you, Olivia. I’ve come to provide you with some entertainment while you rot here for the next few days. ”
“Valiant,” I croaked.
“I thought so.” He grinned. “I don’t have much to offer in the form of entertainment, of course, but I do have stories.”
My eyes shone ever so brighter as that thought sunk in.
Killian, at last settled next to me, released a deep sigh and an agonized groan that made me flinch. Finally gathering the courage to look up at him, I realized he was already staring down at me.
“You terrified me,” he admitted, his voice low and quiet.
I went to apologize, but he shook his head.
“I am trying my best,” he said, frowning. “I am trying my best to be more… more human. For you, I mean. I am trying to keep my more… pixie instincts and behaviours hidden.”
“Don’t,” I breathed. “I want you. The real you.”
He shook his head again just as a guttural noise slipped from him.
“When you slipped beneath the water for the last time and didn’t come back up, I couldn’t take it. The thought of you…” He shook his head a third time and I placed my hand over his just to soothe him. But like I had seen from Raegan several times, his pupils blew wide and his nostrils flared.
“I thought you were as good as dead, and then you were lifeless in my arms and I couldn’t pretend to be human anymore.”
“What does that mean?” I whispered, somewhat afraid of what he might say. Did he want to… eat me? Worse? I regretted asking.