Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-six
Faolan
“Leave it.”
I swat the healer away, who huffs but pulls back his ochre-tinted hand.
A jar of yarrow paste sits open on the table beside him, next to a mortar and pestle brimming with flowers ground to a pulp.
There are other things: leaves and white heather from Frozen Hearth for pain.
Herbs Saoirse would be able to name without question.
I grit my teeth at the thought.
Stupid. So feckin’ stupid.
A second healer hovers beside the first, muttering something in his ear as she collects bandages and holds them out to Rowan, who takes them gingerly: fingers blistered, one eye black.
Past her shoulder, Aidan sits on a pile of cushions, shirtless and pale save for the acid burns raked down his left side.
Nessa’s been spared most of it, but even she’s forced to remain still as a third healer slathers ointment over each bright, angry mark on her arm.
Guilt eats a hole in my stomach, and anger gobbles up the rest.
“Let them take care of you.”
I glare at Kiara, who stands, arms crossed, against the brothel wall. Dried flecks of blood cling like rust to her shirt collar, painting her knuckles as well—mementos of the punch she threw into my jaw after three of her men hauled Lorcan inside.
I still feel the dead weight of him on my shoulder.
Can still count the heartbeats that faded against my back.
“I’m fine. They should focus their attention on Lorcan.”
“Lorcan is alive.” Kiara’s jaw locks tight as she kicks a boot into plaster, then pushes off the wall to face me down. “Stitched up and near bloodless, aye, but he’ll make it through the night. I need to make sure you’ll do the same.”
“It’s hardly a scratch, Kiara.”
“I don’t bloody care.” Her laugh is hard, hand hovering in the air like she wants to hit me again—and I sorely wish she would.
But she doesn’t. She closes her fist instead, letting it fall—jerking—to her side. “You’re not proving anything by suffering. I thought being with Saoirse would have taught you that.”
The chair scrapes rough across the ground as I stand, then immediately wobble.
Kiara doesn’t so much as flinch. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I hate you.”
“I don’t care.” She sets a hand on my shoulder and shoves me back into the chair. “Sit down. And shut up.”
My whole body recoils as she tugs at the shirt glued to my skin with dried blood, trying to see what’s been made of my chest—the slashes there that sting every time I breathe too deep. Shaking her head, she acts before I can stop her, grabbing a jug of water and dumping it over my head.
“Feck’s sake, Kiara!”
She ignores my protests, stripping the shirt neatly now it’s sodden through.
Still, I give it my best effort, cursing her name, her trousers, her favorite horse, as she throws the ruined, vaguely pink fabric into the first healer’s hands and goes for the cup of water next, dumping that on my wounds as well.
Indignation makes my lungs quiver, every breath sending a fresh knife of pain through my skin.
The cuts are long and ugly, but not the worst I’ve suffered. Still, something about them sings sharper than it should.
“Poison,” she confirms, squatting to have a closer look at their sallow edges. “Shite.”
I open my mouth to quip and she throws a hand over it. “One more godsdamned word, Faolan, and I’m knocking you out. Now, you,” she says, cutting a look at the first healer, who drops my ruined shirt. “What would cause these cuts to go blue at the edges?”
His hands waver in the air. “What shade of blue?”
“Do I look like a bloody artist?”
“Of course not, Ríona. My apologies.” He ducks forward, peering at my cuts in the filmy dawn light from the windows. “Ah. Periwinkle.”
“The snails?!” I drop my head back, only now realizing how much it’s been spinning. “Bastard. Downright humiliating, that is.”
“They’re actually rather brilliant and make the most incredible pigments when you—” The healer’s jaw snaps shut as Kiara glares, then jerks her chin toward me.
“Right. Listen. That’s the Wolf of the Wild you’re healing. If he dies, I’m holding you personally responsible. Understood?” The healer nods, paling by the second. “Good. Get to work.”
Shaking her head, Kiara catches the back of a chair and drags it to the center of the room, turning to face the others.
Aidan stares with open suspicion as a healer wraps bandages over his shoulder, chest, and arm.
Rowan doesn’t look at me while she paints that sunshine-gold ointment over her fingers, but I’ve never seen her face so closed off.
And Kiara…
I drop my head. “I’m sorry.”
Kiara’s snort rings hollow. “Not nearly good enough.”
A hiss escapes my lips as the first healer presses my flesh together over the widest cut, daubing something thick and sticky along my skin.
“I shouldn’t have left in the night like that.
Or allowed Lorcan, Nessa, and Aidan to come with me.
I should’ve waited for morning, or—winds o’ fury, I should’ve gone it alone. ”
This time, it’s Aidan who scoffs. “What, so you could be the avenging hero? Run here all blood-soaked and smiling about how you’d bested an ambush on your own?”
“That was the idea.” I can’t quite manage a smile, lips twisting and then dropping as the second healer hands me a tonic, commanding me to drink. Milky pink liquid spreads like chalk across my tongue. “Gods, that’s vile.”
“You deserve it.” It’s Rowan who speaks this time, eyes flicking up. The blue of them has always been so keen, but there’s no affection now to dull their sharp edges.
I set the glass down and flatten my hand to the rough-hewn wood below.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Even as I say the words, another set floats into my memory.
My mother’s voice, so muffled it’s like she’s speaking through the wall.
It doesn’t matter now, love. The damage is done. All we have left are the stories, and the wide journey ahead, aye?
Splinters bend beneath my fingers as I curl them slowly, and I swear if I breathed deep enough, I could smell neat’s-foot oil.
Feel the rough bristles of fur on my cheek again.
There once was a lad with no name who longed for a cloak of wolfskin.
“I’m sorry.”
The soft clatter of dried clay on the tabletop is the only sound for a while, until Kiara’s sigh floods the room. “You really mucked things up.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean really. For all your wildness and fooling, you’ve never been careless. Not when it comes to your crew.”
My eyes sting as I look past her shoulder to Nessa, then the door of Lorcan’s old room, painted with the cliffside he used to dive from as a wain.
Brilliant colors line the rock walls, just as they do at the northern cliffs of Painted Claw, but the surprise comes with the wee birds dotting its edges and waters.
Puffins, he’d called them the first time we’d met.
I hadn’t believed a word from his mouth—thought his tattoos were an artist’s renderings of particularly fat gulls.
One of those tattoos is a bloody ruin now, carved up like his shoulder and the side of his throat.
Kiara leans forward, one bright strand of hair lighting up like fire in the morning sun. “Faolan…seriously, what is happening to—”
“I don’t know!”
She jerks back like I’ve bitten her. I might as well have.
“I don’t know what’s happening—gods, don’t you think if I had even the smallest feckin’ clue I’d tell you?! Or put an end to it?”
I reach up to push my hair back and yelp when pain splices down my chest.
The healer grabs for my arm.
I rip it back—lurch to my feet as the floor tilts over, like a ship rocked by a storm, only this time, I don’t have goat’s hide around my ankle or any way to keep from falling down.
I stagger into the table and swear as it jars the objects on top, flowers scattering like fireflies as the mortar and pestle hit the ground.
“Sir, if you could—”
“Don’t touch me!”
The healer steps back, face jerking toward Kiara, who shakes her head. “You stay right there. You’re healing him.”
“I don’t want to be healed!”
I’m shouting now and I don’t even care—not until that cliffside door flings open and Lorcan’s mother steps out.
Eimear is normally a boisterous woman, as wide around as Lorcan though she doesn’t even reach his shoulders on a good day. I’ve never seen her without a smile, not once in ten years of visiting this place, but her mouth is flat and tight now.
“Is Lorcan…?”
“My son is sleeping.” Eimear’s voice trembles as she shakes her head. “And I’d like to keep it that way.”
“I’m sorry. Feck, I—” My leg buckles as I try to step forward, sending me careening into the table, then panting on the floor.
No one moves to stop it—and what’s more I don’t want them to.
I want to be in the dirt. Lower than dirt.
And in the silence, all I hear are my own words to Saoirse.
Calling her a fecking martyr.
A laugh rises and dies in my throat as I press my forehead to the rug, wrapping one arm across my chest to keep the cuts from gaping open. I hear the sea in my clouded ears—my mother’s dying screams. The chants of the Gan Ainm: disgusting, feckless cowards who cast us out in the middle of a storm.
There once was a lad with no name who longed for a cloak of wolfskin.
And what a shite reason that was for him to die.
I don’t know how to tell Kiara that I didn’t expect to live.
That I thought I’d die from the bargainer’s mark—die a legend—and without that promise, I don’t know who in the shade’s realm I am. I don’t know how to be anything else but a story—I wasn’t born anything at all!
Words fumble across my tongue until all that comes out is a pitiful stream.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—so feckin’ sorry.”
A hand catches my shoulder before I can pitch forward again. Two hands—three—haul me upright. Kiara crouches beside me, Nessa on the other side. Aidan, still frowning but here, grabs the jar and bandage from the table as Rowan holds open the door to the stairs.
I’m still blubbering as they carry me up, then lay me back on the bed.
Rowan bites her lip as she taps the handle once, then slips down the hall to her room.
Aidan hangs back near the doorframe, body rigid, jaw hitched to one side, then follows her out.
Kiara mutters thanks to Nessa, who strokes my hair once in a move so gentle, it might be the thing that breaks me.
It feels like my mother’s ghost is in the room.
“You’ve got him, Kiara?”
“Aye, I have.”
With a heavy sigh, Nessa shakes her head at me; then she’s gone.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter one more time, tongue thick with whatever the healer gave me. My hands spasm, clenching and unclenching on the bed. Kiara sighs and covers one of them with hers, squeezing until I lie still.
“I don’t need you to be sorry,” she finally says, eyes flicking back and forth like emeralds tossed on a pile of coins. “I need you to do better. Be better.”
“I know—”
“No, listen.” She presses my arm down into the mattress, then taps my temple with her other hand. “Whatever is going on inside there? Figure it out. We’re all born with some amount of bullshite to work through, but you can’t make yours everyone else’s problem. All right?”
Lights flicker across my eyelids. The room pitches again, then goes still.
I nod. “Aye, that’s a fair shake.”
“Good. Do it, then.” She lets me go, driving the heel of her hand across her eyes.
“Are you…crying?”
“No.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Go the feck to sleep.”
A chuff fumbles its way out of my mouth as I tip my head back, letting the strange tides wash over me.
Letting myself go numb.
Remembering how Saoirse used to do it. That pitiful phrase she’d say.
I see nothing. I want nothing. I am nothing.
Nothing…
I was nothing, once.
Just a reckless lad born with no name who longed for a cloak of wolfskin.