“Don’t check your pace on my account. You made impressive time.”
She sliced him a glare. “Did I do something to offend you today?”
His level stare revealed nothing, but his powerful arms kept working the wheels of his chair as he pushed himself along.
“Well?”
“Why do you shove away the prince? It seems like you two were once close.”
It was not the time or the place for this conversation. “That is none of your business.”
“Indulge me.”
“No.”
He easily kept pace with her as she increased her own. All the way to the doors to his suite.
Kadja was standing outside, and Yrene gave her an inane order—“I need dried thyme, lemon, and garlic”—that might have very well been one of her mother’s old recipes for fresh trout.
The servant vanished with a bow, and Yrene flung open the suite doors, holding one wide for him to pass.
“Just so you know,” Yrene hissed as she shut the doors loudly behind him, “your piss-poor attitude helps no one and nothing.”
Chaol slammed his chair to a halt in the middle of the foyer, and she winced at what it must have done to his hands. He opened his mouth, but shut it.
Right as the door to the other bedroom opened and Nesryn emerged, hair wet and gleaming.
“I was wondering where you went,” she said to him, then gave Yrene a nod of greeting. “Early morning?”
It took Yrene a few heartbeats to reorder the room, the dynamic with Nesryn now in it. Yrene was not the primary … person. She was the help, the secondary … whatever.
Chaol shook out his hands—indeed red marks marred them—but said to Nesryn, “I went to the Torre to help the girls with a defense lesson.”
Nesryn looked at the chair.
“On horseback,” he said.
Nesryn’s eyes now shot to Yrene, bright and wide. “You—how?”
“A brace,” Yrene clarified. “We were just about to resume our second attempt at healing.”
“And you could truly ride?”
Yrene felt Chaol’s inward flinch—mostly because she flinched as well. At the disbelief.
“We didn’t try out anything more than a fast walk, but yes,” he said calmly. Evenly. Like he expected such questions from Nesryn. Had grown used to it. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll try a trot.”
Though without leverage from his legs, the bouncing … Yrene went through her mental archives on groin injuries. But she stayed quiet.
“I’ll go with you,” Nesryn said, dark eyes lighting. “I can show you the city—perhaps my uncle’s home.”
Chaol only replied, “I would like that,” before Nesryn pressed a kiss to his cheek.
“I’m seeing them now for an hour or two,” said Nesryn. “Then meeting with—you know. I’ll be back this afternoon. And resume my … duties afterward.”
Careful words. Yrene didn’t blame her. Not with the weapons stacked on the desk in Nesryn’s bedroom—barely visible through the ajar door. Knives, swords, multiple bows and quivers … The captain had a small armory in her chamber.
Chaol just grunted his approval, smiling slightly as Nesryn strode for the suite doors. The captain paused in the threshold, her grin broader than any Yrene had seen before.
Hope. Full of hope.
Nesryn shut the door with a click.
Alone in the silence again, still feeling very much the intruder, Yrene crossed her arms. “Can I get you anything before we begin?”
He just wheeled forward—into his bedroom.
“I’d prefer the sitting room,” she said, snatching her supply bag from where Kadja had set it on the foyer table. And likely rifled through it.
“I’d prefer to be in bed while in agony.” He added over his broad shoulder, “And hopefully you won’t pass out on the floor this time.”
He easily moved himself from the chair onto the bed, then began unbuckling his jacket.
“Tell me,” Yrene said, lingering in the doorway. “Tell me what I did to upset you.”
He peeled off his jacket. “You mean beyond displaying me like some broken doll in front of your acolytes and having them haul me off that horse like a limp fish?”
She stiffened, pulling out the bit before dumping the supply bag on the floor. “Plenty of people help you here in the palace.”
“Not as many as you’d think.”
“The Torre is a place of learning, and people with your injury do not come often—not when we usually have to go to them. I was showing the acolytes things that might help with untold numbers of patients in the future.”
“Yes, your prized, shattered horse. Look how well broken I am to you. How docile.”
“I did not mean that, and you know it.”
He ripped off his shirt, nearly tearing it at the seams as he hauled it over his head. “Was it some sort of punishment? For serving the king? For being from Adarlan?”
“No.” That he believed she could be that cruel, that unprofessional—“It was precisely what I just said: I wanted to show them.”
“I didn’t want you to show them!”
Yrene straightened.
Chaol panted through his gritted teeth. “I didn’t want you to parade me around. To let them handle me.” His chest heaved, the lungs beneath those muscles working like bellows. “Do you have any idea what it is like? To go from that”—he waved a hand toward her, her body, her legs, her spine—“to this?”
Yrene had the sense of the ground sliding from beneath her. “I know it is hard—”
“It is. But you made it harder today. You make me sit here mostly naked in this room, and yet I have never felt more bare than I did this morning.” He blinked, as if surprised he’d vocalized it—surprised he’d admitted to it.
“I—I’m sorry.” It was all she could think to say.
His throat bobbed. “Everything I thought, everything I had planned and wanted … It’s gone. All I have left is my king, and this ridiculous, slim scrap of hope that we survive this war and I can find a way to make something of it.”
“Of what?”
“Of everything that crumbled in my hands. Everything.”
His voice broke on the word.
Her eyes stung. Shame or sorrow, Yrene didn’t know.
And she didn’t want to know—what it was, or what had happened to him. What made that pain gutter in his eyes. She knew, she knew he had to face it, had to talk about it, but …
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. She added stiffly, “I should have considered your feelings on the matter.”
He watched her for a long moment, then removed the belt from his waist. Then took off his boots. Socks.
“You can leave the pants on, if—if you want.”
He removed them. Then waited.
Still brimming with anger. Still gazing at her with such resentment in his eyes.
Yrene swallowed once. Twice. Perhaps she should have scrounged up breakfast.
But walking away, even for that … Yrene had a feeling, one she couldn’t quite place, that if she walked away from him, if he saw her back turn …
Healers and their patients required trust. A bond.
If she turned her back on him and left, she didn’t think that rift would be repaired.
So she motioned him to move to the center of the bed and turn onto his stomach while she took up a seat on the edge.
Yrene hovered a hand over his spine, the muscled groove cutting deep through it.
She hadn’t considered—his feelings. That he might have them. The things haunting him …
His breathing was shallow, quick. Then he said, “Just to be clear: is your grudge against me, or Adarlan in general?”
He stared at the distant wall, the entrance to the bathing room blocked by that carved wood screen. Yrene held her hand steady, poised over his back, even as shame sluiced through her.
No, she had not been in her best form these past few days. Not even close.
&nbs
p; That scar atop his spine was stark in the midmorning light, the shadow of her hand upon his skin like some sister-mark.
The thing that waited within that scar … Her magic again recoiled at its proximity. She’d been too tired last night and too busy this morning to even think about facing it again. To contemplate what she might see, might battle—what he might endure, too.
But he’d been good to his word, had instructed the girls despite her foolish, callous missteps. She supposed that she could only return the favor by doing as she’d promised as well.
Yrene took a steadying breath. There was no preparing for it, she knew. There was no bracing breath steeling enough to make this any less harrowing. For either of them.
Yrene silently offered Chaol the leather bit.
He slid it through his teeth and clamped down lightly.
She stared at him, his body braced for pain, face unreadable as he angled it toward the door.
Yrene said quietly, “Soldiers from Adarlan burned my mother alive when I was eleven.”
And before Chaol could answer, she laid her hand on the mark atop his spine.
CHAPTER
16
There was only darkness, and pain.
He roared against it, distantly aware of the bit in his mouth, the rawness of his throat.
Burned alive burned alive burned alive
The void showed him fire. A woman with golden-brown hair and matching skin screaming in agony toward the heavens.
It showed him a broken body on a bloody bed. A head rolling across a marble floor.
You did this you did this you did this
It showed a woman with eyes of blue flame and hair of pure gold poised above him, dagger raised and angling to plunge into his heart.
He wished. He sometimes wished that she hadn’t been stopped.
The scar on his face—from the nails she’d gouged into it when she first struck him … It was that hateful wish he thought of when he looked in the mirror. The body on the bed and that cold room and that scream. The collar on a tan throat and a smile that did not belong to a beloved face. The heart he’d offered and had been left to drop on the wooden planks of the river docks. An assassin who had sailed away and a queen who had returned. A row of fine men hanging from the castle gates.
All held within that slim scar. What he could not forgive or forget.
The void showed it to him, again and again.
It lashed his body with red-hot, pronged whips. And showed him those things, over and over.
It showed him his mother. And his brother. And his father.
Everything he had left. What he’d failed. What he’d hated and what he’d become.
The lines between the last two had blurred.
And he had tried. He had tried these weeks, these months.
The void did not want to hear of that.
Black fire raced down his blood, his veins, trying to drown out those thoughts.
The burning rose left on a nightstand. The final embrace of his king.
He had tried. Tried to hope, and yet—
Women little more than children hauling him off a horse. Poking and prodding at him.
Pain struck, low and deep in his spine, and he couldn’t breathe around it, couldn’t out-scream it—
White light flared.
A flutter. Far in the distance.
Not the gold or red or blue of flame. But white like sunlight, clear and clean.
A flicker through the dark, arcing like lightning riding through the night …
And then the pain converged again.
His father’s eyes—his father’s raging eyes when he announced he was leaving to join the guard. The fists. His mother’s pleading. The anguish on her face the last time he’d seen her, as he’d ridden away from Anielle. The last time he’d seen his city, his home. His brother, small and cowering in their father’s long shadow.
A brother he had traded for another. A brother he had left behind.
The darkness squeezed, crushing his bones to dust.
It would kill him.
It would kill him, this pain, this … this endless, churning pit of nothing.
Perhaps it would be a mercy. He wasn’t entirely certain his presence—his presence beyond made any sort of difference. Not enough to warrant trying. Coming back at all.
The darkness liked that. Seemed to thrive on that.
Even as it tightened the vise around his bones. Even as it boiled the blood in his veins and he bellowed and bellowed—
White light slammed into him. Blinding him.
Filling that void.
The darkness shrieked, surging back, then rising like a tidal wave around him—
Only to bounce off a shell of that white light, wrapped around him, a rock against which the blackness broke.
A light in the abyss.
It was warm, and quiet, and kind. It did not balk at the dark.
As if it had dwelled in such darkness for a long, long time—and understood how it worked.
Chaol opened his eyes.
Yrene’s hand had slipped from his spine.
She was already twisting away from him, lunging for his discarded shirt on the bedroom carpet.
He saw the blood before she could hide it.
Spitting out the bit, he gripped her wrist, his panting loud to his ears. “You’re hurt.”
Yrene wiped at her nose, her mouth, and her chin before she faced him.
It didn’t hide the stains down her chest, soaking into the neckline of her dress.
Chaol surged upright. “Holy gods, Yrene—”
“I’m fine.”
The words were stuffy, warped with the blood still sliding from her nose.
“Is—is that common?” He filled his lungs with air to call for someone to fetch another healer—
“Yes.”
“Liar.” He heard the falsehood in her pause. Saw it in her refusal to meet his stare. Chaol opened his mouth, but she laid her hand on his arm, lowering the bloodied shirt.
“I’m fine. I just need—rest.”
She appeared anything but, with blood staining and crusting her chin and mouth.
Yrene pressed his shirt again to her nose as a new trickle slid out. “At least,” she said around the fabric and blood, “the stain from earlier now matches my dress.”
A sorry attempt at humor, but he offered her a grim smile. “I thought it was part of the design.”
She gave him an exhausted but bemused glance. “Give me five minutes and I can go back in and—”
“Lie down. Right now.” He slid away a few feet on the mattress for emphasis.
Yrene surveyed the pillows, the bed large enough for four to sleep undisturbed beside one another. With a groan, she pressed the shirt to her face and slumped on the pillows, kicking off her slippers and curling her legs up. She tipped her head upward to stop the bleeding.
“What can I get you,” he said, watching her stare blankly at the ceiling. She’d done this—done this while helping him, likely because of whatever shitty mood he’d been in before—
Yrene only shook her head.
In silence, he watched her press the shirt to her nose. Watched blood bloom across it again and again. Until it slowed at last. Until it stopped.
Her nose, mouth, and chin were ruddy with the remnants, her eyes fogged with either pain or exhaustion. Perhaps both.
So he found himself asking, “How?”
She knew what he meant. Yrene dabbed at the blood on her chest. “I went in there, to the site of the scar, and it was the same as before. A wall that no strike of my magic could crumble. I think it showed me …” Her fingers tightened on the shirt as she pressed it against the blood soaking her front.
“What?”
“Morath,” she breathed, and he could have sworn even the birds’ singing faltered in the garden. “It showed some memory, left behind in you. It showed me a great black fortress full of horrors. An army waiting in the mountains around it.”
br /> His blood iced over as he realized whose memory it might belong to. “Real or—was it some manipulation against you?” The way his own memories had been wielded.
“I don’t know,” Yrene admitted. “But then I heard your screaming. Not out here, but … in there.” She wiped at her nose again. “And I realized that attacking that solid wall was … I think it was a distraction. A diversion. So I followed the sounds of your screaming. To you.” To that place deep within him. “It was so focused upon ripping you apart that it did not see me coming.” She shivered. “I don’t know if it did anything, but … I couldn’t stand it. To watch and listen. I startled it when I leaped in, but I don’t know if it will be waiting the next time. If it will remember. There’s a … sentience to it. Not a living thing, but as if a memory were set free in the world.”
Chaol nodded, and silence fell between them. She wiped at her nose again, his shirt now coated in blood, then set the fabric on the table beside the bed.
For uncounted minutes, sunshine drifted across the floor, wind rustling the palms.
Then Chaol said, “I’m sorry—about your mother.”
Thinking through the timeline … It had likely occurred within a few months of Aelin’s own terror and loss.
So many of them—the children whom Adarlan had left such deep scars upon. If Adarlan had left them alive at all.
“She was everything good in the world,” Yrene said, curling onto her side to gaze at the garden windows beyond the foot of the bed. “She … I made it out because she …” Yrene did not say the rest.
“She did what any mother would do,” he finished for her.
A nod.
As healers, they had been some of the first victims. And continued to be executed long after magic had vanished. Adarlan had always ruthlessly hunted down the magically gifted healers. Their own townsfolk might have sold them out to Adarlan to make quick, cheap coin.
Chaol swallowed. After a heartbeat, he said, “I watched the King of Adarlan butcher the woman Dorian loved in front of me, and I could do nothing to stop it. To save her. And when the king went to kill me for planning to overthrow him … Dorian stepped in. He took on his father and bought me time to run. And I ran—I ran because … there was no one else to carry on the rebellion. To get word to the people who needed it. I let him take on his father and face the consequences, and I fled.”