“Words don’t hurt. And a little bump in the passageway, I can handle.”
He enfolded her in his arms, tucking her under his chin. “I don’t want you to handle it. You’re mine to protect.”
“I don’t need protection from being called a traitor. They’re only telling the truth.”
She felt his mood darken even further. “Promise me. If anyone threatens you or Loïc and I’m not with you, you’ll call me through the bond.”
“Brandt—”
“Promise me.”
His fear blared through their connection, a deep terror of losing her. She sighed. “I promise. If I’m in true danger, I’ll summon you.”
“Any danger.”
“True danger,” she insisted. “I won’t have you fighting the entire Tower because someone calls me a name that I deserve.”
His wings wrapped tight around them both, trapping her. “Your guilt is my guilt now. We share it.”
“That’s not how guilt works,” she protested.
“It’s how mate bonds work.” He pressed his face to her hair, breathing deep. “Everything shared. The good and the terrible.”
Idabel felt something ease in her chest.
They weren’t fixed. Might never be. But they were finding their way though the ruins of what she’d broken.
Chapter 31
Brandt
Though Idabel now gave him his bottles of tonic directly, he still visited the masons’ hall. It was not only to fulfill his promise and avoid their meddling, but also to watch over Rikard as he was pieced back together and ensure he was treated well.
As always, the place stank. Rikard, or what remained of him, lay on a raised platform. The masons had done their best, filling cracks with limestone paste, reinforcing joints with metal pins that gleamed copper-gold against his gray hide. But his wings...
“Don’t stare.” Rikard’s voice was rough, like grinding millstones. “I know how I look.”
“You look alive.” Brandt moved closer gingerly, careful not to jar the platform and cause more damage. “Alive is what matters.”
Rikard gave a clotted, pebbly chuckle with little humor in it. “Is that what we’re calling this?”
It was painful to laugh as such a joke, but he did for Rikard’s sake. “Can I ask you something? How much do you remember about the war?”
Rikard grimaced, exposing broken teeth. “As little as possible. I asked the masons to wall it off permanently.”
Hope faded. He couldn’t push Rikard to remember the painful parts of their deployment. Not when he was half pebbles and depended on the masons for everything.
Aalis waved him over, so he bid Rikard goodbye and approached her desk, stopping by the treatment chair where she practiced her brutish trade. “What is it?”
“I wanted to show you what’s left of him. We’ve made good progress.” She waved to a tray of fragments, most pieces no bigger than Brandt’s thumb and some ground nearly to powder. The pieces of Rikard that they hadn’t yet fit into the puzzle of his destruction.
“What about his wings?”
“We’re attempting to reconstruct everything, but as far as function...” She shook her head. “I doubt he’ll fly again.”
A memory of Rikard’s last flight slipped through a crack in Brandt’s mind walls.
A storm had driven them off course, two survivors from a watch of hundreds seeking shelter on a barren cliff face somewhere in the goblin mountains. They’d been lost for what seemed like moons, pushed deep into narrow canyons and treacherous gorges by mounted goblin companies that seemedto guess their position no matter how hard they tried to evade them.
