“Where are we walking to?” I asked with a sudden cold-induced yawn.
“Away from here.” Julian stripped Ezra, careful not to jostle him too much. “It’ll take a week if we move quickly. There’s a wagon trail. We can follow it to Cascade. I’ve got business there.”
“You sound like you’ve been planning this for a while,” I said, reeling. One moment he’d been dead, and now he was not only alive but scheming. Heretically.
Without acknowledging me, Julian gathered our wet clothes and shoes. “Stay there. I’ve got to hang these up to dry them properly.”
A small ripple of fear ran through me at the thought of being stranded beside the icy river in my underclothes. I decided to be angry instead, preferring that to being frightened. “Why didn’t you tell me anything? Why aren’t you explaining things now?”
I didn’t want to be left out anymore. And it still stung, despite all that had happened since, that he’d sent me away.
Julian stood like a sapling stretching toward the sun. Somehow, he looked no less haughty in rough clothes. “I didn’t know if I could trust you. Besides, you were meant to be halfway back to the House by now. Give me time to consider my words.”
“That’s cowardly.”
“Perhaps.” The thick brush swallowed him as he went to hang our clothes over branches to dry them with radiance. I listened for his footsteps rustling and crunching, but the river’s constant rush was too loud. Beside me, Ezra breathed evenly with no alarming shallowness. I didn’t know much of healing, but I’d helped nurse other girls at school through fevers and coughs enough times to know when to send for help.
Not that we could send for help. And Ainsley was out there. Did she have more hired killers at her disposal?
Why had Ezra claimed responsibility for Julian’s death?
Why had he helped me get away?
“I wish you were awake,” I whispered.
“I’d rather not be,” Ezra whispered back, startling me.
I nearly punched his arm. Instead, I took his cold hand in both of mine and squeezed it, my relief so profound, it left me woozy. “You need to hold still.”
His lips were pale, but he smiled faintly. “Iamholding still.”
“Well … Should you be talking?”
“You’re the one who wished for me to be awake.”
“I didn’t manifest it. Stop being foolish.”
He cracked his eyes open and tilted his head to meet my worried gaze. “I’m all right, I promise. Being out here in the forest, it’ll help. If Ike had punctured any important organs, I’d have bled out long before we ended up here.”
I wanted to ask him more about how the forest helped, how it made him feel—but Ike’s name shattered something in me.
“I killed them.” The words were thick on my tongue. It sounded like a lie to my ears. Like it couldn’t be real.
I was a killer. And I could never take it back.
I’d never be the same.
Ezra closed his eyes and didn’t speak for so long that I wondered if he’d fallen asleep. “You did. But that was my fault. You wouldn’t have been there at all if it weren’t for me.”
“None of that,” Julian said, crashing back out of the brush and shooting an impatient look at both of us. “Can you walk? We should get going.” He threw me my clothes and placed Ezra’s in his hands with somewhat more gentleness, though it appeared to be only on account of the wound at his side.
I hurriedly shimmied back into my clothes, delighted to find that they were dry and warm.
“Thank you,” Ezra said, avoiding his gaze and swiftly tearing long strips from the hem of his shirt. He worked quickly to wrap his middle, wincing as he tightened the knot that held the makeshift bandage fast. “I don’t believe a walk was part of the plan.”
“Fishing you out of the river wasn’t part of the plan either,” Julian said mildly.
Ezra huffed as he finished getting dressed. “You could have let me drown if it was such an inconvenience.”
