“And when Raffan discovers you speak elvish? What will you dothen?”
Venick saw it again. Ellina’s arrow through the southerner’s neck. Her lips sealed against his. If those secrets were ever revealed, she could be banished for it. Worse. Venick dropped his head. “I never wanted to hurt her.”
“Then you know that you cannot stay. It is too dangerous. If I were you, I would be thinking of escape. I would accept any chance to slip away, should it arise.” Which was not the sort of answer Venick had expected. Which had the flavor of collusion.
Venick became aware of the night, the dark, his mind sharpening to fit together each piece of this moment. There was a reason Dourin had knocked him unconscious, and not just to silence his screams. There was a reason he had dragged his body through the forest, tied him far away from the others. A reason he had come for him now to speak alone. “What you’re suggesting…”
“I am notsuggestinganything.”
“If you—” But before Venick could finish, Dourin pulled his sword from its sheath, and in a quick moment Venick’s hands came unbound. Then, in a twist Venick never saw coming, Dourin offered out his weapon.
“Gohome, human,” Dourin said. “And go quickly.”
Venick stared at that sword, at the chance that had been offered by the unlikeliest of allies. But maybe not so unlikely. He and Dourin shared a common thread that was Ellina.
Dourin was right. This was Venick’s only option. He knew that it was. And yet: “I can’t just leave her,” he said. “Not like this. Not withhim.”
“Were you not listening to anything I just said?”
“Ican’t.”
“You care about her.”
Venick’s throat was tight. “Of course I care about her.”
“Then you need to leave.” Dourin softened. “It is best. For both of you.”
TWENTY-THREE
Ellina did not want to open her eyes.
She did not want to see the brush of morning light through the trees. She did not want to be reminded of the morning, or what it meant that it was day now and not night, or why that mattered. She squeezed her eyes shut and ignored the low whispers of her troop, the way they hovered around her, the burn of pain as they dressed and redressed her bandages, a salve thumbed gently over exposed flesh. She did not want to see the confusion in their eyes, or the concern, or the questions.
Mostly, though, she did not want to see her choices. They were all around her, unavoidable, laid bare in the blood that seeped down her ribs. In Raffan’s gaze, his dark jealousy. In her own heart, which was restless. Insistent.
She ignored it. She told herself she did not care to know what it meant that her heart beat so incessantly. She did not care that it worried, that it begged her to wake.
She kept her eyes closed.
???
Dourin was there.
She heard him settle in beside her, the slide of his back against a tree. He heaved a long sigh.
She opened her eyes. It was full daylight. Sun filtered through the trees, casting everything in a haze of green. She could hear the rest of their troop nearby. Voices. The snap of canvas. A camp being broken down and packed away.
She lifted her head, and the motion sent spasms of pain down her back.
“Where is he?” The question was out before she could pull it back.
Dourin readjusted his shoulders against the tree. “Gone.”
“Gone—?”
“He fled last night. I do not blame him. After what happened with Raffan, he would be a fool to stay.”
The words were feather-soft. They floated around her, landed gently, a butterfly’s touch. They could not hurt her. She promised herself they could not, because they were expected. Because she could not be hurt by something she already knew.
