“He says—”
“I understand what he is saying,” I gritted out through my teeth. In a swipe of my hand, I snatched up the bone. “But I don’tunderstand how. What am I to do? Place it on him? Give a bit of my own flesh? Tell me and I will do it.”
There would be no words shared between us, but Roark leaned forward like he might murmur the answer, his brow a mere finger’s width from mine. I stilled when he used one knuckle to tap the place over my heart, then with the same finger, gestured at Kael.
Roark gave no further instructions. He rose and took three backward steps.
Through a blur of tears, with Kael’s wet, thick breaths filling my head, I studied the bone. Ashwood’s demands were clear enough—he believed I could find a way to make the healing bone save Kael’s life by placing it—I assumed—against him.
When the heat of my palm touched the bone, something inside me fell away. Like gates sweeping open in my mind, a strange glow bled from Kael’s shattered ribs and breastbone. Patterns of gilded stitches crossed this way and that over his battered wounds.
It took but a moment for my mind, perhaps an instinct, to note the glow revealed a possibility of how to include the new piece of bone, a way to seal the cracks and holes left behind.
I reeled over his body. “Kael, I-I know how. I see it.”
His lashes fluttered. A weak smile crossed his lips as he whispered, “Let it be. I will greet you with the gods with a…curved horn, Ly.”
“No.” Nausea tossed through my middle for what needed to be done. “Salur can wait.”
There was no time to scorch a blade in a flame. Infection we could face if he lived. Hewouldlive.
I took the knife Roark handed me, placed it at the open wound in Kael’s chest, and began slicing it wider, deeper.
Screams of our people boiled in my brain with each cut of Kael’s flesh. His eyes rolled into his head, no doubt with the pain so fierce his body was giving up.
I swallowed back the thrum of panic when he went limp.
Once the wound was wide enough for three fingers, I took up Ashwood’s strange bone and maneuvered the edge into the bloodied flesh.
But there was more.
Intricate golden patterns honeycombed across Kael’s front and Ashwood’s healing shard. Heat prickled on the ends of my fingers, a need to reach out and follow the golden threads.
Baldur let out a groan of frustration at my back. “Hasten your damn hands, woman, or—”
Roark held up a closed fist. The man did not utter a sound, but one simple gesture sliced through the Stav unit like the lash of a whip. Spines straightened, jaws tightened. What sort of cruelty was given by those hands to demand such abrupt discipline?
Kael’s chest was soaked in blood. He was no longer lucid and his sun-toasted skin had gone pallid and sickly, but through the gore, a soft hum of light pulsed with each weak beat of his heart.
With trembling hands, I maneuvered the shard into the bloodied flesh, bile burning my throat when my fingers brushed along the pulpy edges.
Beneath my palm, the new piece shifted, sinking into Kael’s chest, as though an unseen force absorbed it into his body. Craft brightened like a silken web around his body.
No one gasped, no one uttered a sound at the sight of the gilded filaments, and it was frighteningly clear no one could see what was unraveling before my eyes. Unorganized and chaotic, the glow of fibrous magic flitted across the bone, desperate for a purpose, for a command.
I gingerly touched one thread. Heat teased the tip of my finger, and where my hand shifted, so, too, did the glimmering strand. The threads rearranged like Kael’s bloody body and the bone inside were a spool with wool yarn, my hands the needle. With each movement, the strings of gold sutured the new shard into the broken edges of his wound.
My eyes fluttered closed.
The air grew colder. Where candlelight from sconces and chandeliers in the great hall had brightened the room, now the space was doused to misty gray. Shadows stretched up the walls and doorways like creatures so black they seemed to draw whatever was left of the light toward them.
When I lowered my gaze, a scream split from my chest.
Kael had been beneath my palms, but now only a soft glow of his shape remained. Each bone, each divot of his jaw, his spine, his ribs, was outlined in a golden sheen.
I spun around. Village folk, Stav Guard, all stood like radiant starlight beams. Flesh was gone, and it was as though I were witnessing the burn of their souls.
In the eerie silence came a laugh. Low, dark, like fear on the wind.
