“I’m all right, thanks to you,” she offered in reassurance.
Vade stared at her like he’d never seen her before. He went for something else in his pack and returned to her bedside with two vials of pink liquid.
“These are deep sleep potions. The seidr sana will work on its own, but I don’t want to take any risks. I want to make sure you have enough time to heal completely and recover from everything that happened. They’ll keep you asleep for a few marks.”
She offered him a small smile and nodded. “Okay.”
Orelia downed the two vials, then shimmied underneath the blankets, pulling them up to her chin. She curled into the warm bedding while Vade took a seat in one of the kitchen chairs.
The fire crackled in the hearth behind him, coating the room in a soft, orange glow.
“You’re not going to bed too?” she mumbled into the blankets.
He rubbed his jaw. “I need some time to think.”
“About what?”
Dark eyes cut to hers across the room. Once foreboding, but now a comfort she’d grown used to. “Get some sleep, Orelia.”
Vade turned his focus on the fire and her lids soon became heavy. The potions quickly pulled her into sleep. To a place where none of the pain of life could find her.
thirty-one
When Orelia awoke, thesun had almost set. She’d slept the whole day.
The fire still burned in the hearth in the main room, but Vade was nowhere in sight.
She sat up, able to see clearly out of her right eye again. She tentatively pressed her fingers to her face, finding the swelling had dissipated and the pain was gone. Orelia slid out of bed and padded into the washroom.
The mirror revealed a wild, fiery mess of hair, but her face had completely healed, and her jade eyes were clear. The pounding in her head she expected from the amount of ale she’d consumed wasn’t there, and she attributed the relief to having slept for at least ten marks.
Her eyes went to Vade’s tunic covering her body, and she smiled as she ran her fingers over the fabric. From what she could remember, he had helped dress her and doctor her wounds. Ivan’s face flashed in her mind, but she pushed the memory away before it had time to linger.
Orelia wandered through the cabin and found a note in the kitchen that looked like it’d been written quickly.
Back soon.
There was food on the counter Vade must have purchased while she’d been asleep—apples, carrots, a slab of some cut of beef, an onion, celery, and a few spice bags.
She filled a glass with water from the basin and downed it in seconds. Orelia was refilling another when a dark mass on the ground outside the back window caught her eye.
The thin layer of dirt on the window distorted the shape, making it look like a puddle of black liquid. Curious, Orelia stepped outside and descended the porch steps.
Her mouth fell open.
Plumroses littered the ground. A few hundred of them. With furrowed brows, she approached the circle of deep violet flowers with a path wide enough to walk through in the middle. Their not-too-sweet aroma carried on the cool breeze, bringing a massive smile to her face.
She’d never seen plumroses grow on the ground before, only on bushes. Orelia went to pluck one, but it came away easy. She turned it over to find the stem cut short.
She picked up another stubby rose, finding a clean cut on the black stem where a thorn was missing. Orelia knelt in the circle of roses and turned over a handful, finding more stems with missing thorns that had clearly been carved away with a knife.
A door closed, and her head snapped toward the cabin.
Orelia carried a single rose in her hand, quietly crept up the back steps, and peered into the corner window.
Vade sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, dressed in his leathers. His fingers dragged through the hair he’d left down and he stared at the tabletop without blinking. After a few seconds, he walked toward the bed, pulled a plumrose from his pocket, and set it on her pillow.
Hedidcare.
