His inner clothes were soaked with sweat, chilling with the fading adrenaline.
‘Csilla.’
There was no answer. He instinctively reached out to touch her, then hesitated. Perhaps he’d lost the right to touch her kindly.
‘I know it hurts, but it’s over.’ He replayed the past minutes, wrist flexing in memory. ‘You did well. He believes that you don’t know anything.’
She turned her head slightly with a quiet murmur, an eye and part of her face visible from her curtain of dark hair. She had the look of a deer with an arrow through the throat, awaiting the last seconds before the inevitable.
He sat next to her and brushed the hair away from her face so he could see her better. She tilted her head slightly, a hint of forgiving pressure against his palm that went straight to his traitorous heart.
The part of him that ached to see her desolation was infuriating. He’d never met anyone who tried so hard to be good for so little reward. It was what faith required, but seeing it taken to conclusion was unsettling more than inspiring. Perhaps that was what made Sandor relent and not throw Csilla directly out onto the empty streets in a city too afraid of shadows to open a door of charity to a stranger. Even Justice and Obedience had to acknowledge the role of Mercy in the Faith.
Perhaps he simply wanted Ilan to stew and suffer. If so, that was also fine. Resentment might not nourish, but it was invigorating in its own way.
‘Can I look at your back? I’ll put something on it.’
He’d had to poultice Vihar when he’d busted his leg on a fence, and he kept a few things for headaches and monthly pains and the like. With the servants now spread through the city and the remaining mercy priests busy with the burned, there was no one to call for her. There was no one else he’d want to tend to her. It was his responsibility to fix what his hands had done.
She shifted, hand clenching at his blanket as she seemed to weigh the relative pain and modesty. Finally she nodded, and he gently lifted her shift.
He’d struck well, the thought bringing a possessive sense of pride as he sat next to her. There were sharp welts across her upper back, purple blooming out of the red and pale islands of skin between them, but he hadn’t broken her, hadn’t risked any organs. It was beautifully done, and she’d been brave.
‘Well?’ The misery in her voice tamped down his admiration of his own handiwork.
‘You’re fine. Or will be.’ He rubbed his finger in the mixture until it warmed with his skin and soaked strips of linen. He lay a strip across the first of the marks, the line of flesh hot and swollen. She flinched but didn’t ask him to stop.
When he was small, his family chapel held a painting of Vasya, hung so she caught the sunlight in the layers of paint and gesso, and he’d kept it dusted and lit candles beneath, and tried and failed to recreate its entirety for his own altar. Her image was still the first thing that came to mind when asked to think on the beauty of holiness.
It was nothing compared to Csilla.
‘If we can’t find the Seal, or if we fail, I need you to leave,’ Ilan said finally. ‘My parents are in the city. They can pay enough to get out of lockdown, take you to Saika, away from all this.’
They would if he asked. For all the trouble he’d made for them, they had always done everything he asked. Too much so, perhaps. Here he was, still expecting to be spoiled, relying on them again.
She turned with a wince, body going momentarily rigid and sheets falling off her bare shoulder.
‘What will going to Saika do? All I’ll see if I leave is the refugees at the gates, reminding us of how we failed them, and Shadow will come to every remote corner eventually. If I’m needed anywhere, it’s here.’
‘Doing what?’ She was holy, yes, but they didn’t know how to use her power. He wasn’t even sure she could use her power when it was all at the discretion of the divine. ‘What if it doesn’t work?’
There was passion in her eyes but no violence. It was the warmth of a hearth fire, just as alive and comforting.
‘Then I can still help. It’s better than running away.’ She smoothed her hair and shifted, moving gingerly with lingering pain. ‘They can hardly do anything worse to me than everything they’ve already done. And I have so much to make up for.’
She couldn’t possibly believe that. ‘None of it was your fault.’
‘Of course it was.’ Her eyes met his, clouding with quiet despair that cracked his heart. ‘I said yes.’
There was nothing he could say that would take that knowledge from her.
She shifted to cover herself again, tugging her shift over pale thighs and bony knees.
Then she moved to stand.
‘What are you doing?’ He reached for her arm, but she caught his hand instead, fingers closing around his in a gentle grip as arresting as a vise.
‘We can’t just stop.’ The pained set of her jaw undercut the determination in the words, and Ilan pressed his palm more firmly against hers, shifting her back to the bed.
