“And I supposeIwant to be well enough that I won’t pass out while I’m on top of you.”
That made him laugh, a quick exhale against my lips. “Gods…” he muttered. “There’s an image.”
“Me passing out?”
“You on top of me. Beneath me. Beside me.” He punctuated each phrase with a kiss to my neck, my temple, the hollow of my throat. “The possibilities are endless.”
“Or maybe by the time we get home, I’ll have recovered enough of my senses to realize this was all some sort of fever dream.”
At that he grew quiet. When he pulled away to look at me, his eyes were grave.
“Don’t think that we’re finished talking about what made you come here today,” he said quietly. “You can’t just push it aside forever. Not with jokes, not with bravado.”
I stared at him, the shift in mood so abrupt that it took me a moment to recover my voice. I put a hand on his chest, making a slight space between us. “That’swhat you want to talk about right now?”
“Ignoring the monster means it will eventually come back for more, and I won’t let you hurt yourself again.”
The wordmonsterstung. I released him and scooted away, feelingcold and damp and strangely abashed. “You won’tletme?”
“Wewon’t let you, I should say.”
“What, you’ll recruit all of Rosewarren to follow me around and physically restrain me?”
He looked at me with infuriating calm. “If that’s what keeps you alive, then yes.”
I turned away, my stomach in knots. Whatever madness had swept me up into its grip was gone. That I had kissed this man, that I still ached for more of him, mortified me. Even worse, I understood what he was saying and why he was saying it. But his patient regard made me feel like a fool, like I was a student whose professor was helping her understand where in her equations she had made a crucial mistake.
“I need to rest,” I said shortly. “Once I have the strength to take us home, we’ll leave.”
I lay down with my back to him, my cheeks burning, and offered him nothing more.
Chapter 18
I slept, but only in fits. Once the rain stopped and morning touched the sky, I called to Freyda. The flap of her wings woke Gareth, who gathered his supplies in silence. I didn’t look at him; I didn’t want to see the hurt on his face or his judgment. Remembering it was awful enough.
I won’t let you hurt yourself again, he’d said.
As if he could stop me. As if he had any idea what it was to live my life.
Freyda pricked my arm with one of her talons, and I smeared two fingers through the blood before reaching into my shredded clothes and pressing them to the rose tattoo on my thigh. A physical manifestation of the bond that tied me to the Warden, to my fellow Roses, to the Order, I’d long thought of it as a brand: here stands a Rose, and her body is not her own.
As soon as my blood touched the tattoo, the binding magic bloomed to life and tugged me forward. It was like one end of a hooked chain had been buried deep inside me and the other end of it lived in the Warden’s fist.Come home, it said.Come home to me.
It wasn’t a pleasant sensation; the magic was urgent and impatient,and I already felt sick to my stomach. But at least it was a distraction, something to focus on besides the memory of Gareth’s kisses and the question of whether my anger was justified or simply embarrassing.
“Follow me,” I told him, still refusing to look at him. I held out my hand. “Traveling along the binding magic is faster than taking a greenway, but it’s also more violent. You’ll have to hold on to me or you won’t be able to keep up. The magic will sense a foreign body and reject you.”
I hated the cold tone of my voice, hated it even more when Gareth took my hand. I gripped his fingers hard; the last thing I wanted was to lose him somewhere in transit. The thought of never having to look at him again was both horrible and tantalizing. With him gone, the memory of kissing him would fade, and the next time I decided to die, he wouldn’t come after me.
Shameful thoughts. I immediately wished I could unthink them.
Hand in hand, we stepped out into the mountains and said nothing else.
***
The passage back to Rosewarren was a sharp shot through the darkness. One minute we were hiking up a dusty mountainside in Ghorlock, following the binding magic’s pull. The next we were stumbling out of a tight nothingness and onto the snowy grounds of Rosewarren.
Gareth lost his footing and caught himself against a tree, gasping for air, but he didn’t vomit. Impressive. We rarely allowed anyone outside the Order to travel with us along the binding magic, but when we did, they always got sick immediately afterward. The pressure on your lungs, on your whole body, felt like being squeezed in a giant fist. Traveling through even the harshest greenway couldn’t compare.
