He lurched to his feet and stumbled away from me, knocking over his chair. “No,” he whispered.“No!”
“It’s all right,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “You’re safe now.”
“No, no, no.” He put his head in his hands. His voice shook, full of tears and terror. “Not safe, not—Gods, no. Please.Please.”
“Gareth—”
“Don’t touch me!” He staggered back, crashed into a table, and fell hard to the floor. His eyes were wild. “Don’t touch me. Don’t make me touch them.Don’t make me!”
I knelt a few paces away from him, my throat aching with sadness. “I won’t make you do anything. Your mind is your own.”
That made him laugh. Tears leaked from his eyes. “My mind is his. It will always be his. He found me. He’ll always find me.” He struck his head with the heel of his hand—hard, fast, over and over. “Get out,” he shouted, “get out, getout!”
I’d seen this before. Living as a soldier, it was inevitable. But seeing Gareth caught in the grip of this awful panic—consumed by the animal urge to fight or flee—broke my heart wide open.
“Gareth, please look at me,” I said gently. I moved a step closer to him. “It’s me, Mara. You trust me, don’t you?”
He didn’t answer me. He was too far gone, his breaths coming hard and fast. If he didn’t slow them down, he would faint.
I moved closer still. “I know you trust me. I know you—” I stopped just short of saying a word I wouldn’t have been able to take back. “I know you. And I know you’ll believe me when I tell you that you’re safe, and that I will do everything in my power to ensure that this doesn’t happen to you again.” I paused, then moved within reach of him. It was agony not to touch him. “Gareth?”
He clapped a hand over his mouth, sobbing so hard that he nearly choked on his own breath. He reached out to me with shaking fingers. When he found my feathered arm, he fumbled to grab hold and tugged me toward him.
“Mara, oh gods,” he choked out. “What they did to me. What they did. And now again, they’ve done itagain.”
Holding back my own tears, I took him in my arms and folded him into the soft brown cocoon of my wings, letting him cry against the down of my breastbone. He held on to me with a grip that would leave bruises, like I was the only thing standing between him and certain death.
I rocked him gently, my cheek pressed against the hot golden crown of his head. On the other side of the room, Brigid helped the Warden sit up. Cira was herding the two hysterical littles out of the room. Distant cries of grief and screams of horror rose up the stairs to greet us, and I gently pressed my hand against Gareth’s ear to shield him from the worst of it.
“I’m here,” I whispered into his hair over and over. “I’m here, and I’ve got you. You’re safe. You’resafe. Gareth, I’m here. I’m here. I won’t let them hurt you.”
It was then, as he clung to me and I to him, his heart full of nightmares and my own breaking at the sight of his tears, that I knew. The certainty of it crashed down through my body and stole my breath.
I didn’t want to. I knew I shouldn’t. This road could only lead to sadness.
But I did.
I loved this man.
Ilovedhim.
I closed my eyes, letting him keen. Witnessing this grief felt like something sacred—like it belonged to the gods of my childhood, the gods I’d once worshipped with my whole heart.
I loved Gareth Fontaine, and I didn’t know what that would mean for me, for us. Once the horror of this moment passed, maybe I would manage to talk myself out of it. I hoped I would even as I prayed I wouldn’t.
But I knew this much: Whatever came next, whatever evil came to find us, I would die before letting anything hurt him like this ever again.
Chapter 19
Once I’d ensured that Brigid would see to the Warden and Gareth had calmed enough to walk, I helped him to his room.
No one tried to stop me, though I felt the Warden’s eyes on us as we left her office. Now that she was conscious, we had begun shifting back to our human forms. Stray feathers and fluffy bits of down littered the corridors, and the cold air raised goose bumps on my naked body. I grabbed a long gray tunic from one of our many hallway closets—at Rosewarren, fresh clothes were never very far away—and shrugged it on.
The soldier in me felt that I should be downstairs, assessing the damage and comforting the littles, all of whom had hopefully survived. But I couldn’t leave Gareth’s side. He walked unsteadily, and though he was no longer crying, the dead look in his eyes was somehow worse. Shattered glass glittered among the molted feathers on the floor. I walked carefully, guiding him through the wreckage and hoping we wouldn’t see anything worse. Freyda joined us, hopping alongside us using any perch she could find and berating us with a constant stream of sharp chirps, clearly impatient with our progress. But I was so happy to see her alive and well that I couldn’t bring myself to scold her.
The librarians’ rooms were on the third floor near the servants’ wing. Gareth’s was small and untidy. Books and papers covered his desk and the top of his dresser. He’d left the one small window open, and a light dusting of snow coated the floor.
I helped him to his bed and then bustled about the room, stacking all the books and papers neatly in one corner, draping clothes over the back of his desk chair, pouring a fresh glass of water from the pitcher on the washbasin. When I brought it to him, he was still sitting in the exact same position on the edge of his unmade bed and staring at nothing. He took the water without looking at me, sipped it quietly for a moment, and then put it on the bedside table with a small grimace of distaste.
