Leena kept the information from Rami tucked away in her mind, unable to focus on it now when so many other problems required her immediate attention.
“Be careful?” Leena implored, looking up at Rami with a lump in her throat. At Rami’s short nod, she gave him the satchel in which she’d packed her botany book and the housekeeper’s timepiece. “Take this back to Golborne for me.”
Rami took it distractedly, glancing at St. Silas for a moment with a hooded expression that she’d never seen him wear before. He shook his head before he bent to her, his voice low so that only shecould hear him. “The Saint knew the duel was an ambush from the very first. He knew it wasslaughter.He still went.”
Leena absorbed the words. “Yes, he told me, but what I don’t understand is why he would do such a thing. It is very unlike him.”
Rami straightened, staring down at her with something bordering on exasperation. He took the reins and turned the horse southbound.
“Rami!” She tried to go around him but he threw her an irritated glance before trotting forward.
“Have you not guessed by now?” The horse grew restless, Rami barely able to restrain it single-handedly.
“Do not play games now.”
Rami speared one final glance at St. Silas, before looking back at her intently. “I was going to be executed on the steps of Weavingshaw. The Saint saved me. And it was all for you.”
Then he lashed the reins forcefully, a canter turning to a gallop, Mrs. Van following closely behind. Leena watched him go, his words echoing in her ears.
She felt his absence like the cleaving of two branches that shared the same root.
Rami and Mrs.Van were gone.
Go with them,St. Silas had told Leena.
And miss a walk in the snow?she’d responded.
Only now they walked through a storm.
The snowflakes had built to a crescendo, and they were the only two figures making slow progress against the harsh drifts. The roads were no longer visible, so they relied on the tall blades of grass peeking through the snow to navigate the banks.
The farther they walked, the more Leena supported St. Silas—every step laborious, half stumbling in exhaustion. They had passed Lytham in the carriage, and now walked back toward it, away from the road. It had been only two hours since they’d started their slow progress toward the miners’ town, but already Leena felt St. Silas descending further into delirium.
She looked obliquely at him. His expression was stony, long eyelashes tipped with frost, breath clipped in pain.
“What are you thinking of?” he asked her. He was no longer able to maintain his habitual honeyed tones. Now his words were grit.
“I am thinking of you.” Leena felt his head turn toward her.
Rami’s parting words still tore through her—all for you—until they had remodeled her in some essential and unknowable way. She could not think past them—not when she had spent so longfightingto survive, not when life found new ways to orphan her continuously. Not when she was so exhausted from always carrying loss on her back.
That St. Silas had deliberately,willingly,met the sword for her—
She choked on the thought, felt it expand within her until she was suffused with it from the inside out. She knew she could never adhere to Rami’s last caution—to use the inexplicable hold he thought she had over St. Silas to her advantage—and she knew her brother would likely think her a fool for not doing so. But she could not. She would not.
“Leena?” St. Silas’s voice broke her from her reverie.
Yet she could not speak of Rami’s words to St. Silas, not when she’d not had time to understand them. Not when he’d not admitted to them himself.
Instead, she said softly, “You are suffering greatly, yet you show nothing of it. I was wondering where you learned such a trick.”
He didn’t respond for a while. The growing fever coming from his skin alarmed Leena more than his silence.
“Tell me,” Leena said, thinking quickly, “how you learned to shoot so accurately.”
His response, when it did come, was stilted. “It was Hargreaves. We practiced daily when I was a boy.”
“Is that also how you learned to ride so well?”
