The words are not a soothing boon, but a ruthless promise. And they are enough. She lets out a strangled sound of relief. Her lashes flutter. And she crumples unconscious in my arms.
Heart beating roughshod against my sternum, I sweep her up and carry her into my bathing chamber. I try not to think of how frail she appears, nor how she feels pressed against me. It’s been so long since I’ve been free to touch her; the few stolen moments in the Lunaedon were not enough.
Nothing ever is when it comes to Willa.
Blood trails behind us, fresh enough to know that despite her claims, some of it is her own. Her breathing is ragged and pained, but to my relief it still comes at regular intervals. I set her gently in the small tub, trying to focus on its rhythm, as my own breaths spiral wildly out of control. Panic constricts my ribs as surely as my death at the state of her.
Her beautiful hair is dark and matted; her skin painted in swathes of scarlet. The original color of her dress is no longer discernible, the fabric sodden and torn. My death slices through it, and I gingerly peel it away from her skin, searching for a source of injury beyond the shallow scrapes on her cheeks and arms.
I grit my teeth, willing my death to calm as I take in her ravaged body. But it is no use, as at the sight of the wound marring her stomach, the ribbons pierce into the air like vengeful swords. I hardly feel the pain of it—the burning nerves or the raw ache in my bones—because my death’s rage tangles with so furiously with my own, that for a moment, I see nothing but rot.
A few inches in length, Willa’s wound is familiar, having suffered a few myself over the centuries.
She’s been stabbed with a Silva Lucai spear. Clean through, from her stomach to her spine.
I leak a slow breath through my teeth, and lean forward to examine the edges of her injury. The smaller scratches have all clotted, and by all accounts, Willa’s immortality should have begun healing this one, too. But it still bleeds as freely as if it just happened. Not because her immortality has failed, but because ofwhoseblade she’s been pierced with.
Adira’s. The Princess of the Wilds laces her spear with the sap of the Nyawa, sacred and lethal.
I brace myself as my death spirals from me, shattering the mirror above the vanity. I close my eyes and press my palm above Willa’s heart, not to reassure myself of its beat, but to keep from tearing through the island to desiccate one of my oldest friends from the inside out.
They need protecting…from me.
Willa’s panicked words drift back to me, dread settling in my stomach like a boulder. Whatever it was—whatever she’s done that Adira felt the need to injure her so gravely—it had something to do with the shadow that plagues her. Though it is not here now, and I cannot decide what that means.
Trapping a groan of pain behind gritted teeth, I draw my death back to me, winding it around my wrists. I ground myself in it, forcing both our attention back to Willa. I need to clean the sap from the wound, or she’ll lose every drop of blood in her body. And though I know from stories of her time in those wretched camps that she’ll survive it, I also know her immortality will not spare her from the suffering.
I gather supplies, which are plentiful even after two hundred years of abandonment. A pirate’s life was always dangerous nomatter the world, and Sam made a point to keep the Indomnitus well stocked.
Kneeling beside the tub, I begin the painstaking process of washing out the wound. Willa’s weak whimper at the first touch of the alcohol nearly sends my death shattering through the rest of the cabin, but I keep it locked tight against my skin. She writhes beneath my ministrations, her body bowing upward.
“I’m so sorry, Darling.” My words are a whispered chant that rain over us both.I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.“I should have been with you. I should always have been with you.”
Her keening cry echoes through me, and in my desperation to comfort her, I begin to sing a soft song. A melody buried so deep in my memory, it exists somewhere alongside my mother’s laugh and my father’s stern smile.
To my relief, the sound of my voice Willa settles immediately. So I sing as I work, clearing enough of the wound to examine the edges.
They are blackened, much like the shade of my own blood, and curled as if the skin has been singed with fire.
“Fuck,” I mutter out loud.
The poison has already leeched into her skin, which means I’m going to have to cut it out.
My breath stalls in my lungs as the rest of my ribbons crawl over my chest, jerking toward Willa. My jaw locks as I try to hold them back, but my death is insistent in its pull.
I stare down at her, broken and bleeding, indecision warring behind my ribs. She is in so much pain, the urge to keep any more of it from her is instinctual. But my death knew Willa was our heart long before I did—knew that ending her life would be ending our own. And my biggest mistake, the one I regret above all others, is that I shielded parts of myself when she asked me for everything.
So, this time, I give Willa what I’d been too scared to before: everything. I open myself up to my death and my love, and I hold nothing back.
The moment I let go, my death does not rampage through the island. Instead, it washes over Willa like a silk sheet. It caresses her cheek and slides over her broken body. And when it dives into the wound at her stomach, her mouth parts in a guttural noise. Not of pain, but ofrelief.
The relief of death. The end to the agony. The silence from the noise.
Everything Willa has always been denied. EverythingI’vedenied her because I was too lost in regret and self-loathing. I was never able to see my magic as Willa saw it—not as something ruinous, but as something beautiful. I’d only seen what it would take from her, never what it could give. And in that hatred of myself, I made decisions that lost us both.
My death sidles back to me, and my breath escapes me for the second time in the span of a few moments, this time having nothing to do with pain.
The skin around Willa’s wound is no longer black nor necrotic. Still jagged, still painful—but the skin that had just been stained with poison, is now shiny with new growth.
