When he looked down at her, she couldn’t see Kaelan under Cae’s face, not even remotely.
“Ready?” he asked.
No.
He held out his hand and she took it.
Nothing. No emotions of any kind. How had she gone from hearing his thoughts to feeling absolutely nothing from him?
“Did you need to wear the armor?” he asked as she attempted to find a comfortable position.
“Yes,” she said. “Until I’m certain Lavana has been dealt with, I’ll be sleeping in it.”
Gur growled at her continued squirming.
Finally, Kaelan wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her back against him. She stiffened, her fists clutching in Gur’s mane.
“You’re too tense,” he said. “You’re making Gur nervous.”
Gurywarledin agreement.
“We have a long way to travel,” Kaelan went on. “Are you going to be like this the whole journey?”
She inched from him. “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.” His fingers touched the back of her neck lightly. The taut muscles cording her spine loosened, her breath came easier, the barbs of worry drew back, and her chest warmed.
He slid closer so her backside fitted snug against him.
“What did you just do?” she asked.
Gur picked up speed across the meadow, stirring fairies and butterflies as his wings flapped.
“Healed you,” he said, “in a way.”
His thumb grazed across the back of her neck before his hand fell, settling high on her thigh.
But his healing felt more like a subduing. The anxious thoughts attempted to push back in but failed, as though repelled by some invisible barrier.
“When did you learn to do that?” she asked.
Gur took flight into the bright and clear morning sky. The chilled air rushed by, numbing her nose and ears.
“Flor taught me,” he said in a vaguely disinterested tone, as though his mind was elsewhere.
“How?”
“She gave me a book,” he said. “It had been Cae’s. It speaks to the nature of Princes.”
“There’s a Prince instruction manual?” She frowned. Why hadn’t there been a Rae how-to book? Then again, she’d had so many people around always telling her what to do and how to be, she wasn’t sure that if there had been a book, she would’ve wanted to read it.
“I guess you could call it that,” he said, the sound of a smile in his voice. “Much of it was a history of great Princes. The rest, a bit of this and that.”
“And it taught you how to... do what you just did?”
“No,” he said. “It made me realize that I’d been underutilizing my abilities. That I am capable of much more than I ever imagined.”
“Like what you just did,” she said, refraining from using the word controlling. But that’s what it had felt like, as though her emotions had been taken out of her hands.
