Neirin sat back, leaning against a post. With the dying sunlight coming into the barn at an angle, his profile cast a stretched shadow along the dirt flooring. “I do not know,” he admitted. “There was a vulnerability to the boy tonight that softened me. If I cast him out, he will die.” His final word hung solemnity around us. There was something about the boy Neirin wasn’t disclosing, yet the weariness that darkened the skin beneath his eyes told me that was a question for another time.
“You care for the boy?”
Neirin turned to me, and the light fell evenly across his face, painting him in a glowing warmth. The length of his lashes caught, dark like his brows, despite the pale silver of his hair. They framed his eyes in such a way that my heart thumped against my ribs. “No,” he said, and turned his attention back to the child. “No, I just empathize with him.”
The response took me by surprise, and hesitantly, I reached out a hand and placed it gently atop Neirin’s arm.
For a long moment, the stillness of the stables held us. The boy’s chest continued in its steady rise and fall. The horses in their stalls snorted occasionally or shifted their hooves in place. When Neirin finally spoke, his voice was distant.
“Boys like him and I, we never got the chance to be children.” A muscle at Neirin’s jaw flexed. “We live our lives fully for the purpose of devotion to another. Him by necessity, me by … By the regrets of my past and an obligation to my brother.”
With each statement Neirin made, he somehow became more elusive. More shadowed. I’d come to the stables to await his return, to confront him, to curse him for his insolence. Yet sitting beside him, his arm beneath my touch and the marks of his bond,our bond,stark and undeniable, I could do nothing but remain still. Quiet, listening, and wishing I could understand him better.
“The first time I killed, I was nine.” He kept his eyes cast away, and the muscles beneath my touch tensed. “Before joining the guard, all boys are expected to perform a blooding. A first kill to show they have the stomach for such a life. I was … weak as a child.”
It was hard to imagine the man beside me as anything but powerful, confident in his abilities. Yet the heaviness of the moment we shared hinted at a more fragile part of him. An aching desire to learn this side of him, to unravel the depths of his past, tugged at me.
“As the trial drew near, I became frantic. It was Astraea who … reminded me of the importance of it all.”
“What of your brother?” I asked, hesitant to break his trail of thoughts, but unable to connect the brother he’d hardly spoken of, to taking a role in the guard. Or why a Queen would worry herself with the fate of two boys. Perhaps Neirin and his brother were orphans who were taken in by her. “Is your brother a messenger?”
Despite the weight in the air, the corners of Neirin’s lips turned up, and he laughed. A quiet, almost hesitant sound, but there was amusement in it, and when he turned to face me, the dimple at his right cheek showed. “He is not a messenger, no.”
I held his gaze; the striking silver of his eyes was all-encompassing. Warmth flooded my body. Not as it did when I felt desire, nor even as it did when I felt deep care for Aureus or Farren or Renna. It was as if I could feel the depth of his eyes in my soul.
Before I could find my breath, regain my composure, and voice another question, Neirin brought his right hand to my cheek and stroked once with his thumb, the touch so incredibly light. My eyes fell to his lips, and my heart caught, but he withdrew his hand, resting his arm atop his knee again.
A heavy sigh left him, and his chest fell with the exhale. “On the day of the trial, the charges against the man I was meant to kill were listed to the crowd. He—” Neirin shook his head once. “He had a perversion toward young girls. Children. The accusations were brought forward by more than one witness.”
Something within my chest constricted, and I drew my knees up and hugged them.
“He was a bad man.” There was no note of uncertainty in Neirin’s tone, no need to be understood, nor a desire for forgiveness or justification for his actions, only a deep, solidified certainty.
When I remained quiet, he continued. “I came before the execution platform, pointed metal rod in hand. When I think of that day, I can remember my palms sweating and the sickening way the man’s smile curled at his lips. My monster writhed; it took all I had to hold him back.” Neirin’s eyes went back to the boy. “Resisting magic is …” He sighed and let the sentence fall away.
Lowering his gaze, Neirin plucked a strand of hay from his trousers and let it fall to the stable floor. He swallowed hard. “Of all the forms of execution, impalement is the most horrific. Set aside only for those such as that man with an inclination for—” Neirin shook his head. There was no need to repeat the words. “When I finally went to stand before him, my monster settled. I felt a release from all of the thoughts in my mind. Clarity in the moment, on ending the life of the evil man before me. When I plunged the rod into his chest, blood seeped.” He held his hands out and turned them palms up, as if he could still see the effects of the action staining his hands. “In that moment, nothing and no one else existed. I experienced complete freedom from my monster, from my thoughts.”
I tucked my chin between my knees.Nine years old. Gods.
“Don’t,” Neirin said, catching my movement. He ran a hand through my hair and to the back of my neck, gently coaxing me to look at him. “Don’t pity me.”
“Then why?” I asked. “Why tell me this if you don’t wish me to pity you?”
A muscle flinched at his jaw. “Because I’ve told no one else. Because I can speak to you in a way I’ve never been able to with another. My soul calls for yours, trusts it in a way I can’t begin to comprehend.”He broke my gaze and turned his eyes back to the boy. “And because he is …”
“He is like you?”
A faint laugh, and Neirin’s thumb stroked beneath my ear casually. “No, not like me. Calix and I, we are different kinds of monsters.” The smile that crooked his lips was sad, the creases at his forehead telling. “Before today, I’d not seen it but”—his jaw flexed—“we are similar in ways, too.”
My heart twisted, and even as I knew everything about the guard to be dangerous, edged with risk, I could not make myself pull away.
“This bonding.” Neirin looked back at me and, with his hand still at the back of my neck, gently brought me closer to him and rested his forehead to mine. “I don’t understand it. But you do. You seem to know more about me than I know about myself.” A glint of mischief danced in his eyes. “Though you withhold the information from me, I cannot deny this feeling.” He sucked in a breath. “Do you feel it too? The draw?”
“It is magic,” I said, more to remind myself than to inform him. “These feelings aren’t real.”
Neirin dropped his gaze, then, with a hesitant glance up at me through his lashes, he unwrapped the bindings at my wrist, revealing the heavy black markings of the bonding tattoo.“Magic has always taken great humor in meddling with my life.” Though he smiled softly, the slick sadness behind the expression was tangible.
As he touched his forehead to mine again, the hair that fell from the top of his head brushed my brow. I fought to control the betrayal of my heart, beating with a rapid thrum beneath my breasts.
