Cold fingers brush mine as she takes it. More rustling.
“Okay,” she says finally. “You can turn around.”
I do.
She’s swimming in my shirt, the sleeves hanging past her hands, the hem brushing her thighs. The blankets are wrapped around her shoulders like a cloak. Her wet hair is plastered to her pale face, and she looks small, vulnerable and alive.
I force myself to focus on practical matters. “How do you feel?” I crouch in front of her, taking her hands in mine to check her fingers for frostbite. They’re red and cold but not waxy or damaged. I check her toes too and they’re the same. She’ll be okay. She’s warming up and a bit of color is slowly returning to her cheeks.
Claire sits and pulls the blankets back around her, in front of the fire. “Still freezing, but better. Thank you. Thank you for saving me.”
The relief is staggering.
And then comes the anger.
I pull the crumpled note from my pocket. “Explain this.”
My female stares at the paper in my hand and bites at her lip. “You, um, weren’t supposed to find it until I was gone.”
“Well, I found it. And then I found you half-frozen on the road.” I smooth out the wrinkled paper, reading her words again. “‘I enjoyed our time together’? ‘This is for the best’?” I look at her. “What does that mean, Claire?”
She won’t meet my eyes. Her fingers twist in the blankets.
“Claire.”
“I heard you.” Her voice is small, barely above a whisper. “The meeting with your brothers. There’s a servants’ entrance behind a tapestry with a peephole. I heard everything.”
My blood runs cold. “Everything.”
She nods miserably. “The Blood Calling. What it means. Princess Serina. King Aldric. The civil war. All of it.”
She knows everything and for some reason this isn’t disturbing. Instead, it makes everything easier. “And you decided to flee into a deadly storm?”
Now she looks up at me. “I was trying to save you.”
I sit down on the rug next to her. “Save me from what?”
“Fromme.” The tears spill over, tracking down her cheeks. “If I stay, you could lose everything. Your throne and kingdom. Thousands of Krovenians could die, just like before. I heard what happened with King Aldric. I heard what the Council will do if you choose a human.”
She called me Nikolai. Not ‘Your Majesty.’ Just my name, in her soft voice, like we’re equals.
“So I was leaving,” she continues, swiping at her tears with the back of her hand. “If I’m not here, you can marry Serina, take the elixir, continue your life and do your duty. No one has to die because of me.”
I stare at her. She was leaving, walking into a blizzard, to possibly freeze to death on a mountainside, to protect me.
“You foolish, impossible woman.”
“I’m not foolish, I’m being practical?—”
“You almost died out there.”
“Your people need you?—”
“I needyou.”
Silence. Just the crackle of the fire and her ragged breathing.
I hold up the crumpled note.
