“I feel like I’m going to be sick.”
“That’ll stop, too.”
Asher thumps back against the pew, his cap shading his eyes. Lifting his chin, he peers out at Shea from beneath the brim, his skin sheened in sweat and his eyes glazed gold. She wonders if this is what she looks like to Lys—dazed and unfocused, a fever sweating out of her.
Untended, the fire burns low. It’s a long time before anyone speaks.
“You looked like a goddess,” says Asher.
Shea stills. “What?”
“On your birthday—the year I gave you that ring. I’d just come in from the snow, and you were standing right there, dressed in white. You had these green leaves in your hair.”
“Mistletoe.” Her mouth feels like cotton. “It was mistletoe.”
“I know. I remember, because I panicked. I kept thinking,You’re supposed to kiss a girl if you see her standing under mistletoe.”
“Oh.” Her heart is racing. Dumbly, because she can think of nothing clever to say, she adds, “I was Hermia.”
Asher’s brows lift. “Hmm?”
“FromMidsummer Night’s Dream,” says Lys. He’s watching them too astutely, his eyes a pale, clouded blue. “It’s a play, by Shakespeare.WilliamShakespeare.”
“Iknowwho Shakespeare is,” says Asher, defensive.
“I’m only trying to help.” There’s a beat of quiet—as painful as any Shea has ever endured—and then Lys adds, “Hermia was in love with Lysander, incidentally.”
Of all the things he could have said, this feels like the worst. Shea has never wanted so badly to curl in on herself and disappear. It worsens tenfold when Asher peers thoughtfully across the fire and asks, “Are you?”
Her heart misses several beats at once. “Am I what?”
“In love with him?”
The dark of the cathedral shuts up around her. She can feel Lys’s eyes boring a hole in the side of her face. She doesn’t look at him. She can’t.
“It’s okay if you are,” says Asher. “I’ve decided it makes sense to me.”
Her stomach tightens. “What does?”
“This.”
The word throbs horribly between them, both vague enough to be meaningless and succinct enough to mean everything.
“You don’t mean that,” says Shea. “It’s the bite.”
“You think so? Because I’m not so sure. It all comes back to you. It’s always been you. You’re the reason I became a ranger. You’re the reason I came home. It’s like—it’s like you’re the center of my universe. No matter how far out I go, I keep looping back around to you.”
Her heart squeezes painfully. Next to her, Lys looks wary. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”
Asher’s gaze lifts to Lys. “By what?”
“That whole tangent.” He drops his voice from a tenor to a baritone. “?‘You’re the reason I came home.’ I thought you came home to find your sister.”
“Leave him alone,” says Shea. “It’s just the venom talking.”
“Are we sure?”
“Yes.Back off. He’ll wish he hadn’t said all of that in the morning.”
