She stumbled up, lost her balance, and fell onto her hands and knees. Too dizzy to stand, she crawled to him.
“Are you alright?”
With an effort, he managed to sit up.
Valenna clutched his shoulders. “Are you alright?” she demanded, her voice rough with terror.
“I’m fine,” he said. But his jaw and neck were slicked with bright blood, and more poured down his chin from his nose.
“I hurt you!” she cried, her voice breaking. “My magic hurt you!”
“It’s my own fault; I should have gotten out of the way.”
“No, no!” Valenna clutched him in horror. “Oh, Vander! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to.”
She remembered Torsten’s warning—that her anger was like a disease. She couldn’t control who it infected.
“I’m alright, Val,” he said calmly.
But his pupils looked strange—unequal in size—and he wavered where he knelt, not attempting to stand. She tried to help him to his feet, and he reeled.
It was happening. Right now. The thing she’d dreaded, and she had caused it. Never in her worst nightmares had she imaginedthat she would be the catalyst for losing him. It was unthinkable. She was a horrible monster, a blight to everything she touched.
She began to shake, and she felt like she was stumbling around in a noxious fog.
“I just need to rest for an hour and I’ll be fine,” Evander assured her. He could hardly lift his head. “Let’s go to the inn and get something to eat, and I’ll sleep it off.”
Her knees weak and her body quaking, Valenna looped his arm around her shoulder, supporting him as they made their way to the inn.
Chapter thirty-five
Evander
Evander Trevelyan was an escape artist.
He had escaped Ashkendor, then Largotia, then Sivanlight. This was the safest way to live when you cannot trust anyone but dragons.
Not that Evander was a coward. He had faced death and danger without batting an eyelid, but before he watched his father die, he had made him a promise to be careful. Until he met Valenna. Despite his resistance, he had succumbed to her, had broken his promise to his father, and fallen in love with her, trusted her, abandoned his retreat from Ashkendor and death, and now both were coming for him like an avalanche—too broad to dodge, too fast to outrun.
A shiver of fear chilled Evander as they staggered toward the inn.
Valenna was his wife. She was part of him—linked magically, linked physically. Like paint poured together in a pail, there was no unmixing them.
Valenna and her beautiful, adoring eyes, the shape of her body that he couldn’t explore enough, the endless wonders of her mind and soul. She awoke something within him. Something desperate and strange. A hunger for more.
More of her.
More time.
More breath in his lungs.
More hope.
But when Valenna’s magic struck him, Evander felt something break inside his head. He couldn’t stop the irritating trickle of blood leaking from his ear. And the pain was blinding.
As they made their way through town, he tried to hide the racking agony and the way the ground pitched beneath his feet.
But Valenna knew. Her shoulder trembled beneath his arm, and she was so pale, he worried she might faint.
