“Thornstalkers,” she said. “Bigger than you. Claws like scythes. Sharper than hedge thorns. What they can’t rip, they bite. Nasty poison.”
Poison. Of course whatever lived in this place would have poison.
“What does the poison do?” I asked, not looking away from Dorian.
“Pain,” Thalassa said, still pottering in her dark kitchen. Now I heard the scrape of plates. “Then necrosis. Then death.”
She said it so simply,I thought I’d misheard. “You said death?”
“Aye. The poison’s strong enough that even a young, strapping fae like that won’t last twelve hours without the antidote.”
My head swam. “The antidote—what is it?”
“Ground-up braethorn leaves. And before you ask”—she grabbed a long spoon and prodded at a large bowl—“I already put it in his tea.”
“That’s why it tasted like shit,” Dorian muttered, his voice looser now, the edges softened.
Thalassa gave a dry laugh. “You’ll live, fae. As long as you drink every drop—and stanch that wound.”
I shifted closer to him. “Drink.”
He didn’t move.
So I said it again, lower this time. Steady. In Isa’s unignorable voice. “Drink.”
With a grunt, he raised the cup and drank it dry, avoiding my eyes the whole time. When he set the cup down on the dirt, he muttered, “Tethryn.”
From the kitchen, Thalassa let out that pleased sound, halfway between a growl and a purr. “I haven’t heard that word in four hundred years. Nobody’s ever solved the riddle to stay the night. And a human, no less.” She prodded harder at whatever steamed in the bowl. “Most unexpected.”
I reached over his arm to the clasp at his throat. He flinched when I touched him, eyes flaring in the dim light—but he didn’t stop me when I began to undo it.
I slid the cloak off his shoulders. The wound was unmistakable. The cloak was slashed in five clean lines, and through the tears in his leather jerkin, I saw his skin—raw, bloodied, striped with long diagonal gashes from his right shoulder to his left side.
“Fuck,” I said.
Dorian gave a low, pained laugh. “Not what you want to hear when a woman takes your clothes off.”
“Or maybe it is,” Thalassa said with a titter.
“First aid,” I said, remembering our brief training in wound care. It all felt so faraway and hazy now. “Do you have anything to treat him?”
She turned and waved behind me, vaguely annoyed. “That way. Cot and whatnot. I’m making food for two, by the way—he won’t want to eat.”
I set my hand on Dorian’s arm. “Come on. Up. That’s it.” With a low growl, he rose—but stayed bent. The low-growing hedge overhead wouldn’t allow him to stand fully. “This way.”
I guided him in the direction Thalassa had indicated, deeper into the darkness of her hollow. As we moved, another white-blond crystal flared to life, revealing more than I expected—two additional rooms, one with a low bramble cot draped in a blanket of moss and scree.
I led him to the bed and helped him sit. When he swayed, I grabbed his shoulder. Holding him up felt like trying to brace a horse. “I need to stop your bleeding.”
He nodded—whether in agreement or delirium, I couldn’t tell.
I turned to take in the room. The branches here had grown thick and twisting. Some had been repurposed into shelves, bottles tucked among them like Esterday treats for children.
“Gauze,” I called, loud enough for Thalassa to hear.
“Gau-ze?” she echoed, already shuffling closer. “You’ll need moss and antiseptic to treat that.” She studied her wall of bramble-embedded bottles—where had she procured glass?—then plucked out one and pressed two items into my hands.
One was a soft moss. The other, a small bottle of cloudy liquid.
