“You’ve got a bit of blood here, but it looks like the wound is already healing.” He sits back, though his hands linger as his gaze inches lower. “And your wound from the tower is completely gone.”
I lift my hand to my neck, feeling only smooth skin. “It is?”
“You’re like me,” he murmurs.
A burning heat sears through me. I look at him, and he looks at me, and despite the million thoughts rattling around in my mind, I have no idea what to say. Wearealike, far more than I want to admit. But as soon as I think it, his hands drop away.
The moment his touch leaves me, my lungs suddenly reach for air, like I’ve forgotten how to breathe.
“I should have suspected as much,” he says, reaching for his pack. “We both have innate power, something the Order can’t control. It only makes sense you’d heal like me, too.” He pauses, studying me. “You look surprised. Weren’t you aware?”
I shake my head. “While we’ve been partners, Osian has never let anyone get close enough to wound me. If I knew before that, I don’t remember.”
“And you weren’t aware of it now?” He rummages through his pack. “You say your magic usually takes a piece of you. A memory, right? Did it when you healed?”
“I actually…don’t know.” I frown, pressing a hand to my chest. “I usually feel this horrible pain when a memory crumbles, but there’s nothing now. I assume I would have started healing only a few moments ago. After we left the tomb.”
“Yes, the iron would have numbed that power when we were inside, like all the rest.”
He pulls a cloth from his pack and leans forward again, gently wiping the last of the blood from my face. It’s not his skin this time, but even so, my body reacts by tightening all over. I’mall too aware of how he shifts a little closer, lowering his head so that it’s only a breath from mine. He is focused so intently on my mouth that my lips part out of their own volition. A flash goes through his eyes.
Then he swallows and pulls back. “There. You’re perfect now.”
A shudder goes through me. I look at anywhere other than him and blurt out the first thought that isn’t blood, touch, or mouth. Orperfect.
“You say our magic is alike, but your memories don’t shatter when you use your ice, do they?”
His face clouds over, and for a moment, I wonder if I struck a raw nerve.
But then he answers. “Using it drains me, but it doesn’t take from me like yours does.” A pause. “At least not anymore. I think it may have once. My childhood is lost to me. Years after it, too. I don’t why, or if something changed, but I don’t forget things now. Even things I wish I could.”
I search his face. “I don’t remember my childhood, either. My father was a drunk who didn’t want me. That’s all I know. Seren took me from him.”
His gaze sharpens. “Tookyou?”
“Rescued me,” I correct automatically.
“Hmm. And you still believe it was rescue?”
I sigh, then close my eyes. “No, I suppose not.”
For a long while, we just sit here like that, silent but for the creak of the trees and the rustle of animals scampering through the underbrush. I dig the bread from my pack, still warm despite the hours that have passed. Every so often, Taliesin scouts the path ahead before dropping back, his eyes hard and distant.
“Only a few left,” he says after the third time he’s checked.
Just in time for the gray light of evening to have faded from the sky, leaving only a ceiling of black as seamless as theonyx tomb. I shoulder my pack and follow Taliesin to the front clearing. A handful of rogues drift around the ring of skulls, oblivious to our presence. The crash of shattering stone and wild, animalistic roars seeps through the slit in the tomb’s wall, half-shut now. Someone has wedged a sword in the gap to keep it open, but the whole structure vibrates, like it’s only seconds away from sealing and trapping everyone inside.
I hesitate, if only for a moment. No matter who these people are or what they’ve done, that seems like a cruel end. Hunger and thirst will slowly rot them from the inside out, until they’re gasping and too weak to stand.
My touch would be merciful for once.
“We can’t help them,” Taliesin says, reading me again, as he so often does.
I shake my head and follow him down the path, in the direction of the distant rebel command post, and away from the people who would rip us apart the moment we stepped inside that tomb. He’s right. We can’t help them. Still, leaving them feels wrong, like I’m turning my back on something sacred.
Through the trees, Bryn scampers toward us. She greets Taliesin with another swipe at his boots before climbing to his shoulder once again. A stream of chatter spills from her, a language I’m beginning to realize he understands.
His expression darkens as he listens.
