I stumbled out into the clean, bright morning, my hands covered in blood. Fear came with me.
“You’re all right,” he murmured, and then he was at the basin beside me, pouring water over my hands. His hands slid over mine, his fingers and thumb stroking over my palms, between the webbing of my fingers, along the base of my nails, working loose the blood in a foam of soap.
Then my hands were clean, and he had my wrists in his hands, drying my hands against his shirt, holding them against the warm expanse of his chest. The motion forced us close together, my gaze rising from his throat to his face.
“Another mortal can finish with the others,” he offered.
“No, they cannot.”
I owed it to Tesa and to Tay.
And I owed it to our story. If no one else wielded the knife, then the legend grew, just a little. The dragon-marked mortal who wields the unmaking knife. The dragon-marked mortal who undoes the queen’s enchantments.
I had not wanted to be a part of any legend, because every legend was a lie.
But the people needed hope.
Feeling more steady, I promised, “I’m capable.”
He touched my face tenderly, his thumb scraping over my cheek. If I had wept, he brushed the tear away before anyone could notice. “You are. And I am at your side.”
As always, I couldn’t quite see the seam, what was performed for an awestruck theater, and what was real between us. The damp of my hands had left impressions of my palms and fingers against his shirt.
We went in again together.
The healer bandaged Riven’s wound. The enchantment crystal was dissolving away into nothing, blue light wisping away from it as it came undone. He looked away from the wound and from us, his dark hair long around his lean face. I studied him, not able to tell if he was mortal or shifter or Fae. What had he been before he was a Nightwalker?
“You’re free,” I told him.
“Yes. And now I remember everything I did for her.” He watched as the healer tied the last of the bandage. Riven stood to his feet, abrupt and eager. “I do not feel free.”
He went out into the camp.
Fear looked at me as if he were not sure of me. Given how he’d washed the blood from my hands only moments ago, the scent of poisoned magic sick in the air around us, it was entirely understandable. Unfortunately. I would have liked to hate him more.
“Let’s help Tesa,” I said, my words chosen carefully, because being released from the queen’s enchantment might not feel like freedom.
Thirty-Six
Cara
The Nightwalker. Ander’s Nightwalker. Tesa.Her identity to me had shifted. I had been too focused on Tay and Lidi and my mother to pay much attention to what I’d deemed Fear’s pet Nightwalkers.
She had raven hair, short and choppy around a heart-shaped face, and she still wore the black hooded tunic of a Nightwalker, the scarf that they used to cover their faces knotted around her throat.
Now, as she sat stiffly down on the edge of the cot, I felt guilty, so I attempted a joke. “I feel like we should’ve gotten to be friends before I brandished a knife in your direction.”
“You do like to do that,” Fear agreed, smiling, and it sounded as if he was joking, but I knew what was underneath.
I turned away to the table at the side of the cot so no one would see my smile flatten out. Someone had removed the gore-streaked bowl and replaced it with one that was clean and empty.
“It will feel strange,” I warned her.
“So does knowing you’ve left so many pieces of yourself behind.” She studied Fear, her gaze tracking across his face curiously. “You told me you would learn about my past and report back.”
“Now you will be able to remember for yourself.”
“Do I want to?”
