Her foot slipped, and one side of the litter dipped. Luckily, I caught the corpse while she was still cursing. We placed the litter down and started over.
“I’m sorry,” she said shortly, her voice clipped. She never sounded as if she meant it when she apologized, but it was because she meant it so much and was so uncomfortable with her emotions. “I thought I’d make it easier, but I’m not helping.”
She was here, and she was trying to help. That was remarkable, given what she and I had done to each other. “It is helping, Cara.”
Her breath was coming short. “Don’t humor me; I’m not a child.”
“How do I talk to this infuriating woman?”It had been intended as an internal thought rather than an appeal to Shadowbane. Or at least, I thought it had.
“You could try something unusual like honesty,”Shadowbane suggested.“Though, is that too frightening when you are bonded to her forever?”
“Not if we sever the bond.”The thought was grim. I kept returning to the fact Shadowbane had offered.
Afterward, both Cara and I could theoretically fall in love with someone else. Life as I knew it would be over: Cara would be freed of her bond with me, Shadowbane would return to the Dreaming, and Bismyth would choose a new First. I would be alone.
The future with someone who was not a prickly, petite hassle who was far too quick to draw knives should have been a peaceful thought, even a relief, but I found it was impossible to imagine.
“Do you think she would choose the severing,”Shadowbane mused,“knowing it would mean you and I lose each other?”
“I was going to lie about that part.”
There was a moment of silence in my mind that I could hear as shocked, then aggravated.
“Breakable little fool.”
“If she knows what it would cost, she’ll choose selflessly. This is my last lie to her, and it’s a gift. I want her to choose for her own sake. If she wants me or not.”
Shadowbane’s silence continued to be aggrieved.“No. You want her to choose you because you’d rather die than go on in a world where no one truly knows you and no one chooses you.”
“I’m not interested in dying at all.”
My shoulders were beginning to ache, and I glanced back at her. Her face was set in that tight, long-suffering expression that indicated she was struggling. I knew that expression a littletoo well. She had often worn it when she was in my arms and pretending to be a good wife.
“You wish her to choose you, but you also will not forgive her stabbiness?”
“I’m beginning to genuinely wonder what your life was like with Lightbringer, because you seemed inclined to paint right over her trying to stab me in the back. Literally.”
“You should tell her that she hurt you, even though the knife entirely missed.”
“I told her I’m angry.”
Shadowbane’s pause felt as if it contained blistering thoughts about my intelligence.
We reached the pyres. Cara knelt carefully to lower the litter, but she was tired enough that her knees hit the cobblestones too hard, and I winced in sympathy. She needed rest.
There were three other bodies in the street now. Obsidian was focused on searching for their missing, and they had been joined without discussion by Clans Amber and Bismyth.
“What now?” Cara asked me, dusting her hands off on her trousers. She was looking out at the shifters picking through the rubble, at the mortals who had begun to repair the wall, at the glimmer of the sea.
So she did not see me close the distance between us until I was right there. I took her wrists as she startled and raised her hands, palms up, for me to examine. The fresh blisters on her palms from swinging a sword, overlapping the old calluses from farmwork, had torn open carrying the stretcher; they looked pink and raw, and a few were bleeding.
Her lips parted as she looked up at me. For a heartbeat, her expression was open and vulnerable. Then she blinked, and it was gone. She snatched her hands back.
“There’s no one watching, Fear.”
“There’s always someone watching.”
The urge I felt to salve and bandage her hands was one I could barely resist. Someone would see, of course, and it would seem a tender moment. I dropped her hands.
