That drew my attention back.
“To the Tower?”
“When I was twelve. He was gone six days. When he came back, his left hand was bandaged from the knuckles to the wrist.”
“What happened?”
“He said he had put his hand where it did not belong.”
“That’s the most horrifying sentence anyone has said tonight, and Quill has been very busy with his words.”
“I thought so too.”
I looked at his hands again. The left one rested open on his knee. Long fingers. A thin scar near the base of his thumb, pale against the skin.
He looked at mine.
One still had silver dried near the nail from the basin. One had a line of darker dust from touching my mother’s carving.
“You are cold,” he said.
“I’m beginning to regret Cosima’s dress alterations.”
“She removed the sleeves.”
“Heroically.”
He took off his formal coat and held it out.
I stared at it.
“It has sleeves.”
I laughed.
The sound cracked something in me that had been pretending to be dignity. My eyes burned before I could stop them.
Caspian kept holding out the coat.
I took it because refusing would have been ridiculous and because the coat was warm from his body. I put it over my shoulders.It smelled like him: starch, candle smoke, cold air, and beneath it the darker pull of the bond.
My Mark brightened.
So did his.
Across the wall, Kieran’s line answered, green and sharp enough to catch in my chest. From farther away, Hale’s came steadier. Rain-dark. Held at a distance, but there.
For a second, I had all three of them.
Caspian beside me.
Kieran hurting beyond the wall.
Hale farther off, refusing to disappear.
I must have cringed because Caspian asked, “Pain?”
“Too much at once.”
