Page 21 of Sworn to the Shadow Throne

Then the darkness pulled me under again, and this time, I couldn’t fight it.

***

Pain came and went, much like my consciousness. I learned nothing from the pain, and being conscious only left me with more questions.

I remembered a woman’s voice, sometimes close, sometimes distant. Sometimes, she talked to me. Or perhaps she never stopped, and I was the one fading away. Sometimes, Death’s singing would fill the air, pushing back the fog and pain. Whatever I’d expected dying to be like, it wasn’t being surrounded by the smell of a hearth, nor comforted by a voice that made the dark feel less like an ending and more like the start of something.

That impossible certainty hadn’t left me either. Even half-drowned in fever and pain, I found myself wanting to open my eyes to see if I’d been right about Death’s lovely face. Yet the moment her voice faded, my mind inevitably plunged back into suffering or the desolate void of sleep.

I stopped fighting the dark. Not surrender, but a strange, fragile trust. I’d wake to a cool cloth, my skin ablaze with an unbearable itch that still somehow soothed, the clang of wood on the inside of a pot. Darkness. Light.

Sensation without sequence.

The moments repeated until repetition itself lost meaning. How long this went on, I didn’t know. Long enough for time to lose shape.

But then one day, a log cracked in the hearth so loudly that I startled awake, mind clearer than it had been in what seemed like forever. Instinct compelled me to roll to my feet, to call a sword to my hands, to be ready for a fight.

Heart pounding, it all came rushing back at once. The battle. My failure to turn my horse. Waking up to see a pair of soft eyes hovering above me. It didn’t matter what my impression of my caretaker had been; being attacked had led me here, and the only thing that could’ve kept me alive was magic.

I screamed within the walls of my mind, Move, Owain! Yet even the slightest shift brought on a paralyzing pain so intense that I nearly passed out, leaving me frozen in place.

I finally cracked one eye open and scanned my surroundings. Sunlight streamed through the gaps in the shutters and a hole in the roof. The ceiling swam into view. Green shapes hung above me, splitting into two before sliding back together. Drying…herbs?

But then the heavy, comforting warmth on my chest shifted. Only then did I notice a soft breath ghost across my ribs and fingertips brush my skin.

I braced myself to risk opening both eyes then tilted my head to look down. A cascade of red curls spilled across my skin. A…woman? Cursed gods, an actual woman was sleeping on me?

She had collapsed onto mine, heavy and limp from complete exhaustion. It hit me then: those endless cycles of her voice and the singing in the dark hadn’t happened over a single night. She’d been fighting to keep me alive for days, waking me, tending me, over and over, until she had absolutely nothing left to give.

I froze, afraid even a full breath might wake her. Her body was half draped over mine, warm curves pressing into my good side—painfully intimate. Her cheek rested on my bare chest, skin-to-skin. Each breath she took puffed out silently, warming the place over my heart.

The singer.

She was utterly at ease, looking for all the world like she belonged there. As if cuddling with a stranger—an armed, calloused, and scarred stranger—was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

A wave of irrational relief crashed through me. It was too strong, too instinctive a feeling to have for a stranger. My mind screamed danger even as some traitorous part of me relaxed at her touch and my magic reached for her warmth.

The only thing that could explain how badly I wanted to keep her there was the sheer amount of blood I’d lost. That, or I was mad from fever.

I wanted to laugh. I was halfway to my grave, and this was the closest I’d been to having a woman in my arms in years. But she was Assembly, a rebel, or something worse. I couldn’t rule anything out—least of all the possibility that my judgment was compromised.

Just as I dared to look away from her, movement brought a pair of predatory green eyes forward to dominate my vision. Damp, fetid breath washed over me. It was too close to even make out a shape. The creature hissed, followed by a spray of warm, foul-smelling spittle that splattered across my face.

Mist rose off my skin, ready to attack, but the beast made a hasty retreat, scrambling directly onto the head of curls like it owned it. Now that there was some distance between us, I could see that my opponent was a tiny, furious male veska.

The redhead gasped awake, reaching to grab the creature out of the mess it had made of her hair. Cold rushed in where her warmth had been.

While she was distracted fighting the little creature, I tested the weight of my limbs, determining whether I was in any condition to put up a fight. Pain lanced through my side. A hiss that sounded embarrassingly close to the veska’s escaped me before I could mask the weakness.

Too busy to notice, the redhead screeched, “Muffin, get out of my hair!”

Her hands clenched around its body, and at last, the tiny creature released its grip. It thumped to the floor—then immediately launched itself back onto my chest.

My impulse was to swat the creature away, but an absurd part of me was afraid to injure it—not because it was small, but because it was hers.

I’d taken blades to the gut, arrows to the leg—but nothing had prepared me for the humiliation of being mauled by a furry, pint-sized demon. I let out another unmanly, but blessedly quiet, yelp of pain as blood poured down my face from its bite.

The redhead lunged, grabbing the furious veska by the haunches. Instead of letting go, the monster dug his nails into my flesh and attempted to bite my face again.