Page 28 of Betrothed

“I will get another fur for the nest in a moment,” Zax mumbled. But he didn’t move. He licked at the sweat cooling on her neck, and Fawn wondered if she had ever been this close to another person. Not that Zax was a person, but… still.

She shifted in his grip, suddenly wanting out. No, she didn’t want out—she wanted to want to be let out. She was actually quite content in his arms. Worryingly so, for someone who had only slept with him to distract him from the hunters coming to take her away.

She had never been naked with him before, she realized. Not unless she was in the bath, where he could not get too close. It felt less intimate that way. And she didn’t want to be too intimate with him. Not when she knew they had a time limit.

Zax did not demand that they leave again, as she feared. He only replaced the fur lining in the nest and lay down with her again, holding her close.

Fawn was almost asleep when he asked, “Do you dislike my scars?”

Fawn lifted her head from his chest. “What?”

“My scars,” Zax said. “I could find a way to get rid of them if you disliked them. I think. My brothers know all sorts of magic.”

Fawn frowned. She didn’t know he was self-conscious of the scars the Circle had given him the first time they met.

“I like them,” Fawn said automatically. She stroked his broken horn and watched his eye fall closed. His other eye remained scarred shut, and Fawn felt a strange stab of guilt as she tried to imagine what he looked like before they attacked him: healthy and whole. She had only ever seen him bound and bleeding, after the hunting party had come back.

“Do you?” Fawn asked cautiously.

Zax paused. “They hurt, sometimes.”

“Still?” Fawn touched the deepest scars in his shoulders, feeling the grooves. “I don’t want you to hurt. But they don’t look bad.”

“Good,” said Zax, relieved. “I wish to be something you enjoy looking at.”

With that, he settled back down and slept. Fawn stayed awake, staring at the closed curtains. The ones he had put up for her, just like the table, and the books, and the cutlery.

Any moment now, she told herself, ignoring the horrible sadness that arose at the thought.

Eleven

Zax woke to the smell of smoke.

The roof was on fire. It licked inside the windows, eating up the curtains he had nailed so carefully to the wood. As he stared in horror, a flaming arrow sailed through the window opposite him and sank into the floor just below their nest.

He lurched up, shaking Fawn awake.

She startled awake. “Whassappening?”

“We are under attack,” Zax told her, grabbing his loincloth. He picked up her dress from the floor next to the nest and found that it was burning. He stamped the fire out and handed it over. She yanked it on, running her fingers over the burned bottom of the dress.

Hem, he corrected himself distractedly. The bottoms of clothes were called hems. She had taught him that when they were washing their clothes at the river yesterday.

Another arrow slammed into the wall, its fiery tip piercing the wood. The wall began to burn instantly, and Zax caught a whiff of oil that the arrows had been dipped in before they were shot.

A voice echoed up from the forest floor.

“BRING HER DOWN,” screamed the villainous Errol. “OR DIE, MONSTER!”

Zax grabbed a pack—just one, the other was on fire—and slung it onto his back. Then he took Fawn in his arms. Among all the acrid smoke and oil, he could still smell her fear, stronger than any of it.

“Do not worry, my love,” he assured her. “I will protect you.”

Fawn’s face twisted with emotion, her eyes filling.

Zax turned to leap out of the only window that was not burning.

“Wait,” Fawn blurted.