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She reached out to touch me.

The second the tip of her finger met my blood-coated skin, I called on my darkness and transported us to my private quarters on the flagship. Dimmer. Quieter, except for the creaking of the walls and the wind whistling beyond them.

“You could have warned me,” Rayna rasped, throwing out her hands for balance at the sudden rocking of the floor.

“And what fun would there be in that?”

Her glare bolted through me. “Sit down. Let’s take a look.”

I obeyed, keeping the box on my lap as she put her knife away and reached for the bucket of water I’d left by my berth. Thankfully, it hadn’t sloshed much in the absence after my abrupt departure, still half full and bobbing with the sponge.

“Now you can take off your shirt,” Rayna said.

Her voice was a mix of trying to stay stern and genuinely worried and maybe a bit bashful, and God if that didn’t put a stupid, sloppy smile on my face. I set the box off to the side before tugging off my shirt, tracing the bob of her throat.

She moved into the space between my knees, scent wafting against me. Dipped her hand in the water, brought out the sponge, and placed it against my chest. The contact stung a bit, but she’s the one who hissed.

“Coen, this is your blood. You have a cut here.”

“Really?” I couldn’t even bother glancing down, too stuck on her face as she dabbed at me. “It’s fine. It’ll heal.”

It had probably started off as a much deeper gash, the initial pain numbed by adrenaline, and started stitching itself back together over the last hour or so while I was otherwise preoccupied. As long as it wasn’t poisoned, I was good.

Rayna bit her lip and continued dabbing at me. Each touch was so achingly gentle that I would have closed my eyes if there wasn’t something worth looking at. Water trickled back into the bucket as she wrung the sponge, the only sound besides the in and out of our breaths, the beat of our hearts.

And the swirl of her current thoughts, of course, her mind open for me again.

I waited until she’d scrubbed off all the blood and returned the sponge to the bucket before I picked up the box again. “I can’t tell if you’re stubbornly ignoring this or if you forgot what a present looks like, but this is for you.”

Rayna’s eyes finally snapped to the thing in my hand. “For me?”

“Yes, little hurricane.”

She took it hesitantly, pulling on the end of the ribbon tied around the paper and unraveling the whole thing bit by bit. When she’d finally opened the box, she pulled out a little glass bottle full of something that smelled like orchid and bamboo.

“You got me the body oil?” Her brows and lips pulled up in surprise. “Thank you! Oh, I knew I sensed you at the Cardina market. Did you follow me to Fabian’s too, or just to the tree with the original Wild Whisperer?”

There was a deeper question there. A question about how much I knew.

“I found out Rodhi had broken her out when I assigned everyone their tasks in the treehouse.” My hands were on her hips now, steadying her in the wake of a particularly aggressive tilt of the ship. “And I’ve already scraped through her mind to make sure she’s telling the truth about everything—or at least to make sure she believes she’s telling the truth.”

“She certainly seems to think Dyonisia started off with some kind of heroic intention, huh?” Rayna studied her bottle of body oil, though I had a feeling she was looking through it. “So you know about the original Esholian Institute?”

Ah, there it was. The thing that was troubling her most even in the midst of everything else Agathea had said. I’d never thought the institute in Sorronia was relevant enough to mention it to her, but now that she knew about it and I had access to her reaction, I realized how wrong I’d been in that assumption.

Because from Rayna’s perspective, this entire island—her whole life—was just a copycat. A poor, murky reflection of something else.

I shook my head. “They’re different, via. Dyonisia’s institute gives you magic from the start and teaches you how to use it. Mydusia’s institute… do you remember when I told you that some faeries purposefully put themselves through a catastrophic event? To trigger their powers?”

Rayna nodded.

“Mydusia’s institute demands magic or death. It doesn’t infuse you with power, but pulls it out of your marrow. You either die during the process or emerge as a fully-matured faerie. No practice tests. No exiles. No other options.”

Rayna’s shoulders tensed. In a flash, I stood and spun her around until she was the one sitting on the edge of the berth. Then plucked the bottle from her hands.

“May I?”

Warmth infused her cheeks as she realized what I was offering. “Do you want my clothes on or off?”