Page 29

My eyes darted between the two of them. “I don’t understand.”

“And that is the problem, Captain. You don’t understand the workings of Ailbhe.”

“All due respect to you, drui, it doesn’t seem like you do either if healing a simple human girl from mundane wounds confounds you. So, have you earned your caps, or are you just another one of the pretty trappings of the Temple?” I growled.

“Careful, Raven. You’re supposed to make friends with the people who hold your pet’s life in the balance,” the Bandrui said at my side through gritted teeth.

“Perhaps if we . . .”

The two drui of Ailbhe faded off into conferring with each other as they spoke in rushed, hushed tones about the intricacies of flesh mending.

I gave the Bandrui a sidelong glance and winked. “Works on soldiers, too. Sometimes, you’ve got to give them a reason to prove you wrong.”

Her brows drew down, and she began chewing on her lip. “It’s rather serious, Raven. Those are the two best healers in the temple. If they are pushing themselves, it is very serious.”

I nodded to her, returning to the chair by the door that had become my second bed.

“I suspected as much.” I eased myself into the chair and stretched so she could have better access to the wound at my side that had narrowly missed my organs. “You were keeping her from me while he was beating her?”

The question fell as an open-palmed slap across the Bandrui’s face as her fingers stilled for a moment. “She could not feel the damage, and at first, it was easy enough to heal it while we were working on her other injuries. There was no reason to goad your ire when he was neither causing her pain nor harming her in a way that could not be undone. It was best to allow him his visitations and keep the peace of the temple.”

“That violates hospitality,” I hissed, trying to keep my temper under control. Here she was, stitching up my wounds while calmly telling me she had allowed that beast to brutalize a defenseless woman in her care.

“It did. And I have done my penance for that violation. It was necessary.” She raised and inspected my arm where I still bore the mark of Cricket’s bite. “Did that bastard bite you?”

“There was nothing necessary about it, Bandrui. I will not accept the whisperings of your estranged friends as a reason to violate the sanctity of the Temple nor harm a defenseless charge of the Temple, human or not.” I tipped her chin up with the crook of my finger and glared down at her. “It does not happen again. You do not keep these secrets from me again. She is my ward. Do we have an accord?”

Something deviously clever sparkled in her dark-red eyes, and she nodded. “Then, you will take charge of your ward when you can.”

“I will. And leave the bite mark. It’s a trophy.”

“Of what? A rabid dog?”

“My utter defeat,” I quipped enigmatically while watching the hound in question.

Her placating smile was a small balm to my nerves as she worked, and I watched Cricket. Every twitch, every wince, even though I knew it to be a momentary bodily reaction, felt like I was suffering it myself. My heart broke, and my spirit ached for the agony she would have been experiencing if she were not held in an unnatural torpor. Guilt and torment paired together and created a toxic stew within me.

It took them hours to finally finish with her and flee the room, leaving us in silence. All the while, I sat in the chair by the door, guarding her from anything else. Exhaustion tried to claim me more times than I cared to admit. Long hours slipped by sometimes with me fighting the battle not to nod off more than the slight inconvenience from the devastating wounds I had received during the duel.

Daróg had fought me with everything he had. I could see it on his face. He wasn’t going to let the duel stand in his way if I hadn’t completely humiliated him. I could feel him drawing from The Sapphire Speaker the entire time, pulling and siphoning her magic away from her like the little leech he had become. Every one of his attacks was twice as vicious, twice as brutal as they should have been.

I had to mete my own strength. I could not let him know or see the true depth of my own stores. I could not allow him to see how strong I had become under the stress of years of his torment. I could only let him see me struggling. It had been the hardest fight I had waged since the war. Everything within me, every molecule of my essence had wanted to rip him from the very pages of the history of our realm and burn him from memory, for her. To keep her safe. To keep her whole. To honor her in blood.

But I couldn’t.

There were too many years of planning set out before us to allow that to happen. Too many years of careful preparation to destroy him for one single duel to unmake all the plans we had laid down. And even if there was not, she was not ready for me. Not yet. And it would be all for naught.

So, I had let him strike me, let him bend and break me against his magic more times than I should have. Only when I knew that he had nothing left did I allow myself to show him the tiniest droplet of strength I had accumulated. It had been an easy bluff—a painful one but an easy one. He would return to his chambers to sulk and stew and would excuse the loss by the fact that we fought at dawn during the waning of spring. He was naturally at his least powerful with the ending of his court’s time, and I was naturally at my strongest with the height of my own. He could justify his loss as circumstantial and not the routing that should have been his penance for the breach of hospitality.

I pushed out of the chair, groaning silently at the stiffness in my body. I needed a long, hot, steaming bath and to enjoy the unwinding of the day, but before I did that, I would bathe her.

I knelt at the edge of the stone platform and watched her sleep.

Her eye had been stitched closed in an effort to save it. The way it dangled and bounced as I ran still haunted my dreams. Her hair had been parted where they had taken tiny tweezers to remove the slivers of her skull that tried to work themselves into the flesh of her brain. Fluid kept gathering over the exposed, wrinkled greyish-pink that throbbed gently with the strength of her heartbeat. Her nose had been broken multiple times, healed multiple times, and had formed a small bump in the middle of the bridge I could not help but obsess over. Would she like it the way I did? Would she find beauty in the evidence of her survival the way I did?

I gently removed the soft wool blanket that had been draped over her to keep her body from prying eyes. No matter how many times I saw the evidence of his brutality, it always made my gorge rise. I had seen atrocities pile up in the mud of a once-parched battlefield and had never reacted. I had committed such heinous acts upon my enemies that they were whispered in nightmare tales to scare young Fae babes. But this roadmap of carnage was too much for me to bear witness to.

Her hips, once full and rounded with a feminine flare, were littered with dark bruises, where he had taken the stout oaken leg of a chair and beaten her repeatedly until I was sure the cracking was no longer the sound of bones breaking but of the wood striking the stone floor beneath her. The bones had been reshaped but were still weak and delicate.