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Ten steps. I could make it ten steps. Five. Two. The door to thecottage swung open. I made it an additional three paces before I gave up and stumbled over the cool, wood floor.

Adira made quick work of rummaging up a thin quilt and fashioning a pillow from some of the furs in my parents’ room. Her steps rushed past my head, back and forth, until she was kneeling beside me again, cool water in a wooden bowl.

“Adira.”

“Shh.” She dabbed a cold cloth against the wound on my neck.

“Adira. How . . . how did you . . .” I couldn’t finish.

She dabbed, then wrung out the cloth before returning it again to my skin. “Something sweeter turned to rage.”

I didn’t understand but could not find the energy to respond.

“Rest,” she whispered. “I’ve got you tonight, Kage Wilder.”

I wanted to speak, wanted to stay awake to be certain she was not concealing some mortal wound. My wants were disregarded, and I fell into darkness.

CHAPTER 26

Adira

My hair was tiedin a floppy knot in the center of my head. Despite the bite to the morning air, already sweat had beaded my brow and kept sticking strands of hair to my cheeks. In his delirium before I’d left the cottage, Kage called me a crimson fox from all the hair falling into my face.

Then, once I’d top-knotted it, he’d laughed—faintly—and said it looked like I’d grown a chicken’s comb.

Bastard needed to sleep, but fever kept thrashing him about. Infection had latched onto his wounds sometime during the night. My shoulders ached, my skin was coated in dirt and blood, and I was positive pulpy bags swelled under my eyes.

What I’d give for some fever reducers. Kage had done his best to point out a few stacks of books kept in his parents’ cottage.

Sweet, in a way, it was obvious their son had tried to make the place a comfortable home, even if they could not behold it. Books and stocked cupboards, paintings and sitting chairs. The cottage would be quite comfortable were it meant for anything other than a twisted resting place for a king and queen.

I shoved the aches and complaints aside, and dropped the basket with a few herbal guidebooks into a tall patch of grass. Before dawn, I’d played with the notion of returning to the palace, but with Kagestill lost in pain, fever, and festering wounds, I dared not risk the journey back through the Greenwood.

Then there was the undeniable itch of unease—instinct or something else—that seemed to urge me away from relaying our whereabouts to anyone at the palace. Something about those creatures unnerved Kage more than their appearance.

He seemed in utter shock they attacked in such a way, and I could not help but think it was intentional.

Until I knew more, I would tend to him, get him well enough to hold a conversation, then we’d make our next moves from there.

Blue, smoky mist wove through the dark trees like a haunt keeping watch. Sleipnir nickered nearby and indulged in a patch of wildflowers while he waited. Truth be told, the horse might be waiting for some time.

I flipped through the thick pages, scanning words I still stumbled over to understand and tried to match foliage—herbs, roots, petals—with sketched diagrams written in the book. Since arriving in Magiaria, I’d worked hard to pick up on dialects, accents, and words. Some were familiar, more forgotten memories, others were as foreign as extinct languages.

Each line, each page, was filled with ingredients I did not know, and the fear that I’d fail here, that I’d fail Kage, was crushing.

“Step by step,” I murmured, digging through the soil that was slightly discolored, blackened like it had been scorched. If I was reading the page right, these were small pockets in the earth that grew a strange sort of fungus called faeryworm—a stimulant that accelerated the body’s natural healing processes.

Lists, order, steps, they all brought my thoughts to a calm. They’d always given me a lick of control when the outside environment felt like it was spinning into utter chaos.

One finger on the slanted writing, tracking each word, the other hand digging in the soil, I checked off what I’d need. Faeryworm would help Kage’s body battle infection.

I dug deeper until my fingertips tangled around a dark, glistening tube. It looked more root than anything, but the small bulbs oozedwith a blue milky substance. Unbidden, a squeal of delight shattered the somber morning.

Next, ember . . . I squinted trying to translate words. Emberfern.

I sat back on my knees, running my finger under the line and reading slowly to the wind. “Emberfern aids in . . . restore—no—renewal of tissue and . . . flesh. Renewal of tissue and flesh.”

I added it to the list, rising with my new handfuls of fungus, and strode to Sleipnir. The horse was draped in baskets within larger baskets. Once the faeryworm was placed, we went deeper into the trees. The fern grew amidst stumps and decaying trees, thriving in the fertile soil that came from the decomposition.