Page 157 of Bloodwitch

“Why is it,” she asks softly, long fingers furling around the first shaft, “that I always seem to be pulling arrows from you?”

She yanks. He coughs. Blood pours.

Five more times, she repeats this, and he can practically see her calculating the life-debts between them. He would have healed from these wounds on his own, though, so as far as he is concerned, this counts for nothing.

“At least this time,” she says when she is done, a pile of red fletching at her feet, “you waited until you were here before removing them. The cuts will heal cleaner because you let me do it.”

This is not how his magic works. Not at all, but he also does not contradict her. Instead, he says, “You are an expert in Bloodwitches now?”

“No.” Her lips sketch a smile. “Just in stubbornness.”

“It takes it to know it.”

Now her smile widens, and for some reason, his heart hitches at the sight of that. And for some reason, he likes that he can see the tips of her white canines. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen them before.

“I could not sense you coming,” he tells her, gaze flicking away from her mouth. Back to her yellow eyes. “Did you remove the coin?”

“No.” She pulls back her collar to prove this, but he finds he is not watching the silver taler or the leather strap it is bound to. Instead, he finds he is staring at her collarbone. At the small hollow along the base of it.

Her pulse flutters.

“It must need more blood,” she says eventually, startling him back into the moonlight.

Their eyes meet. Hers seem closer now. The air seems smaller. He does not breathe. She does not breathe.

Until, suddenly, it is too much. He backs away two steps and blurts, “I am leaving soon. So you need not worry that I will hurt you.”

He does not know why he tells her this. He had not planned on letting her know. Then again, he had also intended to leave last night. And the night before. And every night since they had found that child in the Contested Lands.

He had yet to actually follow through, though.

“You would have left without saying good-bye?” she asks.

And he counters, “You would have cared?”

She does not respond to this. She simply stares in that inscrutable way of hers while heat gathers in his shoulders. On his cheeks, too. This is not the response he had hoped for from her; he does not know what is.

Without warning, she swoops down and reclaims an arrow from the spring’s rocky shore. Then she takes a single step toward him, and though he wants to back away, he resists. Even as she closes the space between them. Even as she reaches for his arm.

With a touch light as snowfall, she laces her fingers around his wrist. Then she lifts his hand.

At first he thinks she is trying to read his palm like some Sightwitch from centuries past—just as his mother used to do. But then she lifts the arrow, and before he can stop her, she rakes it across his skin.

A soft pain lances through him. He hisses, and blood pools.

Then her free hand moves to the silver taler at her neck. A yank, a snap. She places the coin atop his palm.

Already, the cut is healing. Already the blood clots and the rough skin knits itself back together—but not before a smear of blood can mark the coin’s surface. A fresh spray of red to sink into the grooves of the silver eagle.

“You want me to be able to find you?” He can scarcely hear his own voice. It is caught somewhere inside his chest.

But she hears him. “I don’t want you to kill me. Assuming we ever meet again.”

“Ah,” he murmurs, although “ah” is not the word he truly wants to say.

Two breaths later, she plucks the coin from his palm, careful not to get blood on her own skin. Then she offers him one of her sly, subtle smiles—only visible if you know what you are looking for.

He knows what he is looking for.

“Also,” she adds softly, “I want you to be able to find me.”

Without another word, she turns and walks away. His heart thumps unevenly inside his chest. His lungs swell against his breastbone, as if there is something he ought to say. Something he wants to say before she is gone.

In her odd, perplexing way, he thinks she might be asking him to stay. No one has ever asked him that before.

No one. Ever.

But he does not speak, and he does not follow. In seconds, the forestwelcomes her. The night turns colder. Yet all the while, he stands there, as rigid as the earth beneath his feet.

And all the while, he watches, moment by moment, heartbeat by heartbeat, as the cut on his palm closes until nothing is left but dried blood with a circle missing at its heart.