Page 24

“ G et off me, you ox.” I shove at him, and he moves willingly enough, though his face drains of color just enough for me to realize he’s still hurt.

I grimace and force myself not to grab him close to me again.

Not because I want him—definitely not that—but in that fevered moment, he isn’t just a warrior undone… he’s something softer, something real.

He’s a fellow warrior in a fight we barely understand.

“Here you go. I’ve got you.” Caleb is there, of course, because Caleb is always there.

He flattens his right arm against Tennet’s back, bracing him as Tennet struggles to a standing position then collapses down onto the low couch.

I scramble up as well, circling Tennet until I get a decent view of his back.

“What in—how did this happen? When? You had one of those things attached to you?”

Tennet leans his elbows heavily on his knees, his head still down.

I can’t tell whether he’s about to pass out or throw up, but I almost miss the short-lived energy that fueled his smirk a few moments ago.

“It caught on my clothes and burrowed beneath my tunic. I thought I’d pulled it out, but apparently there was more than one.

There was enough going on that I didn’t notice it, and then I just—I didn’t feel it anymore. ”

I grimace as I survey the long, ugly slash of skin, the edges still puckered and charred.

It strikes me that for all his arrogance, Tennet never thought to stop to check for wounds.

I suspect he pushes forward, always. Maybe it’s pride.

Maybe it’s something lonelier—like he’s not used to anyone caring enough to stop.

Shaking myself back to the moment, I glance at Caleb. “It was under his skin?”

“It wasn’t moving much, but it was trying to, still.” Caleb nods, and I note that his eyes have gone a little glassy too. “Fortunately, it wasn’t dug in deep. Once I sliced into his back, I could pull the whole thing out by the middle.”

“Blighted Dark,” mutters Tennet. He tries to straighten, but the result is a little more than a shrug. “Is this what’s happened to the others?”

“No.”

I turn sharply as Nazar strides into the room, Miriam and the other two councilors hard on his heels. Miriam mutters a curse as soon as she sees Tennet doubled over. She stalks across the room, then exhales in a small gasp when she sees the wreckage of his back.

“I tossed it in the fire,” Caleb says before she can say anything. “If I was supposed to keep ahold of the thing, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“No—no,” Miriam says. She rubs a hand over her face, seeming genuinely stunned. “Has he said anything out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”

“He’s not real talkative right now.” I wave at her impatiently, in no mood to relive Tennet’s ravings right this moment. “Are the rest of the house lords this injured?”

“None of the other lords endured one of the creatures for this long. The skrill were weak, depleted from their journey, I expect, and died quickly. Had they encountered us at the border, they would have been far more deadly, but they traveled a great distance to get here, so?—”

No, they didn’t . I jolt with the realization, but I know I’m right. And because I’m right, the entire Protectorate is in so much more danger than we realized, and the battle we’re about to face is coming far more quickly than we had any idea.

Rihad had planned his betrayal of the Protectorate far better than any of us had given him credit for.

“Caleb—get Fortiss,” I say quietly. “Bring him here, alone. He needs to be in this conversation.”

He nods. “What of the other house lords, if there are any with him?”

“Not them, not yet.” The plan that’s forming in my mind is the attack of a warrior against a many-headed serpent, particularly apt in this case.

But I need Fortiss to advance it, not me.

And only a few warriors will be right for this task.

Other than Fortiss, they’re all in this room already.

“Have him put my father in charge of them, to give him something to do too. I don’t want him here. ”

Caleb grins at me, makes a fist to tap at his heart, then heads out.

I meet Nazar’s gaze next, then turn to Miriam.

“What are Lord Tennet’s prospects?” I ask as I gesture to his hunched-over form.

I can practically feel the tension radiating off him—not pain, I don’t think, but a profound feeling of wrongness that he’s doing all he can to stamp down.

“Is he going to just stay curled up and moaning for the rest of time or is he going to recover anytime soon?”

“I’m right here, you know,” Tennet grits out, managing to twist his head enough to glare up at me. The pallor of his face has definitely lessened, but I can barely keep from skipping my gaze away from his to focus on the angry rupture along his back, still seeping blood and gore.

I gesture Miriam toward him, and she steps forward, dipping into her satchel for a pouch of herbs. “I’ll need two bowls and more towels,” she announces. Nazar nods and turns toward his inner chambers while Miriam scowls down at Tennet. “He should be isolated and given time to rest.”

“No,” I interrupt her before Tennet can protest. “He’s not leaving this room until he can travel without swooning.

You’ll clean him up in this room and seal that wound, and then you’ll tell us what we need to do to keep it from re-opening.

You’ll also explain whatever you know about those creatures that tried to burrow inside him. ”

She doesn’t miss the edge in my voice, and she peers up at me as Nazar places two shallow bowls beside her.

“He did say something to you,” she says quietly as she pours some of her herbal concoction into the water, then soaks a towel in the water before turning to Tennet, her quiet, even voice continuing over Tennet’s hiss as she peels away the bloodied cloth from his back and sets it aside.

The edges of Tennet’s wound are charred, but there are no telltale angry, red claws that spike out from it, indicating a body at war with itself.

That’s at least a blessing. “Did you understand it? Did anyone else hear it?”

“I don’t—remember speaking at all until Talia shouted at me,” Tennet says through gritted teeth. “I didn’t realize she was even trapped beneath me until then.”

“Caleb was here, but I don’t think he heard anything clearly.

His words were gibberish to me,” I lie. For whatever reason, I don’t want to share what Tennet said.

Not with Miriam…not with anyone. Not yet.

“Foreign words I couldn’t understand. I thought he was overcome with pain. He’s earned that, certainly.”

“Yes.” Without warning him, she lifts the sodden towels from the bowl and presses it into Tennet’s back.

He lurches forward with a shout of shock and rage, and I drop to my knees and attempt to keep him from crashing to the floor again.

My swipe for his forearms miss, but his large hands clamp over my shoulders, the fingers digging into my muscles.

His face, contorted with pain, is only inches away from mine, his lips peeled back from his teeth and his eyes once again wild with this now-familiar frenzy.

“The path of shadows lights for you, the dead await the unwary,” he seethes. “The crown of wings?—”

“I’ve got you, Tennet,” I soothe over his moans, but his eyes don’t shift away from me.

He clutches me like a man hanging from the edge of a cliff, and I’m grateful for the reinforced shoulders of my tunic.

The design may have been intended to give me a bulkier, sturdier silhouette, but it’s the only thing keeping me from being bruised for a week from Tennet’s punishing grip.

“Keep him talking.” Miriam speaks to me as if she’s talking from a great distance, her words a slurry breeze on the edge of a lightning storm.

“His words may eventually make sense to you, and you can speak them to us. It’s important, Lady Talia.

The sight he has is only temporary, a shared memory with the creatures who attacked him.

There are stories about this, conjectures, but they’re all consistent on this point. It won’t last.”

I offer the crazed Tennet a reassuring smile as I realize Miriam is preparing a second wet heap of towels, pouring even more of the concoction into the bowl and soaking the thick cloth.

My nimble mind leaps ahead to what surely must come, and I manage not to shriek when she rips away the first application of toweling and what sounds like a layer of Tennet’s skin as well, and then, almost in one motion, plasters a new poultice over his back.

“The promise has been fulfilled! The covenant made!” Tennet roars in new pain at this attack, yanking me toward him so that our faces are but an inch apart.

“Grounding stones will guide us through the lighted horror of this plane, the barriers at the eastern mountains the only door we face. But first we feast, building an army of shadows to do the Sahktar’s bidding.

” He leans into me, fairly keening in pain, his eyes like pinwheels.

I have a vague sense of Miriam turning to Nazar, who now stands beside the fire, drawing out—something. Not a poker, but?—

Tennet’s choked voice drops into a guttural purr, so vile I can’t help but focus on him again. “The promise has been fulfilled, the blood price paid. It is complete. The covenant has been made, and you cannot unmake it.”

“I can absolutely unmake it,” I respond almost cheerfully. “I’ll follow your trail, to and through the shadows, and drive a stake through the Sahktar’s heart.” Whatever the Light Sahktar is.

“You cannot!” he insists, and his breath is hot and desperate on my face.

His brow is wet with sweat again, dark-brown hair hanging over his eyes in soaked curls.

It’s as if a bonfire has been lit within him, boiling his blood.

“Sword and shield, mud and magic, blighted Light and beloved darkness. Blood rules all, though. Blood has always ruled. Blood and blessed dark shall spread across the land and flow all the way to the heart of the infidels. Blood will rule. Blood must—aigh!”

Moving all in one action, Miriam peels off the towels and comes back not with another round of soaked cloth, but a long flat blade fresh from the fire that she presses against Tennet’s back.

He goes rigid with shock, and I brace myself for another torrent of babbling nonsense.

But though he opens his mouth to speak, he only manages a ragged breath.

“Lord Tennet!” Fortiss’s voice explodes in a horrified shout from across the room, and Tennet swings his gaze that way.

I don’t know if he recognizes the lord protector, or if he even understands where he is or what’s going on at this point.

Tennet is a man who’s been pushed far past his limits, limits he likely never expected to be tested so thoroughly in such a short period of time.

And he also has the poison of the Western Realms snaking through him.

I shift beneath his brutal grip, then flinch as he swings his head back toward me. I’m ready for a new round of vitriol, praying I’ll remember all of it. If it actually turned out to mean something, I’d listen to Tennet ramble for the next week straight.

But Tennet only exhales sharply when our gazes connect again, and I realize his eyes are no longer spinning pinwheels of chaos. Instead, they’ve flashed back to stormy blue depths that stare at me with perfect clarity.

Well, not entirely perfect. In barely a blink, his whole face seems to soften, his lips part, his eyes bore into mine as if I am the answer to every prayer he ever longed for in the depths of his heart and soul.

“Lady Talia,” he half-moans, the words caught somewhere between a caress and a benediction. His voice shouldn’t affect me, but it does. There’s something in it—reverent, searching—that makes my breath hitch before I can catch it. He says my name like it matters. Like I matter.

Then he tips forward in a tumbling collapse. For the second time tonight, I face the prospect of being flattened by this infuriatingly half-naked man.

Only this time, Tennet pauses at the last moment, stopping his forward motion as our faces barely touch?—

And his lips come down on mine.