Page 69 of Last of Her Name

“You shouldn’t push him,” I tell Mara. “He could crush you into a pebble. And he looks like he’s waiting for an excuse to do it.”

She snorts and looks down the table at the rest of the tensors bent over their bowls. Several of them look just as miserably at their meals as we do ours.

“I’m going to check on Pol,” I say, rising to my feet.

“And I’m going back to bed.” Mara yawns and raises her oxygen mask to her face for a deep breath. The low O2levels make me sleepy too, but I haven’t had a chance to see Pol since we landed, and I’m anxious to see how he’s doing.

Mara and I split up in the passageway outside the mess hall. She goes up, I go down. Tyrrha is all stairs, it seems, and that combined with the low oxygen levels means I stay perpetually winded. The tensors, of course, just float up and down the stairs like blazing leaves on the wind, and not a few of them with smug little glances at me.

The infirmary is a pleasant room, by tensor standards, anyway. Instead of hard wooden chairs devised to torture one’s vertebrae, the seats here actually have soft pillows on them. The sloping outer wall is set with windows that overlook the mountains, and Diamin’s distant white sun is just peeking over the shoulder of the nearest summit. Thin, silvery rays slant across the snowy plain far below, where a herd of frost bison moves ponderously through the drifts.

Pol is standing at the window, silhouetted against the rising sun, his back to me. For a moment I almost don’t recognize him for his newly grown horns.

Hearing my footstep, he turns. He’s wearing only loose tensor trousers, his scarf knotted around his waist like a belt. His chest is bandaged tightly.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.” I scratch my elbow, my eyes slightly averted. “You want to put on some clothes, maybe?”

He looks down at his bare chest, then up at me. “You’ve seen me like this hundreds of times.”

“Yeah …” But those times, the sight of him didn’t leave me weak. It’s like something changed between us on the way here, in that blazing ceremony of his. I’m not sure how to get back to the way we were. I have even less idea where we actuallyare, and what the jitters in my stomach mean. Or how in the stars I would explain them to Clio.

I try, desperately, to lighten the mood. “So! How about that bison meat? Chews like a sock, am I right?” I punch his shoulder in a poor attempt at playfulness, just as a tensor girl emerges from another doorway.

“Easy!” she snaps. “He isn’t healed yet. You’ll undo all my work!”

“Sorry,” I mutter.

“This is Damai,” Pol says. “She’s incredible, Stacia. All that pain in my chest? Gone.”

“Your bones are strong,” Damai says, setting down a pile of clean bandages and going to Pol. She is tall and lean, her hair woven into many braids that she piles atop her head. She presses her hand against Pol’s chest, fingers lightly probing his sternum, and nods to herself. “He had several broken ribs. But I was able to ease the pressure on his lungs.”

“Turns out gravity-magic is great for healing,” Pol adds. He grins at the girl.

She smiles back at him. “I’m fascinating by this Trying of yours. You aeyla have such exquisite bone structure. I hope you’ll let me study it for my notes. We know so little about your people, and it would be a great service to our medical library.”

“Oh,” he says, lifting his eyebrows. “Well, I guess if it’shelpful…”

She laughs.

“Right. Damai, thank you.” I cough, noting her hand on his chest, her fingers lingering on his bare collarbone. “Pol, you weren’t at dinner. I’d thought you died or something. Again.”

“That’s Stacia,” he says to Damai. “Always exaggerating.”

I suck in a sharp breath. “Well, at least I don’t go around getting myself shot.”

“Oh, I gotmyselfshot? You’re the one who had to jump in front of Riyan—”

“They were going to kill him!”

“Well, better they kill me than him, then. You know, I saw you two cuddling up on the bridge on the way here.”

“Cuddling?”

Damai’s gaze darts between us. “All right. Enough. You need to rest, Pol. You might feel better, but your bones still need to heal.”

She moves to walk me to the door, whispering, “You probably should stay away for a few days, until he’s stronger. You upset him.”