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My chest stings, hurt and a little angry. “Why didn’t you tell me? I wouldn’t have made you come.”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” she admits, fixing me with a pained yet hardened stare. “I didn’t want you to worry and I didn’t want to be made to stay behind. Even though you can’t figure out why you need me.”

I rub my lips together, reaching for her again. She flinches at my touch but I hold her knee.

“But I need you,” she says softly.

I swallow hard, knowing what she’s asking.

“Brynla,” I begin.

“Why?” she says angrily. “If you have this power from the suen to heal, why won’t you use it on me? What happened to you? What’s scaring you?”

For a moment I feel myself freeze up, like everything inside me has seized.

And then it all comes out in a bitter rush.

“My mother,” I tell her, the memories coming over me like a blackened cloak.

They want to smother me until there’s only darkness.

I feel like I’m trying to stay above water, so I talk fast, too afraid to dwell in it.

“My mother was dying. It came one evening, we don’t know what it was.

It was as if her body started to shut down.

The pain she was in…she lost her voice from screaming.

Her eyes started to bleed, her skin turned…

like she was one big bruise. She couldn’t walk or eat or do anything but die.

She could only just die, painfully and slowly. ”

The heat of tears prickles behind my eyes but I ignore them. They can fall if they want. Brynla is looking at me with quiet horror, though I can’t tell if it’s from my confession or from her own pain.

“Everyone knew of my gift,” I tell her. “I was only thirteen; I’d barely had time to understand what I could and couldn’t do.

I was able to fix a broken bird’s wing. I could heal cuts that our horses got after a rough day’s foxhunting.

I was able to cure Vidar’s terrible headaches, at least for a little while.

And suddenly my father told me to heal my mother.

And I knew I couldn’t.” I shake my head, a tear spilling down and stinging the fresh cuts on my cheek.

“I just knew that I couldn’t. Is that what doomed me? That I didn’t believe in myself?”

“What did you do?” she whispers.

“What I had to. I would have done anything for my mother, anything. My father never had to make me do anything. I stayed by her side, I put my hands everywhere I could, her heart, her lungs, her head, and I felt her pain, this sickness, this dark disease. Death. I knew it was death. And then I felt my energy leave my body and go into hers and I had a hope and a prayer. I stayed with her a whole day and a whole night and then when the morning broke, she was dead.”

Her eyes widen, then twitch, shifting through pain and sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”

I swallow the lump in my throat, the sheer panic of sorrow clawing in my chest, like a ravenous beast that’s waiting to be set loose and destroy me.

I don’t let the beast out often. It needs my grief to survive.

“Not as sorry as I was. Not as sorry as my father was, who blamed me for my failure. What use was this power if I couldn’t use it to save the woman he loved? What use was I?”

“But it wasn’t your fault,” she says, shaking her head. “Clearly, she was very ill. You did what you could.”

“I did and it wasn’t enough to save her. What good is the power to get rid of a headache and heal a cut if I can’t save my own mother, my own flesh and blood?”

She lets out a shaking breath and leans against the cave wall. “I’m sorry you couldn’t save her. But you can save others.” She closes her eyes, her head dipping down as her hands go to her stomach, her breath coming in sharp.

I hate watching her like this.

“You saved Lemi,” she says. “You can heal; it’s your gift to use.” She lifts her head and meets my gaze, her eyes watering. “Please use it on me.”

I should be nodding. I should be at her side, doing all I can to help.

But I just hear my father’s voice.

Hear him calling me a disappointment. That I’ll never amount to anything because I failed my first test. My final test.

“Please,” she asks again, the desperation in her voice nearly choking her. Her brow is crumpled, anguished, pleading, and I want nothing more than to make her pain go away, to bring her relief.

But it’s my own pain, the fear of it, that’s stopping me.

“If I fail…” I whisper.

“Then you fail,” she says, her eyes squeezing shut as she lets out a low cry. “You can’t hurt me more than the pain I’m already in.” She manages to look at me, her gaze piercing. “You owe me this.”

She’s right. I do owe her this. I owe her a lot of things, considering what I’ve done to her life.

I nod, feeling resolve, and before I can change my mind, I look through my pack again. I take out the blanket, laying it down on the softest surface of the cave, a mix of airy pumice and fine sand beside the fire.

“Lie down,” I tell her, my voice coming out shallow. “On your side.”

She staggers over to the blanket and collapses on her hands and knees before going into the fetal position. The pain is palpable. I wonder if I’ll feel hers like I did with my mother. A different kind of agony, but an agony all the same.

I carefully walk around her so I’m at her back, and then I get down behind her so that I’m lying right behind her, trying not to get too close so I don’t make her feel uncomfortable. I take in a deep breath and put my arm over her side, moving slow. She still startles under my touch.

“I’m just putting my arm over you,” I say, making sure she knows exactly what I’m doing. “I’m going to put my hand where the pain is. You just tell me where.”

She swallows, her breath quickening.

I place my palm on her stomach and she takes my hand in hers, moving it farther down.

I swallow thickly, trying to concentrate on the task at hand and not where my dirty thoughts want to go. I pay attention to the feel of her lower belly, the way it’s still soft and curving even under the leather armor.

“This might work better if I could touch your bare skin,” I say, my mouth at her ear so that she can hear me over the ever-present roar of the sandstorm outside the cave.

She nods, letting out a whimper of pain.

I reach up and separate where her armored tunic meets her leather breeches. She immediately sucks in her stomach and I’m aware of how hard I’m breathing, of how controlled every movement I make is.

My fingers press against her bare skin, so soft, radiating so much heat that I feel it go up my arm.

She lets out a gasp.

“Am I hurting you?” I ask her, my voice gruff and ragged.

“No,” she says. She sucks in her breath. “Just a little ticklish.”

I grin to myself and then slowly glide my hand down over her stomach, to where she had guided me before.

Her skin is even softer here, the swell of her stomach like a place I could rest for days and catch my breath.

I want nothing more than to have my hand go down even farther, find that spot between her legs and make her forget this pain ever existed.

It wouldn’t heal her, but it would be more fun for the both of us.

But I’m not about to take advantage of a girl in pain.

I’m going to do what I can to rid her of it.

“Is this the spot?” I whisper into her ear.

“Yes,” she says, her breath hitching.

“You might feel a strange sensation,” I warn her. “Hopefully not too ticklish. Just something warm. So I’ve been told.”

Her response is a groan of pain.

I get to work.

I close my eyes and concentrate on whatever reserves I have inside me, someplace so deep down that I’m not even sure that it can come from my own body. Possibly another world. Maybe this one, where dragons are born.

Then I feel the warmth rising up from that place, flowing through my arms, my veins feeling as if they’re made of molten gold and sky lightning, and it leaves through my fingertips and the palm of my hand, passing into her.

She gasps, breathless, moving her stomach away from me at first, and then she moves it back so that my palm is flush against her skin. I keep my eyes closed, waiting for her pain to transfer back into me, anticipating the shock.

It comes with a bang, like someone has literally punched me in the gut.

I swallow a cry, not wanting her to think I’m suffering enough to stop, and grind my teeth together as the pain envelops me. It doesn’t last for long, but by the time it runs through my whole body, I’ve broken a sweat and my pulse is galloping against my neck.

“Oh gods,” she says through a soft gasp, and her head goes back against me. “It’s working.”

“Are you sure?” I ask, too afraid to get my hopes up.

“Yes,” she breathes out. “It’s leaving.”

The smile on my face might just break it in two. Hope feels impossible to keep at bay now.

“I don’t know if this will keep going after I stop,” I caution her. “It might just work right now while I’m touching you.”

“Then don’t stop. Keep touching me, Andor,” she says through a groan. “Please don’t stop.”

Well, fuck me. Now I’m both incredibly proud that I’ve been able to take her pain away and incredibly turned on.

She lets out another breathless whimper and then moves her ass back until it presses against my half-hard dick.

I bite back a moan but with my mouth at her ear, I don’t think there’s any hiding it.

She moves herself harder against me, practically writhing, her gyrations making me harder than rock and causing my palm to slip farther down, my fingertips brushing over the lace edge of her undergarments.

My breath catches in my throat, my hand paused, torn between doing what I want to do, what I think she wants me to do, and doing what we both agreed on.

I manage to stay the course, pressing my fingers against her skin to anchor myself.

“Andor,” she whispers, her voice sounding thick with either relief or lust or maybe both. “Don’t take your hand away.”

I don’t particularly want to. “I’m going to try to shut off the healing and see if your pain is still at bay.”

She nods, her head still back, her neck exposed to my lips, and I suck in another breath, closing my eyes and reaching back inside me now to the golden source of it all. I turn it off like you would a tap, the energy dissipating.

And still Brynla pushes back against my cock, rubbing it with slow, torturous movements.

“Are you in any pain?” I whisper, my lips moving against the sweet-smelling skin of her neck.

“No,” she says. “It’s still gone. It’s gone.” Then she slumps against the blanket. “It’s gone,” she says, her voice fading.

I peer down at her face.

Her eyes are closed, her features relaxed and soft, a small smile on her lips.

In seconds she’s sleeping, breathing out deeply in slumber brought on by acute relief, her body finally letting go.

Finally finding peace.

And I brought her that peace.

Slowly, carefully, I remove my hand from her breeches.

Then I keep it hovering above her stomach as I relax beside her, my arm holding her against me.

I don’t know how I’ll sleep with her so close to me like this, feeling her heart beating through her back, the sweet smell of her hair making my blood run hot.

But, somehow, mercifully, I do.