Page 67 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

“Living shouldn’t hurt so much.”

“You deserve it for scaring us like that.”

I couldn’t turn my head. That was how badly it hurt. Or maybe it was the exhaustion. They felt pretty damn similar.

I opened my eyes enough to see that it was evening. The treetops overhead were bare. We were no longer in the thick fir forests that characterized the central part of Velora’s only mountain range.

I had no idea where we were. After the endless fever-driven delirium, I was surprised that I knew my own name.

Footsteps crunched through the frost to my left, only to be replaced by a soft swish of air. “Where are you going?”

“To get your bonded. He is the only reason you are still alive.”

My bonded.

His face came before his name. I could see it even with my eyes closed, the lines of him etched somewhere deeper than I cared to acknowledge. But swift footsteps followed the beats of Isanara’s wings, and then he was there, more than just a memory.

He searched my face, his eyes moving too quickly for me to make eye contact. I blinked up at him, afraid that if I tried to use my voice, I might break him. Despite the fact that every muscle and tendon in my body ached, it was the agony lining his face that hurt the most.

He knelt down, moving each limb with a deliberate slowness that confirmed I really was as badly injured as I thought.

“You scared me, witch,” Garrick said. His voice awoke the parts of me that still lingered on the precipice.

That telltale divot appeared between his silvery brows, but I lacked the strength to reach up and smooth it, even though, in that moment, the feeling of his skin against mine was the only thing I desired in the world.

Garrick seemed to know.

“May I touch you?” he said softly.

I opened my mouth, knowing this next part would hurt. “If you don’t, I think I might die,” I said, my unused throat burning as I forced the words out. Garrick flinched away—at the words or the sound or both. I cringed. “Too soon?”

“It will never be time for jokes about your death.”

But he did not admonish me any more than that. He reached out. I imagined his hand trembled, but that must have been my own wobbly vision, because when his fingertips stroked my cheek, they were warm and steady.

“I am already dead,” I reminded him.

I felt his sigh on my skin. “You know what I meant.”

My pain was physical, but Garrick’s was mental. Of the two, I’d have chosen the physical burden every single time. I’d spent hundreds of years watching those I cared for dwindle away until only one remained.

I could not presume to know who else Garrick had in his life to care about. We hadn’t shared those sorts of secrets. But I knew that he felt something for me.

The least I could do was show him that I’d survived. I commanded my muscles to move, determined to raise myself from the ground under my own power. I made it to one elbow before my body collapsed beneath me and I was back on the layered furs.

And that divot was still between Garrick’s brows.

“Do not try to sit up. Stay exactly where you are. I will heat you some broth.” And then to my familiar, “Watch over her.”

Isanara snorted as she settled in at my side. I didn’t try to lift my head to see, but I felt her lay hers across my stomach. “As if I haven’t been doing that for the last two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” My tortured throat thanked me for confining that exclamation to my mind.

“Your wounds were—are—severe. But it was the infection that nearly took you.”

That accounted for the delusions of burning alive. But not for everything else. “How did we escape the Devotion Gate?”

Isanara did not respond immediately. My stomach hollowed out, dread competing with hunger.

“Xyta was going to kill you. But then… Ramkael stopped them. Neither of them offered an explanation. Then Garrick carried you through the fire.”

She was withholding something. Not quite lying—I did not know if she even could lie to me, nor I to her. Not with the unequivocal access that our bond as witch and familiar granted us. But there was more that she was not saying, and I suspected it had to do with Garrick.

I remembered the enchanted fire flashing in different colors behind my tormentor. But everything that happened after Xyta threw me into the wall was nothing but a haze of feelings and sounds.

“And then what?” I asked. I let my eyes close, the effort of keeping them open frustratingly noticeable.

“And then he carried you…”

But I fell asleep before she could finish her sentence

I woke to two strong hands braced beneath my arms, pulling me up with more gentleness than a man his size should have been able to manage. Warmth encircled my back and my sides, and those strong hands released me only to encircle my arms.

I tried to stifle the groan, but my lips and body and mind were not all back on speaking terms yet. Muscles that had not done their jobs in weeks protested by sending spasms of pain through my body.

“Don’t try to hold it back,” Garrick said, the warmth of his breath sweeping over me. There was the hint of cinnamon that had lined my dreams for weeks. “I’ve heard it all.”

“That is not comforting.” Thank the Dark God that, positioned behind me as he was, Garrick could not see my cheeks as they burned red from embarrassment. My keen sense of smell informed me that my clothes were unsoiled and my skin was clean. Which meant Garrick had seen to my every need.

If he had not been there to hold me up, I probably would have melted into a puddle of embarrassment right there on the ground. A frozen puddle. But a puddle, nonetheless.

Garrick ignored my comment, wrapping one hand around my waist so the other could retrieve something beside him. He balanced a steaming bowl of soup carefully in our laps.

“Do not knock it over,” he said over my shoulder to Isanara.

“As if a dragon could be so clumsy,” she hissed. But she did remove her head from my lap and settled beside me instead, her body half on the furs.

I tried to lift my hand to reach for the spoon Garrick balanced on his thigh. But my body refused to obey. Garrick did not even seem to notice the effort. He reached for the spoon, dipped it into the bowl of broth, and then smoothly raised it to my lips.

My hunger overwhelmed my pride, and I opened my mouth.

Garrick the fucking Red was feeding me soup with a spoon. It was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.

Several steaming bites later, the ache in my throat had dulled enough for me to ask a question that had plagued me since I’d opened my eyes and noticed the change in the trees overhead. “Where are we?”

Garrick dipped the spoon back into the bowl. “A week away from the Memory Gate.”

I jerked my head back. Given my current state, the motion was feeble, which saved us both from having searing soup spilled across our laps. “How is that possible?”

“After what happened at the Devotion Gate, I thought it best not to risk angering the gods by drawing out the time between the gates.” That still did not answer my question.

If I’d had the strength, I’d have sunk an elbow into his stomach.

But as it was, I could only tilt my head slightly and try to level a reproving look at him.

“I carried you,” he admitted.

I’d dreamed I was floating.

Garrick lifted another spoonful of soup to my mouth. I took it, but swallowed it too quickly as my mind tumbled over its own thoughts. I coughed, trying to dislodge the misplaced soup from my airways. Garrick rubbed circles on my back until I stopped.

“You are the one who needs rest. I am not exactly waifish,” I finally managed to say.

The hand that he’d wrapped around my midsection to keep me upright curled into my stomach, caressing the soft rolls beneath the fabric of my shift and dress.

“Do not insult either of us by implying that your weight is anything but perfect, or that I am incapable of carrying you whatever distance is required. I would not change a single thing about you, witch.”

The embarrassment I’d felt before was instantly replaced with a different sort of heat.

But Garrick spared me from having to think up a reply that wouldn’t end with both of us buried in the furs by slipping another spoonful of soup between my lips.

I finished the bowl, but Garrick did not move, and I lacked both the capacity and the will to do so myself.

I slowly made note of our surroundings. We were tucked in against a wall of shale, the ground beneath us compacted clay that had frozen into permafrost. The clearing was small, barely wide enough for Isanara to spread her wings or Garrick to lie down all the way.

As I’d noted upon waking, the trees were slimmer here, deciduous and ever-barren thanks to the curse.

We were tucked away from the world. Even our fire was small by the standards I’d come accustomed to as we hiked through the mountains.

Were we… hiding?

I knew Isanara had not told me everything.

Would Garrick do the same?

“How did you pass through the Devotion Gate?”

Now that my body had seen to its first need, I was becoming aware of the places where I’d bled. I counted four wounds—one above each wrist and one in the fleshy muscle of each calf just above my ankle.

Garrick exhaled slowly. I felt it against my back. “It must have been the same as you. Taking care of her.” Her —Isanara.

He had offered her his protection more than once.

He’d taught me how to use my power in tandem with fighting maneuvers to defend her.

If the gods had granted the familiar as a way to test us both…

but that did not make sense. Varian herself had admitted that the dragons predated the gods.

They were not answerable to them. Dragons answered to no one.

The hairs at the nape of my neck stood on end in warning. I ignored them and every other instinct screaming inside of me. Between the sore wounds, my aching muscles, and a stomach that was full for the first time in weeks, I did not stand much of a chance. Sleep was coming for me.

“No matter what decision I make, it turns out wrong,” I said. Exhaustion loosened my tongue and muddled my thoughts. “I lost my coven. Failed my sister and Kyrelle. Even Isanara…”

Garrick’s hand closed over my own, the bowl of soup set aside. “Koryn. You saved Isanara. You saved me.”

“But only because of the Mercy Gate, and because of the sacrifice that I owed to Xyta?—”

Garrick lifted my hand. I tipped my head back against his shoulder, watching as he stroked the calloused pad of his thumb over my knuckles.

“I think you have tried so hard, for so long, to be bad, that you do not even recognize when you are doing good.” He lifted my hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to my knuckles.

A new part of me began to ache. “You said before that there is no such thing as a good witch.”

He kissed the next knuckle. “I did say that.”

“Have you changed your opinion?”

His face answered, even if his mouth did not.

But I did not need Garrick to think I was good. I only needed him to see who and what I was, and stand by my side anyway.

It took all the remaining energy I had to lift my lips to his. My head swam, and I thought I might lose consciousness from the effort. But then there he was, his lips so soft against mine, brushing over my mouth for the barest second before drawing back.

A strangled little sound escaped my throat, even as my eyelids slid closed. Garrick began to rock slowly from side to side. His strong thighs anchored me in place, one hand caressing my stomach while the other laced with mine.

I wanted to kiss him forever, but instead I let him rock me to sleep.