Page 61 of The Moorwitch

My heart still burns as if I swallowed the fire. Ash and soot are smeared all over my gown, shawl, and arms. Even my hair smells like smoke. I look down at the braid hanging over my shoulder and see the ends are singed.

Plucking the needle I keep tucked beneath my collar, I tear off a length of silk thread with my teeth. Then I remove my shawl and begin embroidering it, quick, neat stitches.

“What are you doing now?” he asks cautiously.

“It’s a healing charm, slow working but with better results than those flashy, quick spells your usual cheap healers like to work. Makes them look good, to close up a wound all at once, but it’s not so impressive when you get gangrene a few days later.”

I stitch in silence after that, my thread illuminated by moonlight. Conrad bears his pain stubbornly, his jaw rigidly set. I pointedly say nothing of his Weaving, but I can sense the tension in him, waiting for the subject to come up. He’s barely breathing for the weight of apprehension suspended between us. The longer the silence stretches, the heavier it gets, until it feels the sky itself will come crashing down on our heads.

You’re a Weaver,is all I can think.You denied Sylvie her magic, while all along you were wielding it yourself.

He is a hypocrite and a bastard, and I should walk away now and leave him to tend his own damn wounds.

But he did just save my life.

“All right, it’s done,” I say at last, nearly ten minutes later.

I drape the shawl over him. The spellknot is cruder than I’d have liked, but I didn’t have hours to work on it, and he doesn’t have time to wait. It’s best to tend to these things quickly.

Once he’s covered, I place my hands on the embroidery and draw three deep breaths. Each one sends pain shooting through me, but I have to keep going or risk him getting infected and dropping dead in a few days.

The magic comes in fits and starts, my heart convulsing fitfully. I suck in a breath.

His eyes flick to mine questioningly.

“I’m all right,” I tell him. “I just ... breathed in a lot of smoke.”

Conrad’s burned hand closes gingerly over my own. “I can help.”

He channels with me, holding my embroidery and exhaling slowly. My magic trickles in from one end, while his flows brightly from the other. He is nowhere near as strong as Sylvie, nor even as strong as I once was, before my debt to Lachlan took its toll on my heart. But in my current condition, his strength is more than enough to compensate for my weakness.

The light of our combined magic flows through the threads and finally meets in the middle. It illuminates us both and shines on thesmoke still thick in the air, a ghostly corona all around us. Threads of his magic entwine with mine, until they are indistinguishable from one another. But I can feel his energy tingling on my hands, featherlight and warm. It makes a shiver run down the back of my neck. The sensation is as intimate as feeling his breath on my skin. Does he feel my magic the same way? Does my power prickle over his wrists and coil up his arms?

My eyes lift to meet his, and for a moment, I cannot breathe.

For the second time tonight, I am held in thrall by a pair of eyes, but unlike Lachlan’s cold, immortal gaze, inscrutable as a lost language, Conrad’s is warm and human, filled with pain. I expected anger, defensiveness, perhaps even hatred for my discovering his secret. But instead, he looks haunted. There are whole paragraphs behind his eyes, and he gazes at me as if begging me to read them, to understand the secrets, explanations, fears, and hopes dammed up inside him. Or perhaps that is a projection of my own swirling desires. I want to peel him open and get all the answers to all the questions piling on my tongue.

You are a Weaver,I want to shout, if I could only find my voice.You are a Weaver who hates magic. Why, why, why?

Conrad blinks, breaking his gaze away first. He looks down. Between our hands, the embroidered threads begin to fade as the magic sinks in.

“There,” he says softly. “It’s done. Are you—Rose!”

With a sharp cry, I pull my hands back and clutch them to my chest, doubling over. Searing spasms of agony knife through my heart, radiating through my shoulders, neck, and stomach.

Conrad stiffens, the shawl slipping from his shoulders. “Rose!”

I shake my head, unable to speak.

Then I feel his fingertips, gentle and hesitant, on my shoulder. He can barely touch me for the burns on his hands. “You are hurt. I’ll go back to the house and ride for the doctor—”

“No,” I whisper. “It’s the smoke, nothing more.”

“Then here. You have more right to this than me.”

He removes the enchanted shawl and begins to place it around me. I shake my head, already knowing it’s useless. I’ve tried every healing spell there is, many times over, in an attempt to stop or even just soothe the pain. Nothing works, but I can’t exactly explain that to him.

“Let’s share it,” I say in compromise.