Page 81 of To Touch A Silent Fury

I pushed my hair out of my face as I rounded to the quartermaster. It had grown long in the near year since I’d last left Gossamir’s clutches. Somehow it felt like a testament to my time here, some semi-permanent sign of the moons that had passed. This man’s name, I did know. Clainginnin. A good man, of Sightlands stock but not of noble birth. He had tended our needs well here, as best he could in the harsh seasons. I asked him to give me whatever herbs he would prescribe for a healing wound. He asked me if the wound was going bad, and I had no answer. He gathered three different plantstuffs from the back of his storeroom, giving me their names and applications as he prepared them into a poultice. I found I was too nervous about seeing her to think of remembering any of it. I had no passion for botany and was pleased enough when he handed me the cloth, moist with its burden of healing reagents, with no questions.

With the bundle in one hand, I knocked on the wooden door that held her.

After a brief pause, and a rustle of fabrics, a soft voice came from inside. “Come in.”

I opened the door.

She stared up at the light filtering in from the window next to the bed. And I was grateful for that, because it took me a second to compose myself.

A white sheet draped over her body. The sleeve of her undershirt had fallen down on her dusky shoulder, and from her bare curved feet and her tanned bare leg propped up on the windowsill, it seemed she had removed her trousers. The sheet covered her fully, but the contrast of her warm skin to that white sheet stirred something I didn’t want to admit.

She was clearly ill, maybe even feverish, with drops of perspiration at her forehead and dampening her upper lip. Her piercing blue eyes widened as she slid them my way, clearly not expecting me, and she pushed herself up to a seated position. I saw the flicker of pain she tried to suppress, the way her rounded lips tightened around an intake of breath.

I focused instead on the creature nestled into her side. For such a tiny thing, he was already deeply attached to the girl. He had yet to open his eyes around me, or perhaps at all. Sometimes it took the young several weeks to open their eyes more than a fraction. And yet, I knew what I would see when he did.

“Sorry,” she said, pushing a dark strand of hair from her sweaty face. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

I closed the door behind me and approached her bedside. It was impossible not to notice how she tensed, as much as she tried to cover it.

“I brought this for your leg,” I replied, passing her the moist cloth.

She took it from me with shaking hands. “What is it?”

“Herbs. A poultice, I think.”

“Specific,” she replied cuttingly, then she blushed. She sniffed the cloth and relaxed slightly. “Fresh gleadless. Ashraf.”

I didn’t reply, only nodding, the names the same as the ones the quartermaster had rattled off. She’d missed some powdered root that I had forgotten the true name of, but clearly, her botanical knowledge surpassed mine. She did not apply thepoultice, though, leaving it beside her ankle on the windowsill with no small wince. Then she relaxed back on the pillows.

She wrinkled her nose, and my stomach clenched at the familiar sight. “Why would you help me?”

I kept my face in practiced nothingness. “Because we are to ride in two days, and you have not left your bed. If I am to deliver a living woman and dragon to my father, it would be best for you to be well enough to ride.”

She rolled her eyes, and I struggled not to stare. The blue was truly something else, so bright it was nearly luminous, and pulsing with intoxicating life.

“I will be fine,” she sniffed.

“The ride will take several hours,” I said. “And whilst I’ve seen you ride a wolf, I can assure you, dragonback is worse.”

She crossed her arms, then, and repeated. “I will be fine.”

“You would not rather delay?” I asked, glancing down at her infant dragon. “Wait a few more days?”

She followed my look, and adamantly shook her head.

I resisted the urge to smile.

She knew as well as I did what would happen when the child opened his eyes. What everyone would quickly become aware of.

It was fucking laughable that she thought I would not recognise her. She had underestimated her own effect. Her hair had been darkened by some odd concoction, and her eyes shifted by her new bond. But if she thought that was all I had noticed about her, she was distinctly doing herself a disservice.

A span ago, I’d thought of nothing but her face. I’d only had half of it to study, and so I had studied that ad infinitum. I knew the shape of her eyes, the flutter of her lashes, the tiny imperfection by her right brow. I knew the exact shade of her skin and how it flushed warmer under any duress or scrutiny.

This was the woman who had haunted my steps. The woman I had Broken and left for nothing five years ago, and who had by all accounts disappeared into the middle of nowhere. The one with the Broken Fate.

Tanidwen Treleftir.

I slowly nodded. “We leave at dawn the day after next, then.”