Chapter 8: One Bed

The Regent's guards moved my things into the right room before we had even reached the Drift.

It had one bed.

Two grey-coated gulls with spears stood outside on the walkway in the rain.

One of them kept an eye on the window.

Lorcan stood in the middle of his own bedroom with his hands behind his back and looked at the bed.

"I'll take the floor," he said.

"It's a stone floor."

"I've slept on worse."

"You're not sleeping on it for a month," I said. "You can take the left side of the bed."

"Rule one," said Lorcan, "says no one goes in uninvited."

"I'm inviting you into your own room."

"That's very generous."

"It's very practical." I shrugged off the grey dress and got into the bed in my slip with my heart hammering.

I rolled to the wall.

"Come on," I said. "The guards are watching the window."

He turned off the lamp.

I heard him take off his boots and his coat.

The bed dipped under his weight.

He lay on his back a handspan from me, stiff and silent.

Neither of us said anything.

The rain drummed on the roof, which Bess had patched with tar.

Around midnight I woke because the bed was too cold.

Not the room.

The bed.

The air along my side was cool, and along his side it was cold, and I could hear his teeth.

"Lorcan?"

"Go to sleep," he said, through them.

"You're freezing."

"It's the rain. When it's wet I run cold. It passes. Go to sleep, Morwenna."

I rolled over.

His face was a pale shape in the dark.

He had his arms folded tight across his chest, and under the sleeves I could feel them knotting and shivering.

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