Chapter 19: The Healing Night

They carried Elias up to my old room under the eaves, and I sent everyone else away.

It was the room I had slept in since I was six, with one window and an iron bed.

For the first time, nobody locked the door from outside.

June's yellowed page lay on the sill where I had dropped it.

The stone answers to Declan's blood, and to mine.

I read it once, and then I turned it face down, because the man on my bed was bleeding and the page could wait until morning.

The healer cleaned the silver wound and packed it with herbs and left.

"Keep him warm," she said at the door. "Keep him still. If the fever breaks by morning, he'll live."

I sat on the edge of the bed with a basin of water and a cloth.

He had slept for three hours, grey and sweating, with his shirt cut off him and his ribs wrapped.

I washed the blood from his chest and arms slowly.

I washed the scar through his eyebrow.

Around midnight his eyes opened.

He found my mouth in the candlelight, and I watched him work out where he was.

"You're not dead," I said.

"No."

"You stepped in front of a knife."

"You were standing behind me."

"I was standing in front of you, you idiot."

His mouth moved into something close to a smile.

I put the cloth down and found that my hands were shaking.

He saw, and caught my wrist.

"Bryn," he said, rough and quiet. "Come here."

"You're hurt."

"I know exactly where I'm hurt."

He pulled, and I let him.

I lay down along his good side with my head on his shoulder and my hand flat on his stomach, above the bandage.

His skin was too hot, and I did not care.

He turned his face into my hair and breathed in.

Under my palm I felt him get hard against the blanket.

"Elias."

"It's the fever," he said.

"It isn't."

"No."

I laughed, and then I stopped laughing, because I wanted him.

I wanted all of him, slowly, with nobody to stop us and no wall listening.

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