Chapter 4: Terms

I washed Corvin's whisper off my knuckles with cold water and it did nothing.

His signet ring had caught my skin when he bowed, and a thin line of blood ran down my right hand.

I wrapped a cloth around it and sat on the edge of my bed with the door locked.

At midnight someone knocked twice, and I knew the knock.

"It's me," Lysander said.

I opened the door, because our terms said I could keep it shut and I did not want to.

He had changed out of court black into a plain shirt with the collar open.

His eyes went straight to the blood on the cloth.

"Sit," he said.

"It's a scratch."

"Sit, Solveig."

I sat on the bed again, and he knelt on one knee in front of me and unwound the cloth.

His hands were big and careful, and callused at the base of each finger from the sword.

He cleaned the cut with water from my jug and a pad of lint, then turned my hand over to look at the wrist.

His thumb came to rest on the inside of it, where the pulse ran.

No one had touched me there since I was a child.

My heartbeat jumped against his thumb, and he felt it.

He did not say a word.

I stared at the top of his bent head and noticed the gray at his temple that had not been there when we married.

"It's racing," he said, very low.

"Corvin frightened me."

"He didn't," Lysander said. "You haven't been afraid of anything since the day I met you."

He was right, and I had no answer to that, so I took my hand back.

He let go slowly and sat back on his heels.

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