Chapter 11: Silver

Eira's POV

The silver blade was lodged under his collarbone, and it took me forty minutes to get it out.

Bram held the lamp.

Odessa mixed a poultice of yarrow and cold ash in a tin bowl and said nothing.

The two brothers guarded the tent flap with their arms folded.

Anyone who came near got a look that sent them away.

Ronan lay on my cot with his shirt cut off and his teeth set.

I knelt beside him with a thin knife heated in the lamp flame.

"This is going to hurt," I said.

"It already hurts."

"It'll hurt worse."

"Then talk to me while you do it."

I slid the point in beside the silver and he went rigid.

A sound came out of his throat, low and broken.

His good hand closed on the edge of the cot hard enough to bend the wooden frame.

"Talk," he said through his teeth.

"What do you want me to say?"

"Anything."

"I learned to cut clean on rabbits, the first winter," I said.

I had not planned it.

It came out of me with the knife, without my choosing.

His eyes opened.

"Who taught you?"

"Nobody. I went hungry until I worked it out."

I turned the blade and felt the silver shift.

"And at the Feast you looked at the table.

"Yes," Ronan said.

"I looked at the table because if I looked at you I wouldn't have been able to do it."

"That's no excuse."

"It's not an excuse.

"It's the truth."

I pulled.

The silver came out in a rush of dark blood, and Ronan's whole body arched off the cot.

Keep reading free with an account. Start His Luna? Never, He Rejected Me First from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.