CHAPTER EIGHT
Kragorn
‘Twas good to be home,even if—I admit—I had very little recollection of how I came to be there.
I remembered Torvolk lifting me onto a horse, jostling my broken arm, the pain spiking throughout my body. I remembered the heat of the fever setting in. I remembered looking frantically about for Lillian, only to have my cousin grab me again.
“Easy, Kragorn,” he’d murmured. “Else ye’ll fall and break something else.”
“Lillian.” I could barely make my throat work. “Where…”
“Isadora has her. I didn’t even know my Mate could ride, but she’ll keep her safe.”
Mate? Fook me, I’d been gone too long. When had thishulking dobber find the time to find a human Mate? What was the likelihoodhe’dspent time in a human dungeon?
But I’d lacked the strength to ask. So instead, I’d gripped my cousin’s wrist.
“She’s mine.”
“Aye, we ken it. She’s already told Isadora she’s yer captive, and we’re all looking forward to hearing yer story. But first we need to get ye to Nan for healing.”
Thank fook I passed out then and missed the agony of being paraded through the village and lifted into my bed like an invalid. Which I was.
The fever took me again, and while I woke several times in the next days, I remembered only snatches, images. My grandmother was there, as were my cousins Torvolk and Mkaalad. Even the Bloodfire Keeper appeared once, which must have been a hallucination, because Jorak never left the stones.
Human women came and went too, most of whom I didn’t recognize. It seemed my cousin hadn’t been the only one to find a Mate in my absence.
But the one constant that Icouldremember was Lillian. Whenever I’d wake, I’d look for her and not be disappointed. Sometimes she’d be at my side, spooning tea down my throat, and sometimes she’d be hovering anxiously near the hearth, pretending to attend to some chore as Nan examined my broken body…but she was always there.
And her scent in my home comforted myKteerin a way naught else could. Lillian was here, withme…and I had another month before we had to worry about the pathway opening to the human’s world again.
Eventually the fever broke, and I could think straight.
Lillian was there, and myKteersang as I reached up to touch her arm, to ensure myself she was real. Since I hadn’t opened my eye yet, I suppose she hadn’t realized I was awake, because she startled, jostling the bed.
“Kragorn?”
“Good morning.” Slowly, I opened my good eye and found her sitting beside me on the bed, tucked up next to my splinted arm, wiping my brow with something cool and wet. “How are ye?”
“How amI?” Her blue eyes wide with incredulity, she leaned over, her gaze darting over my face. “How areyou? How do you feel? Are you in pain? Do you need aught?”
I grabbed her hand. “Just ye,dkaar.”
With a flustered look, she jerked away from me, twisting to pick up a bowl from the table someone had dragged beside the bed.
“I have porridge for you! ‘Tis leftover from this morning, but your grandmother told me you like it with honey, and I have?—”
She bit down on her words when she turned back to me, her cheeks bright pink with what I assumed was embarrassment, and she dropped her gaze to my chest.
“You need your strength.”
Obediently, I opened my mouth and allowed her to spoon some of the porridge onto my tongue. ‘Twas not the best-tasting way to break my fast, but she’d made it for me, and that fed my heart as well as my body.
“Just like auld times, eh lass?”
Of course, I meant the times she’d fed me while I’d been chained to the wall of the dungeon, but her flush just deepened. Why wouldn’t she look at me? I focused on swallowing the soft food, and she concentrated on…well, aught besides me, it seemed.
Soon enough, the bowl was empty and she still kept her gaze lowered. The pulse at the base of her throat told me she was nervous, but why? We were safe here; my home was the same it had been when I left, cozy and warm. Why would she be uncomfortable?
