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I couldn’t wrap my mind around any of it. So I didn’t. Instead, I went through the motions, watching Ronan—and me with Ronan—as though from afar. Trying to figure out what on earth was going on. He was looking at my belly, hmming and poking. A fresh zing of pain brought me back quick enough.
I flinched away. “Easy. ”
He ignored me…of course. “The salt water would be painful—”
I shifted away to give him a good glare. “You think?”
“Aye. ” As he knelt closer, he tried to hide his smirk, but I spotted it. “The salt burns, but it has antibacterial properties. ” He poked and prodded a bit more, testing the edges of the gash, pushing together, pressing down.
“Ow. ” I hated the tone of my voice, but something about this blatant attention made me peevish. I didn’t care about my injury. I didn’t want to hear about it. I wanted him to explain what he was doing, like, in a fundamental way. “Do you have to do that?”
“It needs to close back up. How well did you clean this?”
“I cleaned it. ” As best I could, stealing solitary moments in the girls’ room without anyone seeing. People seeing me with bruises was one thing, but I’d become very secretive about anything that might betray a weakness. I could’ve gone to the infirmary—there was such a thing—but seeking help was yet another way to mark yourself as vulnerable. We studied combat medicine for this very reason. We were trained to be tough. To endure extreme conditions. Extreme pain. We should be tending our wounds ourselves.
I wouldn’t need to be tending my wounds if Carden were around. I felt a flicker of resentment and snatched on to it. Anger was so much easier than loneliness or sadness. I pushed Ronan’s hand aside and felt around the wound. It was cool. Not swollen. “It’s not infected. ”
“Keep direct pressure on it. ” He put my hands over my belly, then took my shoulders and guided me off my seat. “Move. ” He opened the bench storage and began digging through. “You need to keep it dressed. ” He pulled out a first-aid kit—it looked ancient, the red plastic box faded almost pink—and fished through it till he found a yellowed roll of gauze and a sterile cotton pad. “Hands up. ” His voice was devoid of emotion as he staunched the wound with the cotton and began to wind the ribbon of gauze around and around my belly.
A silence followed, and it became unbearable. With nothing more clever to say, I finally told him, “Thanks. ”
Weak. Lame.
“You should’ve just told me,” he said flatly. “You didn’t have to do this today. Why do you continually insist on putting yourself in harm’s way?” His hands stilled on my belly. “Have you ever once considered telling me the truth without hesitation?”
“I tell you the truth all the time,” I protested.
He looked up and pierced me with those green eyes.
“Most of the time,” I amended. “Think about it, Ronan. If I told you I wanted to get a look at that gate, you would’ve hidden the oars and made me swim out here myself. ”
He’d been fighting it, but a reluctant smile finally quirked one corner of his mouth. “Probably true. ”
“And, anyway, you were right to challenge me. ”
The other corner of his mouth curled until it became an actual symmetrical smile. He tied off the gauze. “Indeed?”
My eyes swept past him as I considered, taking in the vast sea. It was the color of a spilled inkpot. Or a bruise.
But not the sky. The sky was so bled of color, the white band of the horizon seemed barely able to touch down.
My gaze returned to Ronan. Drawn to him, as I’d been drawn on that first day we met. He’d been an anchor for me since I’d arrived. “I needed this now more than ever,” I told him.
Little did he know, my words referred to so much more than swimming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I needed to get into that sea gate. Tom had said boats pull up to unload. Surely it wasn’t just vampires and Trainees who used it. I doubted those vampires did anything so banal as unload cargo. I had a great big picture in my head of Master Dagursson hauling crates like a dockworker.
Not.
Surely they had cooks and maids and scullions and whomever else people employed in castles. I thought of the vampires I’d seen on the other island. They had an army of servants. I didn’t believe these vamps mopped their own floors. Someone did it for us girls; someone had to be doing it for them, too. And that vampires’ keep was way bigger than any Acari dorm—they had to employ dozens of someones.
Villagers. It had to be villagers.
I thought of the few I’d met. It was village men who managed the airstrip. Villagers who’d ferried us to the other island. They had to have villagers who helped in the castle, too. How did they enter? I doubted they sashayed through the front door.
Good old Tom. He’d know. Which is how I ended up poking around the Draug pens, but he was nowhere to be seen. The Draug were there, though, snarling and moaning in their cages as I neared. It must’ve been the scent of my healing wound. I pulled off my gloves, and something about winter’s bite helped me clear my head. Staved off the fear. It must’ve worked, because the Draug made no more than those basic complaints.
