“The warmth?” His hands fell to his sides, his forefinger and thumb dancing together in a small circle.
“It spread…from here.” I pressed my other hand to my chest. “It spread and spread and spread until I was filled with it…this stranger’s joy. When I slit Throllo’s throat, then the other’s, then Pietr’s…”
His arm twitched, fingers stretching to skim the edge of my shawl.
“I still don’t have it, Lycandor.” His name slipped from my tongue before I had the good sense to pull it back, the syllables tumbling from me as if I had spoken them a hundred times before. “The guilt, the shame, the remorse. Why am I empty of all the things I’m meant to feel, and full of the things I am not?”
“Remorse? Overwrought and useless. You have no need of it.” He waved a dismissive hand as I bristled at the words, familiar somehow. “What do you feel at this moment?”
I returned my gaze to the flames. “Cold. Just cold.”
Some indistinguishable sound leaked from behind his mesh. Readying to turn, perhaps to prowl back to the dresser he ransacked upon entry, he paused before the first step of his boot.
Two arms encircled my shoulders, wrapping themselves across the expanse of my back.
I sucked in a breath, the cold somehow banished.
His touch was firm, but gentle, angling his body away from my cuts. Yet, even with the small distance between our middles, I was lost to him, to his embrace—cloaked in his smell, in his heat.
The telling weight of metal lowered to my crown, the hem of his veil ghosting the back of my neck and shoulders. For a moment he hovered, like a dragonfly unsure where to land. Then, his chin came to rest atop my hair.
My parting scratched beneath the friction of a beard, the one I had glimpsed in the Unmantle. I braced for the weight of his helm, but it never came, its burden kept from me.
I smiled into his shoulder. The heat radiating from him was delicious, better than the fire. I exhaled, closing the distance between our chests and letting his warmth banish the ice. Pressing my face to his heart, it hammered beneath my ear, each thump urging my grin higher and higher.
“Which is it, Lycandor, excited or scared?”
My head dipped alongside his chest with the huff of a laugh. “Both.”
Nestled into the strange comfort of the faceless druid I’d come to know, I thawed. He was sturdy, unbreakable, unyielding, and I pushed into him, determined to borrow some of his strength. I’d need it, surely, once the numbness abated and Falstaff came knocking. I wrapped my hands around his waist, my closed fists skimming over the vast expanse of his back. His breath jumped, holding me tighter and softening, his shoulders relaxing.
A sticky warmth thrummed over our middles, washing me in another wave of heat. He stilled. Damn me to the pits if I didn’t cling on, hoping for just one moment longer as he tried to pull away.
“Your wounds, Ashara.”
My name on his lips sobered me, and I released him, reeling from how intimate it felt—more so than his embrace. I glanced down at my exposed breasts, one leaking, the rust of dried blood lining its edges. Lower, at my hip, the padding gleamed tacky and damp.
As if noticing them awakened me to the pain, the sting of the incisions rekindled, stealing my breath.
“Oh…I—” The telltale heat of a blush crawled up my neck.Foolishto feel shame at this moment. Lycandor hadn’t shown a single inkling he was fixated on my nakedness, and even without reading his eyes, some part of me knew they hadn’t leered with lust, only concern.
“We need to patch you up; you’re dripping all over my carpet.”
Dottings of red embellished the patterning.
“I’m sorry, I’ll—” I tugged at my bodice, wincing.
“Stop.” His hand closed around mine again, igniting it. “And do not apologise.” I could somehow feel his eyes on mine, like a prism of sunlight through a windowpane. “None of this is your fault.” He lifted my hand and for a moment, I thought he might kiss it, like the knights in my mother’s stories. Instead, he used it to guide me towards his bed. “You are not to blame, foranything,” he said over his shoulder. “It was your blessing, and even if it wasn’t, do we blame the fox who turns on the hound? No, it is the way of things, it’s survival. And it was I who—”
“I wanted to hurt them,” I hissed, forcing my feet to a stop. “I wanted them to bleed, and to feel afraid, and to suffer the same indignations as I had. Even through the haze of my blessing, if that’s what it was, I wanted it.” I still wanted it, all of it. I wanted the entire templum reduced to rubble. “I am grateful for the joy, even if it wasn’t my own; there was freedom in the absence of fear.”
I frowned at his sigh, at the pity in it. He rotated to face me fully, not letting go of my hand. Carefully, he unpicked the linen tied to my palm. My mouth parted at his delicate touch, at the Butcher’s hand moving so tenderly. It was mostly healed, the crusted blood an illusion to its severity. Before I could retract, he skirted it under the hem of his tunic, to the heat of his chest, pressing it firmly at his heart. It beat steadily, unlike my own.
“Blessings can be addictive.”Thump, thump, thump.“Something that makes you feel invincible will inevitably turn into something you crave. As someone who is blessed like you, what the gods chose to bestow upon us can be curses as well as gifts.”
“You think your blessing of truth a burden?”
“To scent and taste everything?” His dry laugh rumbled under my palm.Thump, thump, thump.“Yes. Watch as the world soon tires of meat if butchers could taste the fear of the lambs.” A deep breath. “Truthfully, I would be rid of it if I could.”
