“No,” Shrike hastened to explain; he couldn’t bear the sight of Wren’s heartbreak. “It isn’t that.”
Wren didn’t look comforted. “Then what?”
Shrike hesitated. His hand arose and traced the shape of the wound in the air above it. “Because of this… I almost lost you.”
It took considerable force of will to thrust the words out past his teeth. He couldn’t speak on it without thinking of it, and he couldn’t think of it without drowning in the wretched memory—Wren’s scream as the beast bit him, the blood freezing against his broken flesh, his shivers and broken moans of agony, his sunken eyes and hollowed cheeks—then further back, to Rochester, with another monster holding him up by the throat, and how he’d collapsed insensible for what must only have been moments but which felt like eons of anxiety as Shrike waited for his wheezing breaths to bring him back to consciousness,for his eyes to open and focus on some fixed point rather than wandering along the edge of oblivion, the cracked pain of his voice when at last he spoke, and how Shrike’s heart had wrenched itself in twain for the sorrow at the evident suffering in his creaking words and the sheer relief at hearing his beloved speak again—and further back still, to his first failure, when he’d left Larkin alone and defenceless and returned too late to find him broken and gone forever.
A hand caressed his cheek.
Shrike jerked his head up. It’d fallen again, his gaze ever-returning to the haunting lodestone of Wren’s wound. But now, as he met those soft dark eyes, he saw something bittersweet in their fond depths.
“How many times have I almost lost you?” Wren asked.
Shrike furrowed his brow as he ran over the sums. “Once, by my reckoning. In my fight with the old Holly King. But your sigil kept me from danger.”
Wren shook his head. While Shrike stood in silent confusion, Wren reached for his bared chest. His hesitant fingertips gently touched the star-burst puncture just below Shrike’s collarbone and above his heart.
“Did I not nearly lose you here?” Wren asked.
Shrike said nothing. An errant arrow in the Wild Hunt had struck him there some centuries ago. Yet what Wren did now seemed to strike a surer blow to his heart.
Wren’s hand descended to trace the long diagonal gash across Shrike’s navel, beginning at the crest of his left hip-bone and ending beneath the floating rib on the opposing side.
“And here?” Wren asked.
Another tournament—one of many—had not ended in victory for Shrike. Still, he’d held his entrails in with one hand and kept his sword in the other as he staggered away from thefield, alone, with no one but himself to tend him. Wren didn’t need to know of it, so Shrike said nothing.
Wren moved his hand again, this time to ghost along the gash in Shrike’s side from his duel with the Holly King. “And here?”
Shrike found his voice at last. “Your pentangle protected me.”
Wren’s mouth twisted with impatience. “And the others?”
“You didn’t know me then,” said Shrike, his discomfort with this conversation only growing.
“If you had found the pain of any one of these wounds too great and given up your will to live… I would still be clerking in Staple Inn.” A bitter smile twisted Wren’s mouth. “Just as dead as you, in spirit if not in body.”
The thought of their never meeting didn’t sit easily in Shrike’s mind.
“But you survived,” Wren continued, his smile growing more sincere. “And because you survived, we have each other.”
For which Shrike felt very glad indeed. His Wren well-deserved someone to cherish and defend him. Shrike was honoured to take up the charge.
“I admire your scars,” Wren said, the words rushing out of him with an air of confession. “They prove your strength and courage.”
In vainer moments now and again, Shrike may have thought the same. To hear someone else say it, however, seemed to raise it up from mere vanity. And to hear that his beloved Wren thought so sent a pulse of warmth throughout Shrike’s chest.
“Is this not the same?” Wren asked, gesturing to his own wound, a hint of desperation creeping into his voice. “Not of strength or courage, perhaps, but—may this not likewise become a mark of our victory?”
Until that moment it had never occurred to Shrike to think of it as anything other than a mark of his own failure. He’d failed to protect his beloved, and Wren had paid the price in pain.
Yet neither could Shrike bear the idea of Wren thinking he held his scar in scorn. And so he replied, resolving to believe it as he spoke it, “It may.”
Wren’s tentative smile of hopeful relief both broke and warmed Shrike’s heart. He could answer it with nothing short of an embrace. Gentle and mindful of Wren’s broken body, he enfolded him in his arms, and Wren slipped his own around Shrike in turn and upraised his face to meet his kiss.
Still, it relieved Shrike as much or moreso than his Wren to cover the wound with bracing swathes of linen.
~
