The grip around my middle changed, the bunched muscles flexing and shifting and thinning down to wiry forearms with weathered brown skin. I broke free of the weakened grasp, but promptly fell to the ground. And when I tried to crawl, my would-be saviour rounded my heaped body and dropped to his knees before me, halting me with a firm hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t spare the energy nor emotional capacity to be shocked.
It was Roy staring back at me.
“Caelan?” He said. He was hoarse, his muddy green eyes wide with horror. “He’shere?”
“He’s inside,” I wailed.
Roy turned and stood in one movement, and sprinted back into the doomed glow. I tried again to get my legs beneath me, to follow him, but collapsed at once. My Flame was still crackling manically over my skin, still reaching in vain for the tavern as though it would drag me there through sheer will alone. It couldn’t, but I could feel the weak pulse of anotherflame nearby, an ember of my magic independent of my body.
Please, I called to it, praying to the little flicker of heat like it was some benevolent deity.Please bring him back. Please.
“Please,” I sobbed aloud.
And perhaps it was the Dagda himself who answered.
In the next moment two figures staggered through the door. A buoyant wave of relief swept me to my feet and I lurched forward, colliding with Caelan before we both fell to our knees. A wave of black swept over me, and I fought my way through it, clung to consciousness so I could be sure he had really made it.
He was coated in soot, red-eyed, wheezing, but so gloriously whole and alive that I began to weep, quiet and weak though it was. My head was swimming and my lungs were swollen and tight, but he wasalive,and for that blessing my body would devote this last drop of energy to tears of sheer, earth-shifting relief.
“Don’t, Rosie,” was all he could manage.
He lifted a shaking, grimy hand to smear tears and soot across my cheek, and when he gave a grimace at the mess he’d made I wanted to laugh.
“You’re alright,” I wheezed.
“More so than you,” he said, brows flickering. I realised distantly that it was true. His eyes had already cleared and were now sharp with concern, but mine could barely stay open. “S’just a serpent thing.”
I wanted to ask if that meant he could heal. I wanted to ask him so many things, but I was fading so fast, my lungs raking in barely enough air to keep me conscious, and before I could give in there was only one thing that seemed to matter.
“Will you stay?”
The look on his face was utterly devastated, but if he answered I did not hear it. My dry and aching eyes rolled back in my skull and I heard nothing more.
Chapter Sixteen
Oath
Iwas in a bed, that much I knew.
I could not move for exhaustion, could barely distinguish dreams from reality, nor comprehend the passing of time. I didn’t have the energy or inclination to open my eyes, which seemed to be bound in cool cloth that my fingers were far too heavy to reach for.
And there were familiar voices at my bedside – but their hushed words were not intended for my ears.
“You should not be here,” said the gentler of the two.
“There’s time,” the deep and lovely voice replied.
“The coronation istomorrow, Caelan,” the other insisted. Its name floated through the ashes and ruins of my mind;Roy.“If you were going to ignore the most crucial part of this plan, why did you come to me in the first place?”
“I came,” Caelan gritted out angrily, “because you’resupposedto speak for us. I came because you’re our Chief, and we needed guidance.”
“I was yourparent’sChief,” Roy corrected gently.
Caelan made a bitter, dejected sound that might have been a laugh.
“Yes, well, Brigid and I never really had a Coven to speak of, did we?”
Roy sighed, the sound both soft and pained. “You might again one day. Soon. It all hinges on these next few days; you know this.”
