Page 44 of The Silversmith

Finn nudged her leg and shot her a look of warning. I failed to suppress a grin.

They made sense, the two of them. Finn Sinclair was remarkably level-headed and unflappable. Gemma was… not. It was a balance between them, just as Marin sounded like the stalwart calm to Caz’s boundary-pushing levity.

Over the past few days—after many sessions of persistent nagging that I was quite proud of—Gemma had explained her feelings for Finn. Feelings that had been developing for a decade. Her parents had died when she was young, and she’d grown up in the Winterton Caves just as he had. They had been close friends as children, but Finn—three years Gemma’s senior and the good man he was—refused to pursue anything until Gemma was at least eighteen.

But then she was picked to participate in Commencement and chosen by Simeon and the Wintertons to be my social-guide-slash-secret-emissary. Since her time with me in Warrich, she’d floated from village to village in Avendrel and Wymara, occupied with various surveillance and reconnaissance missions for Elias’s army. For Gemma and Finn, the pieces had yet to fit.

She wanted it to work. She even said she might love him, though anything physical had yet to transpire. I knew it was only a matter of time. And their happiness made me happy.

“We’re two days away from Tovick.” Gemma’s voice dragged me back to the present. She and Finn focused on the map. “I’ve never been there, but it’s supposedly bigger than Freyburn. With Simeon’s wards in place, it’ll be safe from Molochai’s shadows.”

“It’s unlikely Molochai knows you exist yet,” Finn added when he noticed my worry. “Simeon knew what he was doing, keeping you hidden all your life.”

Gemma nodded in agreement, not without an apologetic look for what being hidden away had done to me.

“But still, we need to be careful. Most of Nyrida knows about Christabel’s prophecy. It’s likely Molochai does, too, so any suspicions about you could be dangerous.”

“Being inconspicuous is key,” Gemma sighed. “Which is why we can’t use horses unless necessary. They’re harder to hide and cover tracks. A right shame, as we would likely be in Brinnea by now, and my ass wouldn’t be on fire.”

Finn snorted, folded up the map, and tucked it back in the pocket of his brown canvas jacket.

Using horses had never crossed my mind. I’d only seen them in drawings. I added those to the list of things I needed to see, touch, maybe even ride, before going to the Winterton Caves. How embarrassing would it be if their queen couldn’t ride a horse?

“Damn.”

We heard Caz’s voice and followed his attention to the source of swift, strong footsteps echoing off rock. To Gavin, who’d returned from his hunt. Completely soaked through the long-sleeved shirt that gripped his hard, mammoth shoulders and arms. The sight of him might have stolen the air right out of me had my admiration not been leveled by the sight of a massive dead animal slung over his shoulders.

A red deer. With antlers. He’d killed and carried a full-grown red stag over his shoulders for the gods knew how long and how far.

I cursed myself for enjoying such a savage sight.

He thrust the animal over his head in one fell swoop. Effortless, like everything else he did. The dead stag hit the ground with a sickening smack. Then Gavin looked right at me, no one else, and said, “This should cover your next few meals.” He knelt down on one knee beside the stag and unsheathed a razor-sharp blade from its place on his belt.

“Oh, shit!” Gemma hissed. “I swear on all the sons and daughters of Sussurro, if you do that right here, right now, I will murder you and—”

Gavin sliced open the gut of the red stag with unnatural precision, earning groans of objection from Gemma and Ezra as he proceeded to physically remove the guts from the animal and toss them aside, away from us.

Caz nudged Gemma toward Gavin. “Sounds like Sussurro’s going to have a bone to pick with you if you don’t kill him.”

She rolled her eyes and gagged. I doubted one of our twelve ancient gods would bother with Gemma, even if she could get close to his multitude of alleged children.

Caz kept me company as we watched Gavin gut, skin, then hang the stag with a rope over a long, jagged rock that jutted out from the wall of stone. I watched, well aware I should know how to slaughter and prepare my own meat. Still, watching him was… brutal, but the way he worked was almost routine, as if he’d butchered hundreds—perhaps thousands—of animals to survive.

I watched blood drip and drain out of the carcass, having heard Phillip talk about cleaning an animal to know it was necessary. I thought the sight of red would grip me by the throat and steal my breath, but it didn’t. This was… different. Gory and brutal, yes, but this was survival. Maybe it was because he was here or simply because I wasn’t alone anymore, but I wasn’t afraid of the blood. I couldn’t afford to be. Not anymore.

And I thought… maybe that’s why he was doing this right in front of me. Because he knew that too.

Still, there was one piece of the slaughtered stag that haunted me. It churned my stomach, but I forced myself to look at the deep gash in its neck. The final kill. Where Gavin had ended its misery.

I jumped when Caz put his arm around my shoulder. He squeezed me, winked, and whispered in my ear, “Always entertaining to watch another man mark his territory.”

I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant, but he was already gone.

“We will stay here for the day,” Gavin announced to no one in particular. “The rain looks like it will clear soon.” He turned to me, hands still bloody. “Once it does, I want you outside for training. Bring your knife.”

Sure enough, the rain stopped about twenty minutes later. I shoveled down breakfast—the last of our bread and strips of jerky leftover from Freyburn. I stared at the hanging stag as I passed it.

Gavin was still damp when I found him, but his wet, dark, shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a knot at the base of his neck, revealing more hidden scars that I ogled longer than I should have. He was clean—no trace of the stag’s blood on his hands or clothing. The amount of skill it had to take to slay, carry, and butcher an animal while only bloodying his hands…