Page 47 of Heart’s Rescue

Rowan

Nothing Lasts Forever

This is a disaster.

I can’t believe I let this happen. That woman was clearly not in her right mind. She was recovering from hypothermia, damn near incoherent and, for all I knew, she thought I was the stupid monster prince she’d come here chasing after.

I realize I’ve clenched my hands into fists and try to will myself to let them relax. A situation’s only awkward if you let it be awkward, right? So just because I didn’t shut the whole thing down when I should have, just because I freaking loved kissing her and was desperate to take it further before my better judgment finally slammed my libido headfirst into a rock wall, that doesn’t mean things between us have to be horrible. Right?

I clear my throat, glance up at Arryn long enough to see her big, dark eyes watching me, and then turn away as soon as my cock insists on remembering that she’s naked under that sleeping roll. Naked aside from the little bit of white silk between her legs. I clear my throat, reach for a stick, and gently nudge the pot out of the fire.

“You know, Phaedron makes this,” I begin, and my voice sounds okay. A little shaky, but okay. “He dries the meat for days, adds veggies and spices, packs it all up for my trips. It’s lightweight and actually tastes, uh, not terrible.”

I try to smile at her. The attempt feels horrible, so I turn away and focus on pouring the stew into bowls. And not thinking about how soft and warm Arryn felt in my arms.

“It smells good,” she says.

Okay, so she’s still with me. Still lucid. Not still thinking I’m someone she wants to climb like a tree, or whatever it was she was thinking when she was almost dead. When she kissed me.

I place the bowl delicately by the edge of the bedroll. That one bedroll is going to be a problem. And the food is going to be another problem. I wanted to give Arryn the lightest pack, so I’d taken the shelter, the cutlery, the bowls and kettle, and most of the clothes. Arryn had gotten the food. I’d taken two days worth of random crap in my pack, and that was just because Phaedron was watching me with raised eyebrows when I’d packed the bags.

Which meant we now had two days worth of food. Great. I’d tried to use my magic to feel for Arryn’s missing pack in the river, but there was no living energy to sense. The rest of our food, her clothes, and her sleeping roll might as well have been a stone on the bottom of the river for all I could tell. Or perhaps it had already been washed downstream into the heat and steam of the void.

But two days should be enough to get us to the thin place, given the position of the river. And then I’d just be hungry on the way back. It wasn’t that big a deal; I’ve been hungry before.

“It’s good,” Arryn says.

Her voice startles me into looking up. She’s sitting now, with the furs wrapped around her shoulders and steam rising from the stew to frame her face, and she’s watching me with a shy sort of smile, almost like she’s embarrassed too.

Well, yeah. I guess that fits. I make another faltering attempt to smile at her.

“Rowan,” she begins. “Can I ask you something?”

My fingers tighten around my bowl. She’s going to bring up the kiss, and I’m going to apologize like a civilized person for taking advantage of her in her weakened state, and I’ll promise it won’t happen again, and it won’t, and then we can both spend the rest of our lives pretending that kiss never happened. And it’s only going to be awkward if I make it awkward.

“Sure,” I answer.

Arryn takes another sip of the stew, then stares at the shifting flames of the fire.

“Why did you chart the void?” she asks.

That question is so far from what I’d expected her to ask me that it takes me a moment to string her words together and find their meaning.

“Well,” I begin, my voice halting, “I realized that certain landmarks move in predictable ways. Like, say, the river. It’s got a wide orbit, but it moves in a circle. Roughly. So, if I’ve got two or three of those landmarks, I can triangulate—”

“No, not how,” she says. She looks up, and her gaze cuts right through my faltering explanation. “I figured you were using fixed points to navigate. But, why?”

The fire cracks and spits, casting wild shadows between the labyrinthine twists of our drying clothes.

“What were you looking for?” she asks.

I sigh and settle back onto the snow. This close to the fire, it’s all rapidly turning to slush. Several dozen irreverent answers to her question flitter through my mind, but I think she’d see right through my bullshit. Besides, the truth seems easier than trying to make a joke.

“Well, I was looking for a thin place,” I say. “The place where I’m taking you.”

Arryn frowns down at her stew. “What is the thin place?”

“I have no idea.” I set down my bowl and stretch, my fingertips grazing the shelter’s canvas roof. “But I think of it like this. The barrier’s a fence, right? Rensivar the wicked dragon’s magical fence separating the Worlds Above and the Lands Below.”