Page 184 of Feralheart

She didn’t look up immediately. When she did, it wasn’t at my face but my throat.

“You’re asking the wrong question,” she said.

“What’s the right one?”

“Whether I’m choosing to give it.” She frowned, continuing to mend my skin. “And I am. So stop trying to bleed out on me.”

The tent felt smaller. Or I was more aware of how close she was.

She coated my wound with salve and herbs and bit her lower lip as she secured a new bandage, leaning back on her heels after. “Try to keep this intact for more than a few hours. And try not to get stabbed again.” She started packing up the supplies.

“I appreciate your medical expertise.”

“I appreciate you not dying.” The words came out sharp, and she looked away, blinking fast.

I caught her chin, tilting her face toward me. “Eradin.”

“What?” Her eyes shimmered with tears, and seeing them ripped through my guts like the sharpest blade.

“All I could think of during that trial was you.”

“Don’t say that.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes, but tugged away and straightened, clutching her bag of supplies to her chest. “I’ll send Boren in with food. You need to eat.”

“Stay.”

“I can’t. You know that.”

The tent flap rustled as she left but snapped open again a short time later.

Vella stepped inside. “We need to talk.”

“We don’t. We survived. There’s nothing else to say.”

“Two people are dead,” she said, and this time her voice shook. “Alys is dead. Do you know she once told me she hoped you’d consider asking her to marry you?”

“I did not.”

Her throat worked, and she left.

I sat up on the side of my bed and gingerly tugged on a fresh tunic, stuffing my feet into my boots someone had removed when they placed me here.

Outside, I did my best not to stagger.

The trials were supposed to test us. Kill us, yes, but through challenge and failure.

This felt different.

We’d gone through attempted murder—real murder in Alys’s and Brimmore’s case.

Teams clustered together. A scan showed only three other than mine left, none of them complete any longer.

Two of my original five were dead, but I couldn’t take pride in that.

Vella and Blair stood near the stream, their heads bent in conversation. Their body language screamed calculation.

As I walked toward the dragons, the other elite riders gave me space. Eyes followed my movements before sliding away. I’d become contaminated by commons association and trust in a bond I was quickly discovering was less than what Eradin had with Selira, but much more than my fellow nobles had with their own dragons.

Two unforgivable sins, my mother would say.