Page 33 of Blood Curse

“If that changes while Elias examines it, we stop.”

He said it to the curse, not to me. The distinction had become easier to hear.

We reached the outer room as another knock struck the door.

Mara entered first. Behind her stood a narrow man with white hair, a straight back and a black leather medical case that looked older than every hospital I’d ever visited. His charcoal suit had survived the journey better than he had. Mud stained one knee, and tiredness pulled at the fine lines around his pale grey eyes.

Those eyes went straight to Stellan.

Elias stopped breathing.

Stellan stayed where he was. “Hello, Elias.”

“You look appalling.”

“I’ve had a difficult century.”

Elias crossed the room and caught Stellan’s face between both hands. He looked at him from every angle, as if checking for a convincing imitation.

“Mara said you were alive,” he murmured. “I called her a liar for most of the journey.”

“He apologised badly,” Mara said.

“I apologised accurately.” Elias released Stellan’s face and pulled him into a hard embrace. “You impossible boy.”

Stellan closed his eyes.

Only for a second. It was enough.

He had carried the missing court as one blurred failure since I met him. Every old name had belonged to someone he assumed Adrian had killed, driven away or turned against him. Elias’s hands on his back gave those people shape again. They had lived. They had remembered him. At least two of them had crossed countries to complain about the state of his clothes.

I watched Stellan breathe through the relief. It looked harder for him than pain.

Elias stepped back and examined the bloodstained bandage visible under Stellan’s open shirt. “You’re injured.”

“Healing.”

“That answer annoyed me when you were thirty.”

“It has served me well.”

“It has served the people forced to treat you very badly.”

Mara faced me. “Now you understand why we kept him.”

“I’m beginning to.”

The exchange settled something in Stellan. His shoulders lowered, and the caution around his mouth eased. Mara and Elias weren’t greeting a failed king or asking why he hadn’t saved them. They were furious because they had missed him.

Elias finally raised his head.

His gaze reached the Crown and sharpened. He didn’t come closer.

“Bryony?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“May I examine you?”