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My eyes shot to his. “What else needs to be done?” My instincts prickled with deep dislike and warning.
“The fire gave her back her name. She’s remembered thanks to the flame’s help.” He pointed at a silver-mark carved into his chest and shoulder. A bear with its paws spread wide, its claws sharp and ready. “The feast we’re preparing is for Runa’s naming ceremony. But first, she must be marked with her spirit guardian so she will always be watched over and intune with the creature who guides her.”
He dropped his hand, his face etched with command, worn with the importance of a chief who was used to being obeyed. “Be patient and perhaps we can get through today as friends. Do. Not. Move.”
With another scathing look, he walked back to where he’d been helping two males carve a large haunch of bison that’d been roasting in the flames.
Another sound pricked my ears.
Runa’s voice.
Her wonderful voice.
Followed by a man’s.
A man I didn’t trust.
A man who was inside there with her.
The fire might have released her, but he still held her hostage.
My shadows thickened and whipped into angry ribbons, veining the wings behind me, turning them into a stormy sky.
I did my best to keep waiting.
I waited for as long as I could.
I waited until I could wait no longer.
Chapter Thirty-Three
. Runa .
I WOKE WITH A CHOKING cough.
Smoke poured out of my lungs as I launched upright, hacking and spluttering, patting myself on the chest to clear my airways of fire.
Syn leapt to her feet, attacking me with licks to my face and whiskers tickling my neck. Her two tails lashed so quickly, so nimbly that they made cracking sounds in the otherwise stagnant silence.
That silence was shredded as Solin jack-knifed up with a single dainty cough as if he was long used to inhaling the smoke the fire lived in. He groaned as he stretched, his spine snapping in three places, his shoulders popping and knees clicking as he moved a body that’d been locked in one position for three days.
I blinked back the grit in my gaze, noticing the sun had faded into twilight—a snapshot of its impending bedtime visible in the roof hole. The fire that’d been blazing brightly in the stone-ringed fireplace had gone out.
I nudged a toe toward the stones, expecting them still to be warm, but no heat existed. The ashes were as grey and as lifeless as if the flames had snuffed out hours ago.
Syn cried with sharp demands, doing her best to catch my attention. Clambering onto my lap, her feline bulk pushed me backward as her paws landed on my chest and her tongue covered my face in another licking-frenzy.
“Hey.” I raised my arms, doing my best to protect myself from her love attack. “I’m fine, Syn.” My lungs still ached with smoke soreness, and my limbs felt heavy and foreign. The same light-headedness and disorientation that’d made me stumble and sway in the grasslands when Darro had found me kept my thoughts heavy and thoughts soot-sticky.
Solin raised his arms above his head and stretched again, groaning in pleasure. His lips twitched into a smile as he watched me wrestle with the lynx. After a few heartbeats, he murmured, “Syn, enough. The girl is alive, but she needs space to breathe.”
Syn glanced at the Fire Reader, then with a happy yip, she obeyed. Her black-gloss eyes remained bright with relief as she threw herself onto her belly by my hip, her baby antlers fuzzy with barely-there velvet.
Solin shifted to face me, his face slipping into concern. “Brace yourself, Runa. It’s almost time.” With a wince, he pushed his lean frame slowly and stiffly to his feet.
He swayed over me, his bare stomach flexing with muscles to stay in one place.
I looked at him, my heart kicking. “Brace for wh—”
I cried out as the same agony that’d seared through me in the trance ripped through my body.
The mark.
The awful fire-claiming mark.
Ruby blood soaked into the deerskin, oozing from the freshly scorched mark of a flame trapped in a neat and nasty triangle.
Solin grunted as he lifted his arms to the sky again, stretching left and right. His skin pulled taut over his abdominals and ribs. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop the pain.” Bending, he touched the ground with his fingertips, then eased upward and ran on the spot, groaning as circulation returned to his limbs.
I sat silently, nursing my second wound.
I hurt.
I was tired.
And most of all, I was desperate to see Darro.
Solin dropped his arms, licking his dried lips. Cutting across the lupic to the large, carved bowl holding water from the river, he dipped his hands into the fresh liquid. Washing his face, he cupped his palms and drank his fill, not caring he gulped down the dirt from the past few days that he’d just washed away.
