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“In the bathroom.”
I walked over to it. My eyebrows lifted when I found a simple basket full of fresh bandages sitting near the door. I supposed that a centuries-long war meant a lot of wounds, and a lot of wounds meant a lot of bandages.
After returning to Kierden, I kneeled down and splashed his cut again to clean the blood off.
“If the skin’s wet, the bandage will stick to it,” he said.
It surprised me that he told me before I asked. But I wasn’t about to acknowledge any positive feelings for the man, so I changed the subject. “Why did you fight seven rounds if he kept losing?”
“His rage hadn’t faded. He lost the first four, then had calmed enough to win the fifth. I took the sixth, and after he won the seventh, his female fainted. He thanked me for my help, then brought her back to the castle to rest.”
My eyebrows shot upward as I finished wetting his back and then dried my fingers carefully on my dress. “Why did she faint?”
He grunted again when I pressed the bandage to his wound and held it in place. Part of me expected it to fall off when I let go, but it stayed where I put it as I withdrew my fingers. A quick brush against the edges of the fabric proved that it was stuck tight.
Kierden said, “She’s tiny and weak. Not assertive, like you are. Apparently the blood scared her.”
My heart went out to the poor girl. If she’d been trapped the way Laeli and I had, I didn’t blame her at all for beingtiny,weak, ornotassertive. Then again, even if she hadn’t been trapped, I wouldn’t blame her for those things.
Not everyone needed to be strong or stubborn. I didn’t even consider myself either of those things, yet apparently Kierden found me attractive. Or at least attractive enough to touch intimately without demanding anything in return except my name.
“I’m not assertive. I just don’t let you mistreat me.” I tried to change the subject. “Give me your leg. I saw a cut there too.”
He grumbled a bit but pulled himself out of the water. I forced myself not to make eye contact with his erection as I studied the cut on his thigh. It was bigger than the last one, so I looked for a bandage to fit it.
“Of course you’re assertive. You’re wearing an orange dress. Do you know how many fae I’ve ever seen wear orange?”
My face warmed as I pulled out a bandage. “Only a few?”
He chuckled. “None.”
And he was practically ancient, so there must not have been any fae who wore bright colors—at least not in his kingdom.
Whoops.
I leaned over his cut again. It was leaking blood, so I scooped water out of the pool in an attempt to clean it. “Eisley forced me to choose what I liked the most, so it’s her fault.”
“The fact that you wanted the color in the first place speaks volumes about your personality. You hold back your fire, but it still burns.”
“I don’t want toburnanyone,” I countered.
“Does a fire hurt by merely existing?”
The words surprised me.
I didn’t have an answer for him.
Kierden added, “Anyone who touches the fire or steps into it burns, but does that put the fire at fault?”
My forehead wrinkled and I forgot about his wound for a moment. “I think you’re telling me not to hide my feelings and emotions, in a roundabout way.”
He made a noise of amusement. “I’m telling you that you can’t hurt anyone by existing, little human. If someone is hurt by opinions that don’t belong to them, they are responsible for their own perceived pain.”
“That sounds like a perspective only a fae can live by. Humans try not to hurt each other… or at least the good ones do.” I finally looked back at his wound and washed it off again.
“Perhaps. Fae do not live our lives with an intent to please anyone; we simply exist. No one is responsible for someone else’s peace of mind.”
That sounded kind of nice, honestly.
