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A jerk went through him. He let go of her throat, his entire body trembling as he recalled his shadows—unpredictable assholes on good days, and deadly liabilities on bad ones.
The highborn beauty collapsed to the ground with a heavythud. Silent. Unmoving. Asker was going to have my tail feathers for this…
“Bring me the fate!” Malyr’s shout echoed through the forest before wings flapped, and whoever had perched in the nearby trees took flight. “And the healer!”
I grabbed the leather pouch dangling from a low branch, eyes burning and ears buzzing. Spending five days in my unkindness of ravens had overwhelmed my senses to a point I would suffer for a week straight. Every gift came at a cost. Mine? Brain-stabbing headaches.
I retrieved a piece of gray devil’s bark from the pouch and placed it on my tongue. My gums clenched at the bitterness, but I chewed past it. It was still better than having to listen to Asker’s unavoidable reprimand entirely lucid.
Pouch strapped to my cuirass, I adjusted my bow and rolled my shoulders, my muscles sore from too many hours in flight, damaged as my wings were. “You nearly killed her.”
But only nearly.
My ears still pricked at the wheezed gasps she sucked into her lungs, the slowed pulse that trickled through her veins, the occasional twitch in her finger that let a knuckle grind. Then there was the sour scent of fear seeping off her with each weak beat of her heart, tainted with something sweeter that I couldn’t name.
“Even without eyes, I could sense these shadows from a mile away.” Elovan limped into the forest wearing her blue robes, blind as a bat, her kinky hair a wild mess that stood in all directions as she held one hand out before her. When the tip of her shoe stubbed into Galantia’s side, she knelt, letting her fingers guide her hands to the girl’s neck. “This should have killed the thing.”
Yeah, I guess it should have.
I took in Galantia’s ashen face, her unblinking hazel eyes fixed on the canopy, her breaths nothing but tiny, flat whimpers that seized her chest. Fuck, she looked so fragile.
Deliciously vulnerable.
With a shake of her head, Elovan placed her hands on Galantia’s black-stained throat, absorbing Malyr’s shadows into her core. An interesting thing to watch, really, because voids had always been rare—even before we’d systematically killed them some decades ago.
I sighed at that pity. “You should have stopped sooner.”
Malyr’s gaze fell to my lips—undoubtedly gray from the bark by now—and his jaws tensed. “You should have kept her name from me.”
“And have your moody shadows wrap around me instead, fixated as you were on this girl?” He’d looked positively spellbound even before her name had come into play. A rarity, given how most women left him indifferent. “Not what you expected, hmm?”
He shoved at the chest panel of his black cuirass, those fingers he’d used to choke the girl pitch-black to a point it had to pain him. “I didn’t know what to expect from Asker’s vision, vague as it was. None of us have.”
I let my eyes fall to Galantia and how Elovan drew another plume of shadows from the girl’s parted lips. “How did a man with such a rotten soul manage to make such a pretty daughter?”
Of course, Malyr only frowned. He didn’t care for her full blush lips unless he bit them bloody. Didn’t care for her shapely body unless it carried his marks. Cared even less about those unblinking eyes, not unless he filled them with tears.
Sick bastard.
Malyr shifted beside me as though he was imagining it just as vividly. “Will she recover?”
Elovan didn’t dare to arch that brow at Malyr, though I saw the twitch, her sun-kissed skin mottled with even darker spots around her cheeks. “We shall see.”
“You have found her?” Asker was shifting into his human form, wearing the black armor of the royal ravenguard, looking as proper and stiff as ever with his breastplate polished and those black and white strands neatly pulled into a thinning braid along his scalp that matched his speckled beard. “Let me have a look at her face!”
He knelt beside the girl, observing the shadowmarks on her skin. It had to piss him off to see his vision unresponsive on the ground, but alas, his face carried emotions with the expressiveness of a rock. So perfectly controlled, perfectly honorable. Always… perfect.
“Yes, without a doubt, it is her I saw in my vision,” he said after a while, brushing the sweat-dampened ivory strands from Galantia’s face. “Do we know her identity?”
A twitch ran along Malyr’s upper lip. “Lady Galantia of the House Brisden.”
“I see.” Asker nodded, his gaze drifting into the nothingness of the underbrush for long moments. “The goddess has sent us something precious.”
“So it would appear,” Malyr ground out, probably hating the fact since it would keep him from hating on her.
At least to some degree.
“Depending on how much or how little Brisden knows, he might be willing to release Marla in exchange for his daughter’s safe return.” Asker rose, setting a stare on me weighted down by a set of thick, heavy brows. “Ifshe recovers…”
