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I tore my gaze from my arm to look at him. “What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “Later. Take your ring. Please.”
I didn’t really want to touch the arm, but I wanted the ring back. When I tentatively touched the hand, it stayed relaxed.
I shuddered. “How is it still warm?”
“Whatever the Carlin made Belial anoint it with has kept it truly alive.” Lonan hesitated. “What do you want to do with it?”
“Maybe… I guess burn it? But not in the same fire as Balor.” I looked up at him. “Wait. If it’s still alive, will I… feel it if we burn it?”
“I could ask Belial if he can remove whatever he doused it with. So that it… dies naturally.”
My gorge rose, but I nodded. “Okay. Let’s do that.”
Moving carefully, I slipped the ring off the hand’s middle finger. It twitched, before all five fingers suddenly curled in a rush, trying to hold on to my thumb. I managed to yank my hand free in time and stumbled back in horror.
“I don’t want to look at it anymore.” I clutched the ring in my fist, heart pounding.
Lonan snapped the lid shut and moved the box onto the floor. Then he kicked the cloth sack so that Balor’s head rolled to the other side of the throne before moving towards me.
“May I see it?” His fingers curled gently around my clenched fist.
I relaxed my hand to show him the ring. Lonan smiled—a smile I’d never seen from him before. Happy but tinged with grief. And hope.
Without a word, he slipped it onto my middle finger, then raised my hand to his mouth to kiss my knuckles.
He looked up at me, still smiling. “It looks good on you, Oak King.”
Chapter Forty-One
Ash
“Your room is nice,” I said as I emerged from the bathroom.
I was feeling uncharacteristically shy, having never been here in Lonan’s private space before, so I kept my towel wrapped tightly around my waist as I went to sit with him in front of the fireplace.
Lonan grinned at me as I sat down, raking his fingers through his wet hair. He’d wanted us to bathe together, but I’d insisted on going after him because I was filthy from my time in the forest. Some of Balor’s blood had splashed onto my skin, and even though I’d scrubbed it off in a stream on my way here, I didn’t want Lonan bathing in the remnants.
“Probably too cold for you though, seelie.”
I laughed, gesturing at the fireplace, which was lit with blue-white unseelie flames that didn’t burn as hot as seelie fire. “Not with the fire lit. Besides, I think I acclimatised to unseelie weather while I was here. The cooler summer weather, anyway,” I added. “Not all the snow.”
“Maybe we could spend summers here and winters there.”
I looked over at him quickly. “Is that what you want to do?”
We hadn’t talked about how this was going to work yet. He’d told me about the Carlin’s death. I’d told him about Balor’s. And I’d cried when I’d relayed what I found in the Brid’s room, apologising again and again for the way I’d been acting, until Lonan had pulled me against his chest and held me tight.
The smile dropped from his face as he looked back at me. “I don’t know.”
Then he sighed, lowering his gaze as he reached over and fiddled with the ring on my finger. “That wouldn’t work anyway. You need to be there for the Mild Months, and I need to be here for the Bitter Months. That’s just the way of it, Oak King.”
I swallowed, threading my fingers through his. “We’ll figure it out.”
He squeezed my hand, then released it to reach for the tray on the table that held the remnants of our dinner. “Yes. We will. Are you still hungry? More tea?”
“More tea, please.”
