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I closed my eyes, breathing in the scent of him as he pressed his forehead to mine. “Mi luz. Mi vida. Mi fuente de frustracion infinita.”
My light. My life. My source of endless frustration.
Mat huffed out an amused breath, a fond smile replacing his worry for a fleeting moment. And then he dipped his chin into the furs at his neck, hiding his joy as if ashamed of it.
I slid my fingers under his jaw and pried it back out. He’d been doing this lately, looking guilty whenever he felt happy, as though he wasn’t permitted to experience it while I was in pain. While Quareh suffered under Welzes’ rule, and the war at the Mazekhstani border raged on.
“I want your laughter,” I told him, as our breaths puffed into the air and a cold breeze tugged at our clothes. “Your happiness is mine, as is the rest of you, so don’t even think of keeping it from me.”
Another smile, briefly disguised by habit but then allowed to shine, and fuck, he was beautiful. The wintry sunlight dancing in his hair, his cheeks flushed pink from cold, and the way he looked at me as if he’d never let me go.
“So don’t,” I said.
“Dorogoi?”
I stared. Mathias no longer stood before me, but was hunched up, knees to his chest and huffing warmth onto his hands with his breath. And he was…sideways?
Blinking rapidly as if that would help orientate myself, it took until he’d shuffled closer to me to realise that I was the one in the horizontal relationship with the ground. I was stretched out on my back on a pile of furs, the air crisp in my throat but flecked with warmth and the enticing smell of cooking meat from the direction of the nearby campfire.
I rubbed my eyes, quickly swapping to my right arm when my left refused to cooperate. “Weren’t we just talking?”
“You were talking tosomeone,” Mat said. “I’m not entirely sure it was me.”
“Then it wasn’t a conversation worth having,” I retorted, but the concern visibly wrinkling his eyes and mouth was making me nervous. “What happened? We were at the border, and…”
Mathias let out a long, defeated exhale. “That was two days ago,” he told me softly. “You’ve been…in and out of it for a while.”
Images swarmed my brain, hazy and distant as if from a dream or an old memory. A bird in a tree, bathing in sunlight. My boots plodding across wet dirt. Snatches of conversation, half-formed words, my confusion when he said things that didn’t make sense.
“It’s not looking good, is it?”
My northerner glanced at my shoulder before his gaze darted away, refusing to look me in the eye. “It’s fine.”
I snorted, or tried to, but the effort pulled painfully at the wound. “You can lie better than that,mi sol.”
His lips formed into a broad beam of a grin, and he laughed as if this had all been a hilarious joke. “Ren,” he said. “Seriously. You’re going to be fine.”
Shit. I almost believed him.
The meat spat and crackled where it nestled above the fire, and I stared into the flames, searing the flickering light onto my eyes so I didn’t have to think about...
Had fire always been white? I didn’tthinkso, but there it was, a perfect, almost pearlescent white brightness inches from my face. But it was cold, and fire wasn’t cold, and I tried to fight it off as it wrapped around my arms and wouldn’t let go and-
“Let me help you,” growled a voice in my ear, and I fell still as the warmth that voice brought with it sank into my bones.
“Mat,” I croaked. “I don’t…I can’t…”
“You fell,” he said patiently, easing me up onto my ass from the face-planted position I’d found myself in. The way he avoided my shoulder so adeptly told me that this wasn’t the first time he’d had to manhandle me like this, and there was no sign of the clearing with the fire that formed my last memory. “Perhaps we should rest here for the night.”
“It’ssnow.” The realisation hit me as the white mass before my face resolved into a picture I could make sense of, my cheek seeming to burn as it was wrenched out of its chilled embrace. But the mild pain was nothing compared to how my shoulder screamed at me. “Mat, I’ve seen snow!”
“You’ve also tasted it.” Wry amusement tinged his tone. “You insisted on catching snowflakes on your tongue for two miles straight.”
One landed on the back of his hand, and as he was unable to brush it off while he was holding onto me, I thoughtfully licked it from his skin.
“See?” he asked. “It has no taste.”
“Wrong,” I told him. “Snow tastes like you.”
