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“What? No, I’m not-”
“What you’renot,and never have been,” he drawled, “is meek and docile, Natty. And I’m not an idiot.” Then he offered a broad smile which confused the hell out of me. “But that’s okay. You’re trying, and that’s all that matters. You’ll soon realise how good we are for each other.”
I didn’t answer, although he didn’t seem to need me to. He may not have expected me to be meek, but he certainly liked it.
“Aratorre?” Kolya called, striding over to where Ren lay, a dusting of snow on his furs. I darted forward and dropped to my knees beside my lover, heaving out a relieved breath when I saw his chest rise and fall. But his breathing was even more laboured than before, his eyelashes fluttering erratically, and I thought I heard him murmur Altagracia’s name amid his pained whimpers.
I glared up at the Mazekhstani prince where he stood over us watching Ren’s suffering with undisguised satisfaction. “Help him, now!”
Kolya sighed like it was a huge inconvenience, dropped to one knee on Ren’s other side, and prodded at him experimentally. “It’s going to be annoying having to haul him all the way to Máros,” he said with distaste.
Hoping it was just his usual bitching rather than him changing his mind, I dragged Ren’s furs to the side and tried to unlace his shirt, only it was caked to his skin. The blood and pus had entirely soaked through the bandage. I muttered an apology as I wrenched it all away, Ren crying out in his unconsciousness and Kolya displaying visible disgust as he pressed the tip of his index finger to the festering wound beneath.
Purple and silver sparks hissed where their skin met, and I watched without daring to breathe as the damage began to retreat and the wound neatly knitted over. The rainbow of colours – black, yellow, red – disappeared from Ren’s skin, his bloodied shoulder was now whole, and yet…his breathing remained stilted and his eyes were still closed.
Kolya drew back, wiping his hand on Ren’s furs and frowning at him.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Why isn’t he waking up?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, sounding bewildered. “It should have worked!”
“Fucking do something, Kolya!”
“I don’t know what to…oh,” he said then, a slyness entering his expression. “I forgot who I was dealing with.”
Ren’s eyes shot open and he abruptly lunged upright, the knife I’d discreetly pressed into his hand a moment ago flashing towards Kolya’s throat. But the northern prince jerked backwards before it could make contact, catching my wrist just above my glove and dragging me with him. I gave a pained shout as my shoulder was wrenched in the wrong direction, but it was the feel of his hand on my bare skin that shocked me the most; an agonising, blistering sensation of heat and pressure.
“Cute,” Kolya mocked us as I cried out, his mouth twisted in disdain. “Did you get it out of your systems, or do you needanotherreminder of what I can do to you both?”
Ren stilled, his eyes flickering between us and settling on where I was held. Then he tossed the knife into the snow at Kolya’s feet, casually stretching his arms above his head as if shaking off a nap rather than a fatal wound.
My heart leapt at the sight, too overwhelmed by relief at his recovery to do more than stare. He offered me a smile, one of those twitches of his mouth that said he was pleased and pissed off all at once.
“You couldn’t have picked a feral beast in these woods to adopt instead, Mathias? A leper or two? Anything other than this prick?”
“It seems God will always return Nathanael to my side,” snarled Kolya. When I tried to wrench my arm from his grasp, his fingers only tightened around the seared skin.
“Divine intervention, of course,” Ren agreed, his eyebrows raising. “Nothing to do with us all being fugitives and happening to flee north by the only route left to us.”
“Ren,” I snapped, finally recovering my voice. “Run.”
My lover, frustratingly but admittedly predictably, didn’t move.
“Are you fucking deaf? Run, Ren, before he-”
My words devolved into a yelp as Kolya reapplied that same magical pain to my wrist as before.
“Don’t,” warned Ren with a growl, hatred in his eyes as he glared at the other prince. “You can have me and the bounty I’ll bring, just don’t-”
“I already have you,” Kolya interrupted, glancing at me. “For if I hold one of you, I hold both.”
And wasn’t that the fucking truth?
“And yet all that Natty’s affection bought you was another few pitiful days of life, Aratorre,” he added, “and me the delightful sight of your body being hung from your own city’s gates.”
Ren bristled but said nothing.
Kolya knelt to rummage in our bag of supplies, tossing me the last of the bandages before sliding his hand to the back of my neck to free my hands. My wrist was a mess of burned skin in the shape of a handprint, red and raw.
