Weslyn holds my gaze. “I need to take a look.” Slowly, he lifts my shirt enough to reveal the wound just below my navel.
The cut is shallow, but it’s long. There are no needles lining it. Just blood.
“Okay, hold on,” he says, like I’m going anywhere. He produces a vial of sharply scented liquid and dabs a bit onto a small square of cloth, then presses the cloth to the cut with both hands. Tears prick my eyes when it touches my skin.
“I can do it,” I grumble, but he ignores me and presses firmly on the wound for a full minute. I don’t know what to do, so I stare at the ground.
“I’m sorry,” he says in a quiet voice, after a while. “I didn’t mean to cut you.” I risk a quick glance at his face, where a few strands of hair have fallen across his brow, reminding me sharply of his brother. Expression grim, he’s staring fixedly at his hands, which have been careful not to touch anything but cloth. “You startled me.”
I look back at the ground. “It’s all right.”
Using one hand to hold the cloth in place, Weslyn grabs his roll of bandage tape and pulls at the end with his teeth, ripping it once his piece is sufficiently long. Delicately, he lifts a bit of the cloth, then replaces it with a new one when the blood keeps flowing.
“Thanks for coming back,” he mutters, catching my skin while bandaging the wound tight.
I risk another glance, and this time our eyes connect. His are a dark shade of honey, edged with a hickory-brown ring. They’re watching me cautiously.
“It’s all right,” I say again, since I don’t know what else to.
My brother races into the clearing in fox form, bushy tail brushed out, a rabbit clutched between his narrow jaws.
Weslyn pulls away.
“I’m fine,” I say hastily, since Helos’s panic is evident. Barely any time later, he’s fully dressed and has thrown himself down in front of me.
“What happened? How bad is it?”
“Not bad,” I assure him. “You went hunting?”
“The rabbit practically begged to be caught. I went looking for you.” He sits back on his heels.
“Why? You should have stayed with Weslyn.”
“You shouldn’t be out there on your own. What happened?”
My guilt over precipitating Helos’s concern subtly morphs into annoyance. I can look after myself. “Weslyn—”
I don’t have time to explain further, because Helos’s wandering eyes have landed on the sword lying a few steps away, a tiny splotch of blood coloring the tip.
In a flash, my brother’s on his feet with Weslyn’s shirt grasped tight in his hands, slamming him against a tree.
“Helos!”
He ignores me and continues to glare at Weslyn, the muscles in his arms straining at the edge of his white sleeves. Bewilderment thrums through me at the sight of that relentless grip, gentle healer hands suddenly tightened into weapons. The entire picture is completely unlike him—my brother is no fighter.
“I’m fine,” I insist for the third time, forcing myself to march over to them despite the vicious pain that causes. Weslyn isn’t saying anything, nor is he making any attempt to free himself, even though he can probably match Helos in strength. Somehow, that only makes it worse. “It was an accident. There was a bear.”
Helos still won’t acknowledge me, that frightening, slightly wild-eyed intensity overshadowing his face. A stranger’s face. My heart hammers in alarm.
“Helos,” I say, more urgent this time. “Come back.”
Something in my voice must have broken through, because at last, my brother blinks and loosens his hold a little. “A bear?”
I release the breath I’ve been holding. “Just a black bear. We scared him off. We should move, though, if we don’t want to run into him again.” I look pointedly at the fists pinning Weslyn in place.
Helos hesitates a beat longer, then fixes Weslyn with a look that would rival Violet’s best. It’s a look that reminds me of antlers sharpened to a point. It promises death.
“You don’t touch her again,” he commands in a low voice. “You don’t touch her. Understand?”
I marvel at how not even two weeks have passed since we were standing outside the castle, yielding to Weslyn’s authority. Now we’re here, with Helos clutching his shirt in a death grip.
Weslyn says nothing, and Helos appears to take that for assent. He releases him.
ELEVEN
As soon we’ve broken down our meager campsite, Helos takes us back to the lakeshore. The Vale has a penchant for casually leading its inhabitants astray, and growing up, we could lose hours in a day trying to amend a broken course. But for whatever reason, this lake has always stayed in place, unchanging, so we’ll follow its shoreline south until we reach the end.
Helos remains in the lead throughout the morning. Weslyn trails behind me, mostly studying his feet to avoid tripping. Grim silence has tainted our group since the altercation. Though it hurts to stand up straight and hurts even worse to walk, I do my best to match their pace. I won’t provide any unnecessary distractions, and at least I’d managed to bury my scarlet-soaked shirt in the ground before leaving the campsite. No need to lure predators with the scent of dried blood.
The patchy forest near the water’s edge is a good diversion from the pain, lush and alight with an ongoing symphony—the woodpecker’s rapid knocks, quivering bushes, the shrill whistles of deer mice and voles. The knot that’s been building inside me for days unwinds a little at the sound. As we walk, we cross paths with squirrels and grouse, rabbits, and even a couple of ravens. None are their magical counterparts, and I study their retreats in confusion.
At one point, Helos catches my furrowed brow and reaches back to knock my arm. Then he scoops an object up from the ground and tosses it at me.
“Really?” I scoff.
He shrugs.
“I could see what it was before you threw it.”
“Sounds like you’re avoiding guessing.”
“I don’t have to guess,” I say with feigned disgust, drawing out every syllable. “It was a lump of dirt.”
His mouth curves into a small smile. “Dirt, was it?”
Immediately, I stop and stare at the small mark on my lilac shirt. Then I scan the ground.
“Helos.”
He doesn’t break stride.
“Helos, I swear to—”
“What’s wrong?” Weslyn asks from behind, sounding weary.
I bite my tongue, unwilling to admit that Helos may have thrown scat at me.
My brother grins wickedly, aware of my dilemma.
“Nothing,” I mutter, continuing ahead. Anyway, it was dirt.
The next time Helos looks back, the corners of his mouth fall. “Hold on. You’re limping.”
“I’m fine,” I say, though really, the ache that each step aggravates runs deeper than the small stretch of torn skin; pain lances through my abdomen and toward my back, radiating throughout my midsection.
I’ve been determined to say nothing; every hour that passes carries Finley and the rest of the afflicted closer to death, and every moment not spent helping them is a moment wasted. Selflessness requires sacrifice. I know this, and can push through the pain for my friend’s sake, if no one else’s. It’s what Helos would do. What I will do.
But my brother grabs my arm and forces me to stop before we’ve gone nearly far enough.
“Let me see,” he instructs.
“I said I’m fine.”
“You’re not, and I should have noticed sooner. Let me look at it.”
Weslyn steps up behind me. “Do we need to stop?”
“No,” I reply, at the same moment that Helos says, “Yes.”
Weslyn looks between the two of us, then back the way we came. My brother reaches for my shirt, and I slap his hand away.
“Rora.” Helos speaks as someone schooling an unruly child. I bristle at his tone. “You’re only going to slow us down the worse it gets,” he reasons, anticipating my argu
ment.
Resentment spears through me. A burden if I stop, a burden if I keep going. Why must he confine me to the role I’m determined to escape?
Weslyn takes a step closer, and finally I relent, if only to prevent him from getting too near. I keep my back turned to him and lift my shirt to my navel, revealing the bandaged sword wound.
Helos peels away the wrapping as delicately as he can, but I still have to grit my teeth while he works. “It looks clean,” he announces, examining the cut. “Just healing.”
“Great. So we can keep moving.”
He shakes his head. “We should stop for the night. You’re in pain.”
“No need,” I reply. “I can handle it.”
“Be reasonable.”
“I am being reasonable. You’re the one letting emotion cloud your judgment. As usual.”
“By the river, Rora—”
“One night,” Weslyn says, stepping between us with a compromise. “We’ll stop early one night. What about over there?” He points to a cave mouth just visible to the west.
As dark clouds have been rolling in overhead, finding shelter is likely not a bad idea. “It could be all right,” I concede with as much dignity as I can muster.
“Unless someone else is living there,” Helos mutters.
Weak, my brain whispers. Weak. Weak.
I clutch the hem of my shirt, tired of that voice.
Weslyn scratches the back of his head. “Maybe we should check it out, then.”
“You stay here.” Helos sheds his pack roughly. “You check nothing. Rora, keep an eye on the horizon.”
With that, he breezes toward the cave, presumably to search the darkness with his fox eyes, ears, and nose.
Weslyn and I stand without speaking, studiously avoiding each other’s gaze. I monitor the perimeter, then glance back at Weslyn, who’s crossing his arms, then swatting at bugs, then dragging a foot along the ground. It seems he doesn’t like feeling useless any more than I do.
I bite my lip, then decide. “You can’t let your attention linger on one spot for too long. When you’re scouting,” I add, noting his puzzled expression. “Keep your eyes moving and your ears open. Help me look. Please.”
He waits, appraising me silently, as if trying to determine whether the request is genuine.
“I can’t look everywhere at once, and I don’t really fancy being eaten today. Join me or don’t.” I turn away.
Weslyn doesn’t reply, but in my peripheries I catch the new alertness in his posture, the way his wordlessness changes to a different kind of silence.
I work my mouth back into a straight line.
When Helos returns with the all clear, we pick our way over to the cave. The round, uneven monolith juts out from a grassy ridge, its stone walls red-toned and ribboned with white and pale pink sedimentary bands. Moss hugs the walls to either side of the entrance, while delicate ferns grow in swaying lines below.
Inside, the stone’s color skews more tan than pink. With strands of sunlight kindling half the main cavern in watery light, I circle the various rock shelves protruding from the sides, then the shallow basin of water set into the smooth floor. A thick, clear liquid creeps down the walls farther back. I examine it more closely. Pine sap.
“It’s a good find,” I tell Weslyn, the words blunted, slightly muffled by the stone. Though the cave narrows to a recess farther back, the space beyond it is too dark to make out.
Helos picks a spot to skin and gut the rabbit he caught, while I collect sticks for a fire outside. Seated a short distance away, Weslyn divides his time between watching us work and doing something with his hands that I can’t see—he’s blocked the view with his pack. Reading, maybe. The rabbit is restorative when cooked, but no sooner have we all finished eating than Helos pushes to his feet and grabs his pack.
“I’m going to look for a plant that will help with the pain while we have the light.”
I watch him shoulder his bag and smooth his hair back, crackling with unspent energy.
“You don’t have to rush off,” I protest. “You shouldn’t—”
“Stay here,” he says.
Then he’s gone.
The air in the cave hangs close and cold, and carries a faint sound of dripping water. Without looking at Weslyn, I shuffle to the side to rest my back against one of the entrance walls. The movement is difficult to endure, but the relief the added support brings is already immense.
Weak—
Stop it, I say, silencing the voice. It feels good to rest.
Helos shrinks as he recedes farther into the distance, then disappears from view entirely. I study the spot where he vanished.
“I’m sorry,” Weslyn says, claiming my attention. He’s bent over what I have now determined to be the leather-bound book. The one he writes in. Hair curling loosely over his forehead, he gestures to my stomach with his pen. “I should have been more careful.”
“I’m really okay,” I reply, massaging my temples with my palms.
He snorts. “You sound like my brother.”
Dropping my hands, I glance at him sharply, taking in the neutral set of his features. For a moment, I thought the stoic soldier prince had actually smiled.
“Can you not heal yourself?” he asks, shifting the conversation away from his family.
I resume my massage and shut my eyes. “No.”
A sliver of wind whistles through the cave’s opening, lifting my hair from my shoulders. The air carries the scent of rain to come.
“Why?”
Though I raise my eyebrows pointedly, he appears unfazed by my annoyance. Typical royal.
“Shifting requires a certain amount of give-and-take,” I say. “In order to change my features, I have to change my body’s composition. And if part of that becomes damaged or goes missing, I can’t just create a permanent replacement out of nothing. So I can’t heal myself.”
“I don’t understand.”
The note in his voice relaxes me a little. As if his questions are truly just that: questions. Not accusations, like I’ve grown accustomed to whenever my shifter nature comes up. I start again in a calmer voice.
“As long as I’ve seen a person at least once, I can shift to assume their form. To do this, I can change the shape of my eyes, or my nose, or my mouth. I can grow taller or make myself shorter. I can lengthen my hair or my waist. I can change my bones if I want to.” I brace myself for a flinch, a grimace—some sign of apprehension to color his face. Nothing comes. “All of those parts are made of matter, so making them bigger means taking on more, and making them smaller means getting rid of some. Since I can’t create matter from nothing, I have to either borrow from the world around me or shed some of my own for a while.”
“You borrow it.”
Now he does look a little skeptical. Irked, I wave my hand for him to scoot closer. After a minor hesitation, he sets down the pen and sits opposite me.
As it had this morning, his sudden nearness feels strange, the calm energy unfamiliar. Like we’re friends having a normal conversation, not two people with one mutual friend and a history of avoiding each other. But he’s here, so I point to a spot on the cave floor and tell him to watch it carefully. “Look there, not at me,” I repeat, when his eyes wander back to my face. Frowning, he stares at the ground as instructed.
Warmth rushes through my body, and I feel my waist shrink and my feet lengthen, curly hair hitting midway down my spine.
There’s a hole in the stone Weslyn is studying.
He jerks backward and stares at me, eyes widening as he takes in Ansley’s face, then the rest of her duplicated body. “What did you do?”
“I borrowed from the rock.” I hold my long tresses out for him to see. “Usually I’d pull from multiple spots, not just the one, so you wouldn’t even know anything’s missing. Or the air; that one is unnoticeable.”
“Deceptive,” he says, but his voice is traced with light. Almost like respect, but that makes no sense. Weslyn holds l
ittle regard for my shifting abilities. He’s made that clear enough.
I nod at the hole. “Now watch it again.”
This time, I don’t have to remind him to keep his gaze in place.
The dip in the stone becomes smooth once more as my body returns to its natural form. A shiver passes through me.
“You gave it back,” Weslyn observes, leaning on his hands and watching me curiously.
“Matter always returns to its original source sooner or later. It pulls back of its own accord. The longest I’ve ever held on to borrowed matter was two days, and it was exhausting.” I mirror his posture, resuming my position against the wall. “I can’t heal myself, because to replace damaged or missing parts, I would have to borrow matter. And nothing borrowed can remain a part of me forever. To heal myself that way would be to enter an eternal, draining cycle of pulling and releasing. There’d be no point to it.”
Neither of us speaks again for a short while. I take a few swigs of water when Weslyn returns to his pen and book, then pull some dried raspberries from my pack, relishing the tartness that lingers on my tongue. A raven alights on a branch outside, and my thoughts turn to its magical counterpart, a black-tipped caw with feathers thin and sharp as rapiers. That’s the one that should be out there.
“Does it hurt?” Weslyn asks, as if we’ve been talking this whole time. It’s clear he isn’t referring to the wound.
I place the fruit down slowly. “No one has ever asked me that. Except Finley.”
“He asked?”
“Yes. The day we met.”
Weslyn’s definitely smiling now, though only a little, as his attention shifts to the horizon. “That sounds like Fin.”
“He was always kind to me,” I continue, while I still have the nerve. The implication behind the words hangs clear enough. Unlike you.
Weslyn holds my gaze for a long moment before replying. “He thinks a lot of you and your brother. Always has.”
It’s a jolt to the system to hear him admit that, a confession I didn’t expect—and don’t entirely understand, given Helos’s recent expulsion. The ban—has Finley told his brother the reason behind it? I search Weslyn’s face for a clue, but none comes. “You haven’t.”
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