I tried to laugh, but I had to quell it once the ripping pain flared. “Thanks. I guess. I was just trying to stay alive so the rest of you would be okay. Fight or die, you know?”
“You're amazing.”
“Why?” I asked. I shifted slightly to keep from settling on my bad hip. “I was lucky, just lucky.”
“The hell you were.” Shan loosed a hearty laugh. Across the fire, Ragan echoed him, then shook his head and returned to stirring the stew. “I love how modest you are. Seriously. You're turning red. I'm trying to think of the word my father used to describe Mom. In– . . . indomitable. You're indomitable, just like her.”
“I don't know what that means,” I admitted.
“You're a badass, Tessen. Skilled and fierce.”
“Um, okay. I don't feel like one.” I didn't. Yes, I had some trained skill, more than he knew, but I only did what was needed. “You would've done the same, and so would the rest of our friends here. I'm no hero.”
“You–”
Ragan cleared his throat. “Stop bothering him about it, Shannon. If he doesn't feel like a gods-damned hero, he doesn't need to feel like a sarding gods-damned hero. I just hope he knows what he really is.”
“What's that?” I asked.
“A damned good person and someone I'm proud to call a friend.”
Tears stung my lacerated cheek. “You're not just my friend, Ragan. You're family. Always will be.”
The firelight played off his glossy eyes as he watched me. Nador joined him next to the stew pot while the other three crowded close to Shan so they wouldn't have to sit behind the drying wood.
“It's nice to see you somewhat upright, my dear. I won't ask how you're feeling because I know the answer is 'not well',” Rose said with a smile. Her pointed teeth glittered in the golden light.
“I'm okay if I don't move. Or breathe deeply. Or cough,” I said.
“So just sit there and do nothing, you lazy bastard. That's what you'd do anyway, even if you weren't injured. I swear, you're the laziest person alive.” Shan said. It took a moment for his serious expression to break into a grin. “Oh come on, stop grimacing. That can't feel good on your sutures.”
“Laughing hurts more than frowning,” I said. My wince wasn't the result of having to listen to Shan's attempt at a joke, but rather from a sudden spike in pain from my ribs and hip. Black spots swarmed my senses. I closed my eyes to be rid of them, but instead felt as if the world was tumbling around me. “Ugh, I think I'm done. Happen to have any of that underground sleepy-time painkiller you told me about? Sounds like it would be wonderful about now.”
Shan's fingers stroked my temple and brow. “Sorry, no. The little bit Mom had left was sent to the Alchemy Masters for analysis months ago. I've got plenty of willow bark. It'll help the pain but it won't help you sleep.”
“I've got a vial of valerian tincture and it looks like I need to couple it with an anti-nausea tincture,” Marita said. I heard rustling and clinking as she dug in her med kit. “You have to eat as soon as you take this. You need to eat to heal and no herb can replace that.”
“Ah, yes, the extra padding I still have from my chubby childhood might just have saved my life,” I said, my eyes still closed. The world lurched and heaved, and so did my stomach. Don't move, don't move, don't move or you'll vomit, and if you vomit, you'll faint from the pain.
“You might think you're joking, but you're right. If you were thin, you'd be dead for sure.” Marita moved to my shoulder. Her hand replaced Shan's on my face. “No fever. Good. Ragan's just about got that stew finished, so I'll give you the willow bark now and you can swallow it with water laced with the anti-nausea tincture.”
“Never thought anything good would come out of being the fat kid everyone teased.”
Marita slipped a capsule between my teeth, then held a cup to my lips. The water within was an odd combination of spicy, minty, and peppery. It swallowed easily and the world slowly stopped churning.
“What is that?” I opened my eyes. My vision was fuzzier than it should have been, but the black spots were fading.
“Ginger and peppermint, mostly. A little fennel and a dash of green magic,” Marita replied. She set down the cup and carefully lowered the blankets from my shoulders. “Iefyr, bring over the alcohol and salve. I think we should clean and redress his wounds now instead of risking vomiting after he eats, and then he can sleep as long as he needs to without us bothering him about it.”
“Yeah, sure,” Iefyr said. “Do you have the linens?”
“Yes. We'll need to boil the soiled ones so we don't run out. The ones we used to clean him up are still soaking in the pot.” Marita looked around and said, “Anyone who can't stomach this might want to take their stew and go outside.”
“Fine, I'll go,” I mumbled.
“Not you.”
Nador, Rose, and Ragan offered me looks of kind concern as they filled their bowls and exited the shelter. I couldn't fault them for leaving. All three of them were trained in basic field medicine, but it was difficult to look upon a single wound, let alone many, on a person you cared for.
Shan rose to a crouch and reached forward to touch my hair. I thought he was getting ready to join the others outside, but then he said, “Tes, I might need to close my eyes, but I'm not leaving you. Feel free to squeeze my hand until my fingers break if you need to.”
It didn't come to that. I fainted upon being reclined to a supine position and didn't fully wake until I smelled like an herb garden and was bound in fresh dressings. I was a little embarrassed at losing consciousness, but Iefyr told me it was normal, and he would have been surprised if it didn't happen. Marita said my injuries were already looking better and they should continue to heal without issue. That didn't make the pain any less acute, but it did help me accept that everything I felt was temporary.
Shan helped me eat my antelope stew before Marita dosed me with valerian. The tincture took effect quickly, and the constant, searing pain ceased to be an obstacle as I embraced a deep and healing sleep.
Chapter 24
I don't know how long we spent sequestered on the steppe. Sometimes pain brought time to a halt and other times I'd sleep through an entire day in a single blink. A fever rode in, and the chills it carried on its back threw me into such agony I could hardly draw a breath.
Marita and Iefyr stayed with me continuously once the fever began, while the other four needed to ride a little farther each day to gather food and fuel for the fire. I dreaded being awake for Shan's returns. The fear in his eyes became obvious and almost palpable every time he ducked into the shelter after hours away and found me still in the fever's thrall.
I wandered through a hellish palace of dreams, opening doors in an endless bloodstone and mortar corridor. Some doors opened to reveal my family, some revealed monsters, some revealed destruction, and a rare few opened into cloud worlds of nonsense and comfort. After a while, the palace walls crumbled and all of the separate rooms were set loose upon each other. That must have been the peak of my fever, because the next time I returned to the dreams, the walls were rebuilt from bricks of onyx and alabaster and the contents of the corridor were where they belonged—mysteriously tucked behind their separate doors in their separate rooms.
It was difficult for me to remember the specifics of individual dreams upon waking, but there was one in particular that the pain was not able to erase. It was a memory rather than a true dream, and it left me with hot tears streaming down my face and a deep, stabbing pain in my chest that had nothing to do with my injuries. It was so simple, yet so agonizing.
I dreamed I was climbing trees with Caty.
We lived with my grandparents until I was about four, and our neighbors had a daughter who was my age. Not just close to my age, but exactly my age. Caty and I were born on the same summer day—her in the morning and me in the early evening. She was my best friend, really my only friend who wasn't a relative. When we moved into our own house down the road, Mom was s
urprised that Caty's parents continued to allow her to play with me. They were from a well-established merchant family, and they weren't keen on associating with an unmarried young mother who held a job most people found disreputable.
Caty and I didn't care what our parents thought of each other, and I didn't care that Shan thought she was a bossy tomboy. I loved her, loved her spirit and her energy, and by the time I was nine, I started to believe the adults who said that the two of us were destined for marriage and a long, happy life together. Caty's parents even joked about our future like it was a sweet little secret they couldn't wait to reveal to the world.
Then we turned ten and that future disintegrated. Caty had been complaining of an ache in her side for about a month, but her parents attributed it to growing pains. Then, one day while Mom was teaching us how to make bread, Caty coughed up blood. It left a misty splatter on the unkneaded dough, a pattern like a butterfly caught in brambles. Mom rushed her back to her own house, and that was the last time I saw her. Her parents wouldn't let me visit her during the two months it took for her to die. I begged and begged, but they could only hold back their tears and tell me that I needed to remember her as healthy and vibrant. She wasn't contagious, but they didn't want me to see what the disease was doing to her. I never got to say goodbye to Caty, and she spent her last two months without a friend by her side.
Seven years later, I still thought of her when I baked bread. I still wondered what my life would be like if she hadn't died. My love for her was innocent, but it was real. No one else had ever embraced my heart like Caty did, and it made me wonder if the comments about her being my soulmate were true. No one knew how much I still missed her, not even Shan.
And that's why dreaming of something as calm and mundane as climbing through the trees behind my house left me sobbing into my sweat-dampened blankets. Judging by the way I'd been feeling, it wouldn't be long before I reunited with Caty in the afterlife. I never had the chance to say goodbye to her, but maybe I'd once again say hello.
Shan waited in the real world to comfort me. “Hey, hey, calm down. No more nightmares. Whatever it is, it isn't real.”
“But this is,” I whimpered. My throat was dry and my lips were cracked.
Shan stroked my hair with one hand as he held a cup of tepid water to my lips. “I know that feeling. Waking from one nightmare to find yourself in another. At least you're not underground.”
“At least you're not dying, you wretch.”
“You're not dying. Not anymore,” Marita whispered as she sat down next to Shan. She touched my forehead, then rested her hand on Shan's thigh. “Your fever broke about six hours ago and hasn't come back yet. I think this is the longest you've gone without it since it began. I don't know how long, I've lost track of the days. Let me see your hip. That's where the infection started.”
“Where is everyone else?” I asked.
“Hunting and looking for edible roots. There are a surprising number of parsnips and turnips hiding in the grass. Spinach, too.” Shan untangled the blankets from my arms and lifted them away.
“And the dragons?”
“Also hunting. They're on to mice now.”
“Mice? How . . . how long have I been . . . been . . .”
“Semi-conscious? A week, maybe. Two, more likely. I'm not the one to ask. I don't know what time is anymore.” He folded up my tunic to expose the linen bandages on my hip and ribs. “Well, I think you've lost the extra weight that initially saved your life. Might want to work on reclaiming some of it because you look awful. Seriously awful. I don't think you were ever meant to be skinny.”
“Thanks, Shannon,” I growled.
Shan winced. “Don't call me that. You know I don't like it, especially not from you.”
“It's your name, asshole. Shannon Daeriel Sylleth Goldtree, Lord of Jadeshire and heir to the Jade Duchy. You'd better get used to your own name, because the aristocracy has no intention of calling you Shan.”
He pursed his lips and glared at me. “I have no intention of assimilating into their ranks, so you shut your damned mouth, Tessy.”
“Ragan calls you Shannon. So did Daelon.”
“Yeah, and I don't like either of them. Maybe it's because they call me Shannon.”
Marita sighed and a scowl pinched her face. “Stop. Is this really how you two are going to act? I can easily forgive Tessen's rudeness since he's not himself, but you, Shan? Lay off him.”
Shan shrank away from me. “Sorry. I shouldn't snap at you, not now. I don't want you to shut up, either. I'm so incredibly grateful to hear your voice, even though you're using it to be a rude bastard.”
I touched the back of Marita's hand as she reached for my dressings. “It's all right. Really. We have kind of a weird rapport and sometimes we fight for fun.”
“I don't understand you two. I have two brothers and three sisters, and their insults were always sincere. Especially Lindaer's.” Marita peeled back the linen covering my hip.
This was the first time I recalled the injury being touched without causing black to explode into my vision. I held my breath and looked down. My skin was flushed and bruised, and a little puckered around the sutures, but it appeared to be healing.
Marita exhaled. “Good. Swelling is down and you don't have the discharge or red streaks around it anymore. Better thank Iefyr and his honey salve for that. I honestly think that man has a touch of magic skill hiding in him. He's no green witch, but he's something.”
Shan's attention snapped to Marita's face. “Marita?”
“Yes?”
“Lindaer? You have a brother named Lindaer? That wouldn't be Lord Lindaer Starbright, would it?”
Oh. Now that was a problem. Lindaer Starbright was a Jadeshire aristocrat, and Daelis's lifelong rival. I remembered hearing about his father, Lord Linden Starbright, being killed in a freak accident two or three years earlier, an accident I suspected my mother, the occasional freelance assassin, was involved with. A short time before Daelis's abduction and assumed death, the Starbrights and the Goldtrees had come to a truce by means of an engagement between Lindaer's youngest sister and Daelis. The marriage never occurred because he eloped with my mother in the orc village of Sungate before returning to Jadeshire.
“Marita?” Shan prompted. “Are you a Starbright?”
Marita's hands trembled against my bare skin. She sniffled as she kept her eyes fixed on my abdomen. “Yes.”
Shan drew a sharp breath. “Tell me your truth and I'll tell you mine. Otherwise there is no point in us continuing any sort of relationship, is there? You're too young to be Lindora or Lindewei, and too female to be Linrael. Are you Linnea or Linmara?”
“Linmara.” Marita's whisper fluttered around the shelter before landing on my skin like a resting moth.
“You were supposed to marry my father.” Shan sat back on his knees and stared at her. “I don't understand. You said you left home two years ago.”
“I did.” Marita's trembling fingers left my hip to pick at the dressing on my ribs. I tried not to gasp as she brushed against a particularly sensitive spot. Once my healing injury was exposed, she leaned back from me and twisted toward Shan. A flush rose into her cheeks and her green eyes became glassy. “I left home a month after my father died, but my family always knew where to find me. Lindaer is twenty years older than me, and he always acted as if I belonged to him. I had no idea he was considering marrying me off until he came to North Juniper himself to tell me that I was to marry Daelis Goldtree. I was furious with him, and he was furious with me once he saw that I'd marked myself as a forest elf and embraced being a green witch. I knew why Lindaer did it, though. The Starbright line has no natural claim to the duchy, but merging our bloodline with the Goldtree line would elevate the Starbrights to power, specifically any children I had with Daelis. The eldest would inherit the Jade Duchy and would marry one of Lindaer's children, and any younger ones would fit neatly into the line of succession, securing the Starbright legacy.
/> “Lindaer gave me no choice in the matter. He refused to leave North Juniper without me, and his guards followed me wherever I went. I mostly stayed home and glared at him from across the cabin, because I was afraid I'd lose the anonymity of being Marita Wingstorm if anyone in the village saw the Starbright guards tailing me. My standoff with my brother lasted for two weeks, but then relief came in the form of a falcon from Jadeshire. Daelis was dead and the aristocracy was in chaos trying to figure out if there was any living elf who had a legitimate claim to the duchy heirship. Lindaer was enraged, claiming that I could have conceived a son by then if I'd returned to Jadeshire when he told me to, but his business with me was over, so he went home to join in on the arguments. I was relieved again some months later to learn that Daelis was in fact alive, and now married to someone else. I'd never wished him dead because he was never anything but kind to me, but I also didn't want to be forced into marriage with someone twice my age to satisfy my brother's ambitions.”
Shan refused to meet her eyes. “So now you'd rather marry the younger Goldtree and elevate the Starbrights that way.”
“Shan, my affection for you has nothing to do with your lineage.” Marita tried to touch the back of his hand, but he drew it away. “I'm sorry. I should have told you earlier.”
“Can you two take this somewhere else and let me go back to sleep?” I tried to shrink away from them, but the pain and post-fever fatigue kept me rooted in place. I lifted my head, but Shan immediately pressed against my brow, forcing me to stay down.
“No,” Shan snapped.
Marita closed her eyes. “I'm sorry. I have no allegiance to my family. They never wanted me, not once they found out I was a green witch, not until my brother decided I was worth something as a broodmare. I left Linmara Starbright behind years ago and became Marita. Ragan helped me with that, and now I have documentation officially identifying me as Marita Wingstorm. I don't want to be anyone other than Marita.”
Shan remained silent, his hand still on my forehead.
Faelost Page 17