If I let it go, I might never hold it again.
He’ll betray you. He’s betrayed you already.
The cloak’s side dropped away, revealing my nakedness to the night. Dorian replaced it over my body and carried me through the inner district. “Naked, hairless. Can’t even bring you to the worst pub like this.”
I laid my head against his breast, listening to his heart. Slow, steady. That couldn’t be the heart of a betrayer. Couldn’t be.
Fatigue pulled at me with icy fingers. I didn’t know how he had so much energy.
He walked, turned a corner, walked. We passed under the shadow of a building, and then he pushed us through a door. A smell I recognized. Musty, ancient. Familiar creaking floorboards.
His family’s old home. The site of their sudden deaths.
“Not here.” My words sounded like straw over stone. “Anywhere but here.”
“I need to get you warm. And you need sleep.”
I could barely stand this place, and I didn’t even believe in ghosts. I didn’t know how Dorian could come back to it.
Except I did: he was practical. If our roles were reversed, I would have brought him here, too. But it still must tear at him like knives.
He shut the front door with his hip, enclosing us. Crossed the room, set me down in a chair. When he walked into another room, I wanted to ask him to stay—I didn’t want to be alone here—but I didn’t have the energy.
He returned holding clothes. Lace, frill. A girl’s clothing. “These should fit you.”
I shook my head.
He dropped them on the floor. “She didn’t die in them, Eury.”
He left again, and a dragging sounded across the floor. Soon blankets appeared, Dorian tugging them out into the sitting room. “These were in the closet.”
I stared at the fluffy blankets without seeing them. “You had a closet?”
“Three, actually.” He appeared in front of me, crouching. His hand moved over the orb of my bare head. “Eury, will you put the dagger down?”
I gripped it tighter to my chest.
“Please. Let me help you.”
In his eyes, I saw unbroken softness. Could I call it love? I wasn’t sure I knew the meaning of the word anymore. But something sharded in me when Dorian’s hazel eyes met mine, and bit by bit, my grip loosened.
It took a full minute to set the dagger on the side table next to my chair. Uncurling my fingers was like magicking stone into muscle and skin. I’d held it for at least a day while we followed the crosshatches out of the catacombs.
The dagger was numbing, but it was also enlivening. Even here, so far from Feyreign, I’d felt magic all around me. Inside Caustrix’s great chest and veins; flowing through Dorian’s body; ambient in the dank catacomb air as well as the world above.
Thiswas what had allowed Carys’s archers to siege the Kingdom of the Plains. Rhiannon had needed the spiritstag’s boon on the night of the attack, but Carys had only needed the dagger.
Without it, my body felt even colder. I shivered; my teeth chattered.
Dorian picked up the old, pretty clothes and dressed me one sleeve at a time. He muttered, “You’ll never make it back over the wall this way.”
“I’ll make it.” My breath was visible as I spoke. The house was frigid.
“You’re dehydrated, emaciated.” He pulled the shirt over my head and stared at me. “There’s no way.”
There had to be a way. I needed to getback.
“T-t-t?—”