Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 64872 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 324(@200wpm)___ 259(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64872 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 324(@200wpm)___ 259(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
I pause.
He shifts his head slightly and stops himself from looking back. “He wants you to be his what?”
I fasten the last braid. “His healer.”
“Are you sure?”
“What else?”
Quin coughs, and I quickly pull down my veil. My hand bumps his shoulder and he clasps the back of it. His skin against mine has lightning bolting through my middle.
He spreads his fingers, finding the grooves between mine.
“What are you . . .” It comes out half-formed and barely audible.
Quin squeezes our fingers like a fan.
I’m squeezing back too. Involuntarily. Like a momentary spasm.
“My hand feels cold, don’t you think?” He closes his fingers down, slotted between mine. “Particularly between my fingers?”
I yank his hand under my veil and nip him angrily. What are you doing to me?
“You bit me.”
My mouth is still lingering on his knuckles!
I hurriedly shake free of his hold. “S-skeldar technique. To promote bloodflow to the area. Help warm them.”
His laugh has me hurtling off the bed, yanking on my gloves.
I clamp my teeth down against the shaking in my body. “You’re feeling cold because you don’t move. Let’s take a walk. Fresh air will help.”
He laces his shirt over his flutette and looks at the broomstick for a long moment. His lips turn up slightly at the edges, then flatten again as he curls a finger at me to come closer.
I do, hesitantly, and help him up when he clasps me.
“I don’t want stormblades to see me using the cane,” he says.
“Then—”
“I’ll lean on you.” He hooks his arm through mine.
“For a prisoner, you’re quite demanding.”
“I’m not asking as a prisoner.”
My heart pounds and I swallow thickly.
He keeps watching me. I quickly unfurl my clenching hands.
He smirks and gestures towards the door. “Come on, Haldr.”
We walk in silence up and down the meditation grove, stormblades on alert, watching our every limping move. I keep looking at Quin, who basks under vibrant splotches of moonlight, chin and nose upturned, eyes closing briefly.
He knows.
Yet, he’d called me Haldr . . .
“You’re thinking very loudly,” he says, and looks at me.
I blink. “I have a story.”
“I can work with stories.”
“Good. I want to know how it might end. This has been on my mind all day.”
His lips jump at the edges.
“Nothing like that.” I stop where the moonlight shimmers over all his angles. “Imagine there’s . . . a really cruel family member ruling over the land.”
His rumbling sigh borders on frustration and amusement. “You really aren’t good at disguising your stories.”
“Just listen. This man, he suddenly sends some of his palace people away for a . . . cooking competition, insisting they take part.”
“Cooking . . .” He shakes his head in despair. “At least there is no wolf and his beady-eyed wyvern this time.”
A flash of something slips in and out of my mind before I can grasp it. “What?”
“Nothing.”
I wave it away. “Why would this man do that? What’s his agenda?”
“I can’t say precisely, but it won’t be anything good.”
I grimace. “Your wyvern. Did you send it for more information? What do you know about the welfare of the rest of your family?”
Does he know about the island?
“I’m aware. It’s why I was rash, leaving the mountain.”
“Is she . . .?”
“Alive. For now.”
I steer him with purpose back to the meditation cottage, passing grim-faced and muttering stormblades. “Rest.”
He’s stabilised the worst of his injuries. He needs freeing from this place. I need a plan.
I grab my things and stop before the door at an exaggerated cry. My head snaps around to Quin clutching his leg, not an ounce of real pain shading his expression.
I swallow a laugh. “For someone who acts as much as you . . .”
“Come. Take another look?”
“I can see from here. You’re fine.”
“If you don’t massage me, it’ll be worse and I’ll wake up rigid.”
“ . . .”
“ . . .”
“I’ll check on you in the morning.”
He stops all pretences of pain. “Will you?”
“Unbelievable.”
“Bring breakfast.”
I do. And I bring ingredients for dinner the next evening too. For the next three days I spend as much time in the tiny cottage, playing chess and listening to marginally improved flutette melodies, as I do perfecting my alchemy with my aunt.
“You’re daydreaming again,” she says.
“Thinking,” I correct. “Hypothetically, if you were held in a cottage surrounded by a centuria of soldiers and were incapacitated, how would you break free?”
She whacks me over the back of my curacowl.
“What’s that for?”
“Both your impossible question, and the fact you’re even thinking about it.” She hits me again. “Do you want your head on a spike at Ragn’s grand bridge?”
“It was a hypothetical—”
“It was a plan for treason.”
“I’m only half Skeldar.”
“Fine. Half your head will be impaled.”
I wince, and silently return to my newest tincture. “What if I could somehow convince Prins Lief to let him go?”
She laughs, and the crisp sound of it has me looking at her and cocking my head. “He has respect for you,” I murmur. “Could it be he appreciates you on a deeper level?”