His grandmother nodded. “That rain. It soaked the land on the other side of the gate. The fighting might have continued, but the pit opened up almost immediately, pulling most of theirs and some of ours down. A problem to repair, but at least it stopped Tahlen and brought him back to us. To you. I don’t think….” Grandmother paused but it wasn’t to be delicate. “Without that, I don’t think he would have gotten to you when he did.”
Zelli’s hands shook. He put his palm to the middle of his chest. “I… died.”
Grandmother was carved from rock. “As far as we could tell.”
“But it helped?” Zelli met her sorrowful, furious stare. “I helped by calling down the fae at least?”
Her voice cracked once more. “Mizel.”
“I’m sorry.”
She only sighed. “But you’d do it again.”
Zelli’s chest felt unnervingly unmarked. “I did offer to ally with the Villucatto.”
“You did.” Grandmother agreed, but she wasn’t nice about it.
“Was…?” No, Zelli was not going to ask if Tahlen had been upset about that too. “I already know how he feels about that.”
“After yesterday, I suspect some of our negotiations may tactfully fall to silence,” Grandmother remarked, not amused, but with something pleased and perhaps vicious in her tone. “Although those who choose to continue our talks will certainly want to give us generous terms. But I will leave that question, if you choose to keep asking it, for the future. At the moment, I am grateful to be looking into your face again and have you looking back at me.”
Zelli’s throat tightened, allowing just one word. “Grandmother.”
“You did not have to earn your place with us, Zelli.” She was deliberate, intending to hurt. “You do not. You acted as you saw fit, but you should never think your death would be acceptable to me.”
“Yes, Grandmother,” Zelli answered, barely more than a croak.
She gave him several moments to clear his throat and swallow and try to compose himself.
“Everyone else?” he asked at last.
“Minor wounds for the most part,” Grandmother assured him, gentle once again. “Except for you.”
He stared at her in confusion. “Shouldn’t I be in pain?”
“The sleeping draught has other effects, but I’ve never heard of the fae doing this. I am not at all sure what the consequences will be. Maybe some pain would teach you caution, for Tahlen’s sake if not for yours or mine.”
Zelli gave her a harder look for that but couldn’t maintain it.
“He doesn’t want to see me.” His voice was small. “I understand. He asked one thing of me and I didn’t even manage that.” He rubbed his chest again, from habit and the need to know the arrow was gone even if he felt nothing. “I know I’m not discreet about him. Iknow. Everyone can tell what I think when I look at him… that I havefeelings. Which… he likes.” Zelli filled his whole, unpunctured lungs with air so he could sigh. “Did you know that Tahlen likes that?Likedthat,” he corrected himself. “And now I’ve hurt him as he did not deserve to be hurt.”
“You were dead when I came to you and you were dying when he saw you.” Grandmother took Zelli’s hand but she still had not forgiven him. “Is it any wonder that Tahlen would be hurt?”
It was disconcerting to have supposedly been dead and have little memory of it, and only some memories of dying. “I asked them to take care of him,” Zelli remembered suddenly, “to take care of all you. That was my wish.” If the fae thought helping Tahlen kill people was taking care of him, then they had not read Zelli’s heart as they should have. “I asked that he not be alone. I don’t understand.”
Zelli tossed his head despite the bursts it created behind his eyes. “I already know he would die for me. He reminds me of it often. He was prepared to do so. He was not prepared for me to do it?”
It emerged as a question.
Grandmother harrumphed. “This is a conversation you should be having with Tahlen, if you have chosen him at last.”
“Tahlen should be resting,” Zelli argued immediately.
Grandmother was carefully unamused. “It took Esrin and several of Tahlen’s guard friends to get him to finally go down to the kitchens to get something to eat, and I believe their plan is to slip him something so he will sleep.”
“He hasn’t slept at all?” Zelli demanded, though raising his voice made his chest hurt, a muffled hurt, as if felt through layers of down and wool. “He will persist in doing that!” he complained anyway, and threw the pile of blankets and furs from him. He swung his feet off the side of the bed and then spent several moments sitting very still while his head spun.
The hurt remained, not dull enough to be an ache, but far from splitting agony. It was like the memory of pain without the pain itself. But perhaps that was the sleeping draught affecting his thinking.
