Before she knew it, her legs carried her forth. Reflexes steady, Lilac caught his wrist when it raised again.
Garin startled, face twisting up at her in anguish. Lilac couldn’t do anything but nod in silent reassurance, hot tears suddenly clinging to her lashes.
What was this overwhelming feeling that crested over her?Howhad she swung from the violent urge to rip Yanna out of his arms, to picturing letting him have her friend until her heart stopped beating—to this? It was more than sadness, more than the exhaustion of walking through flames to drag him out of his burning home.
It was loss—the four closed walls of a shrinking room. Regret and torture. She was so filled with grief, she couldn’t gauge the exact reasons for the weight behind it.
All she knew was that it was crushing, the pit in her stomach heavy and hollow at the same time.
It was as if she and Garin were tethered by barbed arrows on two ends of a taut chain. An unwavering connection. The more she recoiled, tried to pull away—the more viscerally it dug into her, bleeding her.
Lilac gripped his hand and closed her eyes, willing the sensation to pass.
Instead, grief barreled into her—a feeling she knew by name, but never before at this intensity. It was an inhuman devastation that stole her breath: the farmhouse, mounds of blood-splattered snow, and all the could’ve-beens that had ever kept Garin up at night, soaked into her conscience. She couldtasteit, his bittersweet, aged melancholia.
It was an ancient knowing; shefeltmemories she couldn’t see, loved people she’d never touched, and scorned those she’d never met.
“Enough,” Garin said softly, the plea rumbling from deep within his chest, and she wondered if he felt what she did, too. If he’d witnessed her lifetimes unfurling like the petals of spring—the slow, silent churn of summer into autumn—the ghosts of her reluctant reverie dancing with the earthbound ghouls of his.
She tried to yank her hand from him, but Garin held it firm in an iron cradle, his eyes otherworldly garnets glowing in the moonlight. Blood and saliva dripped from his ash-stained mouth as he knelt before her.
He said nothing, pressing his lips to the back of her hand.
Why would he do this?What had brought him here? Why had he gone toMontfort-sur-Meu? Just to reaffirm what the scouts had been reporting to her father?
Henri had witnessed Garin in his wrath. But if he hadn’t, Henri and his men would’ve been three more bodies to the bloodbath.
“I am not myself tonight,” he whispered pleadingly against her skin. An echo of his words at The Fool's Folly, yet there was no threat behind them. “I put you in danger, risked your life. I was not thinking. I should have known your disobedience would win out in the end. You are my thrall, after all.”
Lilac wanted to strangle him—would’vestruck him, had she not decided Yanna’s heavy slap had been enough. “My disobedience saved your life.”
“As if yours wouldn’t have been made uncomplicated by mine in the first place.”
Jaw set, Lilac crouched and leveled her tearful, intent gaze with his. “You have never been more yourself,” she ground out. “I would’ve followed you into that fire, with or without your spell over me. Your command won’t always best my will, I can promise you that for as long as I live.” Ignoring the rage that shadowed his desperation, she swept the hair from his forehead, along with the layer of sweat that mixed with the soot there. There were no words cutting enough to express the sickening swell of relief and anger at finding him in time.
The only thing Lilac could bring herself to say gripped her throat in an unrelenting vice of terror. “Garin,” she began. “I?—”
“Found some!” Mryrddin thundered from over her shoulder. She released Garin quickly, wiping at her eyes to see the warlock trudging up the hill—an enormous ball of something dark and glittering hovering above him. Myrddin cocked his head at the neighboring farms down the hill behind him. “Stole it from the troughs!”
It was water. A giant, spinning sphere of it, larger than the house itself.
Lilac hurriedly hoisted Garin to his feet, tugging him away from the porch. They watched, stunned and open-mouthed, as Myrddin twisted his outstretched hand, then extended it. The ball of water floated ahead and fell upon the house, immersing them in an enormous cloud of smoke and steam.
Garin snaked an arm around Lilac’s waist and held her to him—justbefore a wall of water slammed into them. They remained upright, but she felt him teeter and dig his heels into the mud.
“Myrddin,” he sputtered. “When I get my hands on you!” He peeled her off, gripping her arms and assessing her body, forcing gentleness into his voice when she could tell he wanted to scream. “Look at me. Are you hurt?”
She shook her head vehemently, not quite able to speak. She was unscathed, too busy scanning Garin herself. There was a stream of dark red flowing from his intact pant leg with the last of the drainage. His shirt was in pieces, whatever was left of it hanging halfway off his torso—a jarring reminder of the rippled leanness his tunics often masked, his skin smooth beneath the ash and stain. All the burns he’d sustained—she’dseenhis leg on fire in the house, though he hadn’t seemed to notice—had already healed over.
The leaking, half-visible wound on his right bicep and the one on his left thigh, however, had not.
Lilac glanced down at her soaked gown, trailing her fingers along her bosom and exhaling in relief. Her gaze dipped to the blood-tainted water. Then, at his fangs glistening temptingly in the moonlight. “Are you?”
He tore his eyes away from her throat, sliding them to Myrddin. “You idiot. What was that for? The house was already gone!”
“We couldn’t leave a fire that size burning at the top of the hill. I glamored your parents’ property the moment we’d arrived, but it’s not the same as Lorietta’s wards. Onlookers can still smell smoke billowing from your chimney. It’s a wonder their guards aren’t storming up here.” Myrddin dusted his hands and placed them on his hips, surveying the damage. The entire second floor of the house had fallen in on itself. All that was left was a grim mess of wet cinder and charred brick of the crumbling chimney. “I must admit, I do envy those water mages.”
“There’s a creek just there.” Garin cocked his thumb over his shoulder at the strip of grass before the field met the trees. “You didn’t have to drop twenty troughs on it.”
