And hoped that she wouldn’t leave me when I gave it to her.
35
Maren
Fragments of sound embedded in my cognition, whipping in and out. There one moment, gone the next.
The weightless feeling of being lifted off a saddle and carried.
The scent of sausages and roasted acorn squash.
Cool sheets under my face and arms.
Mint and rain, somehow warm, gathered me into a cradle of soft blankets as chilled air streamed across my back.
Voices met my ears, echoing oddly, as though their owners sat just above the water’s surface, and I remained trapped below.
Fog swept into the corners of my mind, smoke curling its fingers under a door. It bloomed and swelled, spreading around me, beckoning. The voices in the room grew fuzzy, my eyes too heavy to open. The song of sleep called, and I followed, leaving the room behind as my body sank somewhere beyond the borders of time.
Sunlight shined in my left eye.
My right was mashed against a bed. I lifted my head, blinking to clear my vision, then scanned the length of a wooden wall, bare but for the single tapestry above that served as a headboard.
Wooden walls.
Wooden floor.
Shrinking.
Air caught in my throat as I sat up and wrapped an unfamiliar quilt around me, striking for the door. How long had I been in here in this room of hollow wood, its floors sanded by passing feet and its window too small to let in ample light?
Run. Run. Swim.
The doorknob turned as my hand grasped it. The door opened, and before I could change course, I fell against a body. A tall body forced to stoop under the doorway, muscles hard and skin smelling faintly of soap and mint.
I yelped and scrambled back as arms cast for my sides, drawing me in, but I didn’t see a face. I saw a narrow hallway. Scratched floorboards, dirt woven into the grain. Naked joists with oil lamps fixed to their bodies, buttery light shimmering across the wall.
Shrinkingshrinkingshrinking—
Hands grasped for me, and I shoved them away. The room squeezed, ceiling lowering as the floor rose, and I fought toescape. Arms reached for me again, firmer this time, hands curling around my shoulders.
“What happened?” asked a voice I knew. I knew his eyes too, golden brown and round with worry. Knew his scent, his touch, his scars, the rhythm of his heart as it increased in pace. Everything about him was familiar, but not enough to keep me nailed to the wall. I couldn’t breathe. The wooden walls had consumed all the air, and I felt whatever sense of control I’d had give way to panic as I choked for breath.
I pushed out of his grasp, rushing down the hall and out a door. Crisp wind hit my moist cheeks, the taste of salt hidden in the air, a distant thrum of waves. My bare toes rooted in hard dirt and haggard grass, my eyes locked onto the sight of the water-colored horizon tucking the sun under its nighttime chamber. I folded in on myself, knees bending as green caught my fall, and gasped lungfuls of clean oxygen. Kye’s footsteps sounded behind me, slow and unsure.
Mihaunaabove, it was nothing but an inn. Not a pirate ship with a wooden cabin. A house for resting, a refuge from the cold. And here I sat, shaking and heaving like a child left alone in the dark. I listened to the sound of my own racing heart, trying to think of what to say, and wondered what thoughts flickered behind those honeycomb eyes that I’d suddenly become too ashamed to meet.
“The walls were caving in,” I finally whispered. Kye sank into the grass beside me, studying me with a hesitance that I might have once lashed at in the not-so-distant-past. As though I were a wounded animal he might scare away. His right eye was ensconced in purple bruises, a shallow cut nestled in the ridge above his eyebrow, and swelling had left his jaw slightly thicker on one side.
“The walls of the inn?” he asked, too softly. Too carefully. I ground my teeth at his tone, slow and delicate, somehowneedling under my skin, and didn’t answer. “You’ve been asleep for two days,” he said after it became clear I wouldn’t say anything else.
I swallowed. "I always sleep after being hurt."
Kye nodded. “Your wounds are closed.”
I blinked at him, then pulled the edge of the quilt away to peer underneath. One of Kye’s shirts hung loose from my frame, the curve of my hip hidden by the hem. Underneath it, a thin, rose-pink line garnished the skin where Demyan’s knife had entered my body, so faint I wondered if it might fade entirely in the next few days. I rolled a shoulder absently, searching for the burn of flayed skin. A numbness came instead, strange and foreign, as though my back didn’t quite belong to me.
Brows tight, Kye waited for an explanation.
