Where I left Nolan.
My hands are shaking, and I don’t know what I’m more afraid of. That I’ll enter the room and find that it didn’t work and I wasn’t able to save him after all. That rewriting the tapestry didn’t matter because of some loophole. Perhaps he was dead before I managed to reweave the tapestry. Perhaps time had already run out.
Or perhaps.
Perhaps I’m just terrified of what it will mean if I did manage to save him.
Victor and I had journeyed down the mountain together, Charlie staying with Maddox until Victor could send soldiers from the village to help get him down. The guards at the bottom of the mountain had seemed annoyed by the request for a rescue mission, offering me rather condescending looks that had me wondering if they’d spent the entire evening betting on how many of us would fall injured on our trek.
As much as I’m thankful we didn’t leave Maddox to fend for himself with his injuries, I can’t help but think this would be easier if Charlie were here.
“Winds,” says Victor. “I’d bet anything you’re all he wants to see right now.”
I nod, biting my lip, and enter the room.
The door creaks, and immediately, something shifts in the bed.
The Lost Boys are asleep—Smalls curled up at the foot of Nolan’s bed, the Twins laying their heads upon the desk, Benjamin slumped in his stool, a figurine still clutched in his hand.
It’s Nolan who sensed me coming.
He’s craning his neck, staring at me. When I say nothing, his low voice rings out from the darkness. “I’ve not been turned into a hideous creature in an attempt to keep me alive, have I? Because if so, I’m fairly sure we addressed something of that consequence in our vows, and you still promised you wouldn’t leave.”
You promised you wouldn’t leave.
My mind goes back to last night, to Nolan begging me to stay with him.
I stare at him a moment more before Victor places two fingers between my shoulder blades and nudges me forward.
When I reach the bedside, I trace my fingers over the blankets the Lost Boys used to cover my husband. When I pull the blanket down, I don’t gasp. Because I know exactly what I’m going to find.
Nolan’s illness is healed, the graying lines replaced with veins of liquid gold, tracing tunnels across his chest. He’s no longer heaving, no longer wheezing, but breathing steadily.
I hold back a sob, my fingers lingering over the Mating Mark, shimmering and golden and complete, but for the constellation on my cheek and jaw.
“I believe I told you once that you never have to apologize for touching me,” says Nolan, nodding toward his chest, his chin tucking within the motion.
I bite my lip, then run my fingers over the rivulets. There’s a warmth to them, one that’s unlike what I’m used to feeling at his chest, and not just because I’m used to feeling the chill of his illness. The warmth is unnatural. No, not unnatural. Celestial.
“I have to say, this one’s much more pronounced than the one before,” he says. “Did you exaggerate the description of my Mating Mark to the Youngest Sister?”
“The Youngest Sister didn’t do this,” I say, my voice far off. “She wasn’t there.”
“Are you telling me you’re the one who blew up the Mark to twice its size all over my body?”
I nod.
Nolan grins, then settles his head back into his pillow. “I can’t say I mind you staking your claim on me.”
“Well,” I say, shrugging slightly. “I left your face like it was.”
Nolan smirks. “It’s not as if you could have improved upon it, anyway.”
“If you weren’t sickly, I’d smack you in the face with a pillow,” I say.
“That’s just it, Darling,” he says. “I’m not sickly. You made sure of that.”
I wait for the anger. Wait for him to tell me off for leaving him to die alone when he told me not to. I wait for him to tell me of the hours he writhed in pain, resigned to the belief that the last act he’d remember of his wife was her abandonment.
