He craned his head to look at her as the words settled between them. She only stared at that mark on his spine, her tired face drawn. He doubted she’d slept. “If you’re too tired—”

“I am not.”

He clenched his jaw. “You can nap here. I’ll look after you.” Useless as it would be. “Then work on me later—”

“I will work on you now. I am not going to let them scare me away.”

Her voice did not tremble or waver.

She added, more quietly but no less fiercely, “I once lived in fear of other people. I let other people walk all over me just because I was too afraid of the consequences for refusing. I did not know how to refuse.” Her hand pushed down on his spine in a silent order to rest his head again. “The day I reached these shores, I cast aside that girl. And I will be damned if I let her reemerge. Or let someone tell me what to do with my life, my choices again.”

The hair on his arms rose at the simmering wrath in her voice. A woman made of steel and crackling embers. Heat indeed flared beneath her palm as she slid it up the column of his spine, toward that splotch of white.

“Let’s see if it enjoys being pushed around for a change,” she breathed.

Yrene laid her hand directly atop the scar. Chaol opened his mouth to speak—

But a scream came out instead.

12

Burning, razor-sharp pain sliced down his back in brutal claws.

Chaol arched, bellowing in agony.

Yrene’s hand was instantly gone, and a crashing sounded.

Chaol panted, gasping, as he pushed up onto his elbows to find Yrene sitting on the low-lying table, her vial of oil overturned and leaking across the wood. She gaped at his back, at where her hand had been.

He had no words—none beyond the echoing pain.

Yrene lifted her hands before her face as if she had never seen them before.

She turned them this way and that.

“It doesn’t just dislike my magic,” she breathed.

His arms buckled, so he lay down again on the cushions, holding her stare as Yrene declared, “It hates my magic.”

“You said it was an echo—not connected to the injury.”

“Maybe I was wrong.”

“Rowan healed me with none of those problems.”

Her brows knotted at the name, and he silently cursed himself for revealing that piece of his history in this palace of ears and mouths. “Were you conscious?”

He considered. “No. I was—nearly dead.”

She noticed the spilled oil then and cursed softly—mildly, compared to some other filthy mouths he’d had the distinct pleasure of being around.

Yrene lunged for her satchel, but he moved faster, grabbing his sweat-damp shirt from where he’d laid it on the sofa arm and chucking it over the spreading puddle before it could drip onto the surely priceless rug.

Yrene studied the shirt, then his outstretched arm, now nearly across her lap. “Either your lack of consciousness during that initial healing kept you from feeling this sort of pain, or perhaps whatever this is had not … settled.”

His throat clogged. “You think I’m possessed?” By that thing that had dwelled inside the king, that had done such unspeakable things—

“No. But pain can feel alive. Maybe this is no different. And maybe it does not want to let go.”

“Is my spine even injured?” He barely managed to ask the question.

“It is,” she said, and some part of his chest caved in. “I sensed the broken bits—the tangled and severed nerves. But to heal those things, to get them communicating with your brain again … I need to get past that echo. Or beat it into submission enough to have space to work on you.” Her lips pressed into a grim line. “This shadow, this thing that haunts you—your body. It will fight me every step of the way, fight to convince you to tell me to stop. Through pain.” Her eyes were clear—stark. “Do you understand what I am telling you?”

His voice was low, rough. “That if you are to succeed, I will have to endure that sort of pain. Repeatedly.”

“I have herbs that can make you sleep, but with an injury like this … I think I won’t be the only one who has to fight back against it. And if you are unconscious … I fear what it might try to do to you if you’re trapped there. In your dreamscape—your psyche.” Her face seemed to pale further.

Chaol slid his hand from where it still rested atop his shirt-turned-mop and squeezed her hand. “Do what you have to.”

“It will hurt. Like that. Constantly. Worse, likely. I will have to work my way down, vertebra by vertebra, before I even reach the base of your spine. Fighting it and healing you at the same time.”

His hand tightened on hers, so small compared to his. “Do what you have to,” he repeated.

“And you,” she said quietly. “You will have to fight it as well.”

He stilled at that.

Yrene went on, “If these things feed upon us by nature … If they feed, and yet you are healthy …” She gestured to his body. “Then it must be feeding upon something else. Something within you.”

“I sense nothing.”

She studied their joined hands—then slid her fingers away. Not as violent as dropping his hand, but the withdrawal was pointed enough. “Perhaps we should discuss it.”

“Discuss what.”

She brushed her hair over a shoulder. “What happened—whatever it is that you feed this thing.”

Sweat coated his palms. “There is nothing to discuss.”

Yrene stared at him for a long moment. It was all he could do not to shrink from that frank gaze. “From what I’ve gleaned, there is quite a bit to discuss regarding the past few months. It seems as if it’s been a … tumultuous time for you recently. You yourself said yesterday that there is no one who loathes you more than yourself.”

To say the least. “And you’re suddenly so eager to hear about it?”

She didn’t so much as flinch. “If that is what is required for you to heal and be gone.”

His brows rose. “Well, then. It finally comes out.”

Yrene’s face was an unreadable mask that could have given Dorian a run for his money. “I assume you do not wish to be here forever, what with war breaking loose in our homeland, as you called it.”

“Is it not our homeland?”

Silently, Yrene rose to grab her satchel. “I have no interest in sharing anything with Adarlan.”

He understood. He really did. Perhaps it was why he still had not told her who, exactly, that lingering darkness belonged to.

“And you,” Yrene went on, “are avoiding the topic at hand.” She rooted through her satchel. “You’ll have to talk about what happened sooner or later.”

“With all due respect, it’s none of your business.”

Her eyes flicked to him at that. “You would be surprised by how closely the healing of physical wounds is tied to the healing of emotional ones.”

“I’ve faced what happened.”

“Then what is that thing in your spine feeding on?”

“I don’t know.” He didn’t care.

She fished something out of the satchel at last, and when she strode back toward him, his stomach tightened at what she held.

A bit. Crafted from dark, fresh leather. Unused.

She offered it to him without hesitation. How many times had she handed one over to patients, to heal injuries far worse than his?

“Now would be the time to tell me to stop,” Yrene said, face grim. “In case you’d rather discuss what happened these past few months.”

Chaol only lay on his stomach and slid the bit into his mouth.

Nesryn had watched the sunrise from the skies.

She’d found Prince Sartaq waiting in his aerie in the hour before dawn. The minaret was open to the elements at its uppermost level, and behind the leather-clad prince … Nesryn had braced a hand on the archway to the stairwell, still breathless from the climb.

Kadara was beautiful.

Each of the ruk’s golden feathers shone like burnished metal, the white of her breast bright as fresh snow. And her gold eyes had sized Nesryn up immediately. Before Sartaq even turned from where he’d been buckling on the saddle across her broad back.