“Rook,” I said, patting his cheek and trying not to cringe. His jutting bones and hollow face conjured an echo of the skeleton crawling up my legs. “You’re a prince, remember? Wake up and infuriate me, please.”
He turned his face toward my hand and moaned.
“You’ll have to try a little harder than that.” I balled up some of his coat and pressed it against his chest. Then, remembering the night before, I took his right wrist and turned his hand palm up. So he’d used his glamour to hide the cut after all. Yet his hand was healing quickly—if I hadn’t known otherwise I would have believed the wound a week old or more.
I started when I realized his eyes were slitted open. He was watching me. “You’re still here,” he murmured, half-delirious.
Quickly, I set his hand back down. “Where else would I be?”
“Running.”
“If you hadn’t noticed, this forest is full of things that want to kill me. Even their dismembered limbs want to kill me. As loath as I am to admit it, I’m better off taking my chances with you.”
“Perhaps,” he said. He tried to move, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
“Don’t be cryptic. What do I need to do to get us out of here? Rook?” I patted his cheek again.
“Help me stand. No—fetch my sword first, and then . . .”
I got up and cast about for his sword. The clearing had transformed in just the short time I’d been kneeling. The Barrow Lord’s petrified remains were almost unrecognizable now, engulfed by a giant tree still unfurling new branchlets. Golden leaves rained down steadily, depositing a bright accumulation of foliage through which I shuffled on my quest to find Rook’s weapon. Finally I found it, only because its hilt poked out of the leaves.
When I came back, the falling leaves had nearly covered him. I ran the last few steps, stumbling once over a concealed root on the way, and brushed him off while he watched me in silence—too weak, I supposed, to remark upon the strangeness of my behavior. Even I couldn’t say for certain why the sight of him vanishing into the forest floor alarmed me so. Only that there was something funereal about it. Something final, as if the earth were swallowing him up.
When I was done he tried to take the sword from my hands, but there was no strength in his grip. I had to help him guide it back into its sheath.
A question ached on the back of my tongue, embedded like a fishhook, tugging forth the awful words. “Are you dying?” I blurted out in an odd tone of voice, almost an accusation.
He frowned. “Is that what you want?”
“No!” My vehemence seemed to surprise him, so much so that I felt I had to defend my answer. “If I wanted you dead, why would I have taken the stick from you this afternoon?”
“You gave it to me first.”
“Not knowing what would happen—nor did you.” I struggled for words. “What you’re doing to me, it isn’t right. Of course I don’t want to be your captive. But there’s a difference between that and wanting you dead.” Did he understand that? His wandering gaze suggested otherwise. Did human feelings matter to him at all? “Perhaps you ought to know,” I added harshly, “because it’s over and done with now, that two days ago I thought I was in love with you.”
His eyes sharpened, striving through the haze of pain to focus on my face. Then he looked aside and let his arm flop out on the ground, a futile movement, as though he were reaching for something just beyond his grasp. He looked so inhuman. It didn’t satisfy me to have gotten a reaction out of him at last—I just felt cold.
“Help me to my feet.” It was an effort for him to speak. The air wheezed in and out of his lungs, a quiet gasp with every inhale. I wondered if one of his ribs had broken and punctured a lung, a danger Emma had explained to me one night with a tincture in her hand, and if so, whether anything could be done about it.
But Rook spoke first, saying, “We must return to the autumnlands. I cannot heal myself here. There is something wrong with this place—a corruption I cannot explain.” He paused for breath. “With luck some good will have come of it all the same, and the Hunt will have been thrown off our trail.”
I gathered his slung-out arm over my shoulder and did my best to lift him. He managed to rise, but only by leaning on me heavily, and when his weight shifted he made an anguished sound, almost a sob, that sent a keen dart of sympathy lancing through my own chest.
“Shouldn’t you call for other fair folk?”