And Rowan. Poisoned and wounded and full of hard, cold resignation. Let it kill me. He’s lived for so long with that darkness inside him. Fought and fought, let it take him apart in a slow bloodletting to delay the inevitable. It makes me think of a dry well: the widening space between surface and water, the scrape of the bucket across the stones. He’ll give up, give in, and I’ll have to watch the Corruption slowly ruin him, piece by piece, before it destroys him entirely.
I care for him. But I still don’t know him.
We’ve hidden so much of the truth from each other. I have to know what happened to him in the past. What really happened when Rowan was saved by the Lord Under.
I knock on his door again, harder this time. The sound echoes through the hallway.
I try the handle. The door opens. I go inside.
His room is just as bare as the last time I was here. The curtains are flung wide, the hot night air drifting through the open window with the scent of leaves and earth. Everything is so still, so silent. But then I see him, curled beneath the quilt on his narrow, makeshift bed. He turns toward me as I cross the room, but his eyes are closed. He’s asleep.
His arm lashes out. His wrists are bandaged—he must have done it himself—and thick, black Corrupted blood has seeped through the cloth.
“Elan,” he calls out, pained. “Elan, please…”
A nightmare. He’s having another nightmare.
I tiptoe closer and set my candle on the floor near the bed, beside a tray bearing a half-drunk cup of tea. Three glass vials lie next to the cup. Empty, except for a few drops of the bitter sedative. My small light gleams weakly out into the rest of the room. In the corner, the shadows are heavy. I turn my face away from the darkness.
I lean over Rowan and put my hands on his shoulders. At my touch, he snaps awake, sits up and shakes himself free. “Violeta? What are you doing in here?”
His eyes are dark—pupils blown wide, sclera bloodshot. The scars at his throat are latticed dark, a tracery that spreads upward across his jaw, down over his chest. He isn’t wearing a shirt, and in the candlelight I can see his broad shoulders, his lean muscles, the scars all over his skin. A strange yearning fills me.
His hair is tangled from sleep and still damp from when he washed out the mud. A loose strand hangs over his face, the dark line crossing out his features. I reach to brush it back. “You had a nightmare.”
He catches my hand before I can touch him. “Don’t.”
“You had a nightmare, but it’s over now.” There’s a cloth, folded up on the tray beneath the teapot. I pick it up. “Your arms … Here, let me help you.”
He looks down and sees that the cuts have bled through the bandages. Sighing, he holds out his arms to me. I start to unwind the strips of linen. I shudder when I see the wounds, unable to stop picturing sharp teeth and hooked claws. I try not to touch the blood, but I can’t avoid it; when it smears my fingers, it’s thick and strangely cool.
Rowan takes the cloth from my hands. “There are bandages in the dresser. The top drawer. And—” He looks down, embarrassed. “And maybe a shirt, from the drawer beneath.”
I open the dresser and take out a roll of bandages, then search through his neatly folded shirts until I find the softest one. I take everything back over to the bed, then sit down carefully on the floor and start to unwind the bandages.
Rowan sits very still as I wrap his arms. After I’m done, I lean against the edge of the chaise. “You told me the Corruption wouldn’t hurt anyone except you. You swore it. But I saw how you looked when you fought to save Arien. It wasn’t the first time you’ve done that—tried to pull someone else back.”
He lowers his eyes as he roughly pulls on the shirt. “No. It wasn’t.”
“Tell me.” I put my hand on his arm so he can’t turn farther away. “Rowan, what happened when the Lord Under saved you? What really happened to your family? I want to know the truth.”
He hesitates a moment, then he sighs. “It was as I said, before. I died. I came back. I was poisoned.” His gaze drifts toward the open window, and his voice sounds far away. “I was maybe five years old. I went to play near the lake and fell into the water. It was so cold, and I couldn’t breathe—then all at once everything changed. I wasn’t in the water anymore; I was in a forest. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen. It was dark, and there was no sky. I was there for what felt like a long time. Until he spoke to me.”