Her emotions suddenly felt tangled, her chest small and cracked.
But the only words she could find to say to him were, “You’re reading my letters.”
David was quiet. Adaira could tell she had caught him off guard.
“You think it wrong of me,” he finally stated.
“As a laird’s consort? No,” Adaira replied. “But as a father? Yes.”
This time when she cut her sword at him, he moved. He blocked and lunged, forcing her into a short guard to protect herself. They fell into a stilted dance of a spar, kicking up clumps of sand and splashing through small streams. If this had happened a week earlier, Adaira might have felt a thread of fear. Fear that David had brought her to the arena with the intention to test more than her skills. But she realized now that he was giving her a way to channel her fury and the hurt that lurked beneath it. He was letting her unleash her anger on him, as if he knew the two of them couldn’t move forward without this altercation.
She bared her teeth, catching him by surprise with a feint to the left. His block was slow. He winced as if in pain, and Adaira reacted without thinking. Her sword grazed his side. If she had pushed any harder, the sword would have pierced him.
David grunted and swung around with such speed that Adaira couldn’t parry his blade. It struck her upper arm, slicing through her drenched sleeve.
She stumbled away, dropping her sword. The fiery pain was disorienting, and the world felt like it was tilting. She grasped her arm, the blood welling between her fingers.
“Dammit,” David said, sheathing his sword. “Cora? Cora!”
She fell to her knees. She felt like she was sinking in a bog, and she gasped for breath, tasting the brine of the rain. Her blood felt cold, crackling with frost. Had his sword been enchanted? She hadn’t noticed radiance in the steel, but perhaps she had missed it in the storm. When she drew her hand away from her wound, she saw that the blood had beaded on her skin. It looked like tiny red jewels, slowly deepening to a dusky blue color as they hardened. They glittered in her palm like chips of ice.
“What is this?” she whispered, letting the gemstones tumble from her hand.
“Cora, look at me.”
A man stood before her, in sharp relief against the gray rain. It was Alastair, reaching down to steady her.
“Father?” she breathed.
Hope crushed the last air from her lungs as she plunged into darkness.
She was lying on a bench when she came to, staring up at a shadowed ceiling. The air smelled like crushed herbs, stringent salves, honey, and black tea. For a moment, Adaira thought she might be in Sidra’s house, and her heart twisted in her chest when her memories flooded back.
She was in the west. She had been sparring with David in the rain. Her blood had spilled like gemstones through her fingers.
Adaira turned her head, blinking into the candlelight.
David was sitting on a stool before a battered worktable. Shelves lined the stone wall before him, crowded with glass jars and earthenware vessels, pestles and mortars, clusters of dried herbs. He must have felt her gaze because he turned to look at her.
“Did I faint?” she asked, mortified.
“Yes. Do you want to sit up?”
She nodded, allowing him to help ease her forward. Her vision swam for a moment, but she blinked until she felt steady.
“I don’t understand what happened,” she said. “I’ve never fainted at the sight of blood.”
“You should have told me you were still feeling the effects of the Aethyn,” he gently chided.
Adaira licked her dry lips. When David handed her a cup of water, she saw the small blue jewels, gleaming on the tabletop.
“I thought your sword was enchanted,” she said.
“No. The poison was still in your blood.” He took one of the jewels between his gloved fingertips, holding it up to the light before setting it on her palm. Adaira studied it, realizing the jewel was similar to the gemstones she had worn in her hair at the thanes’ dinner. The same jewels Innes had been wearing in hers.
“Whose blood was in my hair last night?” she asked in a wavering tone.
“It belonged to the thane who murdered your sister,” David answered.
“I still don’t understand.”
“Aethyn is a flower that grows here,” he said, refilling her cup with water after she drained it. “It blooms only in the most perilous of places, which makes it deadly to harvest. But if one does survive in obtaining it, then the true strength of the flower comes forth, and it creates a poison that settles in the blood like ice. It slows the heart, the mind, the soul. In heavy doses, it is lethal, and there is no antidote to counter it. In lighter doses, one builds up a tolerance to it, or it can be used to punish one’s enemies. Either way, it turns shed blood into blue jewels, and many of the nobles wear these stones as jewelry to display their ruthlessness.”