“Bothaim. Trying to get a look at that book again. He’s certain there are more pages that haven’t been transcribed and released to the public.”
I sigh.
Pyrok shrugs. “You ask me, the place has been awfully peaceful without my nagging brother around. And you.”
I glare at him as he chugs his mead.
Agni lifts the dressing to inspect Raeve’s gnarly wound, shaking her head. “The bone is fissured,” she murmurs, poking at the gape of skin in a way that makes me want to vomit. “I’ll have to melt her skull smooth again before I thread her flesh. She’s very lucky this didn’t kill her.”
I would’ve split the world if it did.
Then split my fucking self.
She uses the dressing to blot at the wound. “Someone will need to get me a cloth and a pail of water, and fetch my kit. Pyrok, you look like you need a job. Is this all her blood?”
Surprisingly, Pyrok jogs from the room like something’s nipping at his heels, though not before casting an assessing stare between me and Veya—the latter standing over the other side of the table, gaze narrowed on me like an arrow notched and aimed.
“No,” I say, holding Veya’s stare. “A lot of it is colk blood, my blood, and the blood of another male.”
“You fucking bastard,” Veya growls, then launches across the table at me—arm swinging. I let her get three good hits to my jaw, gut, and the fucking wounds on my chest before I snatch her wrists and shove her toward Grihm, who’d silently eased off the back wall the moment she started speaking.
With a big pale hand wrapped around her wrists, he bands his other arm across her chest, looking at me through a flop of snow-toned hair that mostly hides his icy eyes, the tic in his square jaw pulsing. The only sign the male ever gives that he’s on edge.
Veya snarls, looking up at me with the ferocity of an uncharmed adolescent Sabersythe—eyes blazing, upper lip peeled back from bared canines. Failing to jerk out of Grihm’s hold. “How could you take her to that place?”
“The gorge took her to that place,” I growl, wiping a wad of blood off my lip. “I got there just in time.”
“She’s dressed in the garb of a Tookah Trial, Kaan. A Tookah Trial.”
“Well aware, Veya.”
“Who was the male?”
“Hock.”
Shadows cloud her eyes, and she stiffens. “Good,” she fires, no longer wrestling Grihm—not that he lets her go.
Not that she asks him to.
She lifts her chin. “How did she kill him?”
Rage crackles through my veins like crumbling embers as I fail to shake the image of Raeve sprawled on the sand, covered in blood, straddled by a male who had every intention of claiming her as his own. As I fail to shake the image of her laughing, like she was mocking her impending death.
You shouldn’t spend such lovely words on me, Sire.
Fuck.
I crunch my hands into fists. “She didn’t.”
Veya’s eyes narrow on the málmr around Raeve’s neck, then widen. “Creators …”
I grunt, another pulse of stone-crushing energy shooting through my veins.
My muscles.
I intercept Pyrok as he re-enters the room. Taking the pail, I use the damp cloth to clean around Raeve’s wound, then wipe the blood off her face while Pyrok helps Agni spread her tinctures across the table. When he looks up again, he stills, the jar that was in his hand dropping to the ground.
Shattering.
“Who in the Creators-damn fuck is that, and why does she look like Elluin Neván? She’s dead,” he says, looking from me to Veya to Grihm, his skin turning just as pale as the latter. “Am I the only one that thinks I’m going mad right now?”
No.
Agni looks between us like we’re all mad, dabbing some purple liquid on a piece of cloth and patting it over Raeve’s mouth.
“She doesn’t know herself as Elluin,” I mutter, slopping my cloth back in the pail and dragging both hands through my hair, pulling it back off my face. “To her, she’s Raeve, and she has no recollection of anything prior to the past twenty-three phases.”
My words echo through the hall, taunting me.
“Well … fuck,” Pyrok murmurs. “You sure they’re one and the same? That you didn’t just bring some poor stray home because she looks like Elluin?”
“You think I’d do that?” I growl.
He shrugs. “Seen some crazy shit over the past eon. Not gonna lie.”
I clear my throat.