Once she reached the top, Wren slumped against the wall, her head pounding again and making it hard to keep her balance.
Julian, meanwhile, was digging around inside his satchel. He withdrew some of the dry firewood they’d been carrying, as well as the flint.
It was so damp in here, even above the touch of the water, that Wren worried it was a lost cause, but the sounds of him stacking the wood, muttering to himself and striking the flint, were almost as soothing as the flames would be.
“Wren,” Julian said sharply, drawing her back to herself. Her eyes were closed, though she didn’t remember shutting them. “Stay awake, okay? Can you stay awake a little longer?”
She nodded, lifting her head and straightening her posture. The scent of smoke reached her, and she looked to see a fledgling fire started in the corner, bits of broken stones ranged in a makeshift pit. There was a small window set high in the wall above, providing ventilation.
“We’ll need more, before the night is through,” he murmured, mostly to himself, before shifting and adjusting the logs. He reached with his gloved hands, apparently unconcerned about the heat. That was one benefit to the fact that he never seemed to take them off, though Wren was dying to know the real reason.
“N-not sure we’ll find any d-down here,” Wren said, struggling to get the words out through her chattering teeth. Maybe she should get back into the water, which was warm, even if it was wet.
“Come here,” he said, reaching for her hand, “closer to the fire. It’ll help warm you up.” He turned to stare at the struggling flames. “Eventually.”
Wren released his hand in favor of crawling rather than attempting to stand again, but when she reached the edge of the fire, the cold stayed with her.
It was her clothes—she needed to get them off.
Deciding there was nothing else for it, Wren stood. Julian, who had been poking at the flames, watched her warily, perhaps afraid she might keel over.
She fumbled with her belt, then her bandolier, and the straps for her back sheaths. She dropped the items carelessly, but Julian stooped to gather them one by one and place them by his pack.
Wren felt strangely exposed as her armor gave way—her last protections. Against the undead, of course, but also against him. She was a bonesmith, he an ironsmith. It was how they related to and understood each other. Without their separate identities between them, they were just two people alone in the dark.
Julian took his time stacking her armor, as if delaying on purpose—or giving Wren time.
She looked at her drenched clothes, heavy with water and clinging to her skin, her muscles like jelly. Defeat slumped her shoulders.
“I can help, if you want,” Julian said stiffly, standing before her. “I’ll close my eyes.”
Wren rolled hers. “That won’t make you m-much use to me,” she said, clenching her muscles against the trembling. “Can you just hurry up? Please?”
He nodded, closing the distance between them. He undid the buttons on her jacket, peeling it down her arms and tossing it to the ground. While he’d treated her weapons and armor with the utmost care, it was clear he was going for speed now, determined to get this task done as quickly as possible.
In another time, with another kind of boy, Wren might have thought he was in a rush to see her naked, fumbling with clumsy hands out of eagerness. But with Julian, she suspected the opposite was true, that he dreaded every moment of this. He pushed on out of necessity, for Wren’s sake, and to complete the task at hand. Not out of any desire or lust.
That was its own kind of disappointment, though it made things easier. The entire thing became clinical and detached as he peeled back layer after layer.
When his gloved knuckles skimmed across her bare chest as he undid the shirt buttons, Wren settled a hand on his wrist.
He froze, and his gaze—until then focused intently on his hands and his hands alone—rose hesitantly to meet hers. His face was inches away, his usually smoothed-back hair coming undone, a single forelock dangling across his brow.
She met his eyes and nodded. He understood. He withdrew with almost comical speed, though Wren didn’t feel much like laughing. She pulled off her shirt and tugged down her pants, all while Julian’s back faced her. He was bent over, messing with the fire again—surely he was doing more harm than good at this point—and he stayed that way until the sound of Wren’s sodden pants slapping onto the ground announced that she was fully naked.
He straightened, turning his head a fraction of an inch.
“Finished,” Wren said, stepping toward him—barefoot after kicking off her boots—and putting a hand on his shoulder. As usual, he tensed under her touch.
“Here,” he said, barely above a whisper—and without turning around. He held up one of the blankets from his pack, rough but dry and large enough to wrap her from head to toe.
She flung it around her shoulders and relished the wave of warmth that enveloped her. She just stood there, swaying on her feet, her eyes drifting closed again…
“Can you eat?” Julian said, his voice very far away. “We have—Wren.”
She jolted awake to find him watching her with an expression she would have described as fond if it weren’t on him. As it was, she thought maybe he was amused at her falling asleep standing, like a horse.
She decided to blow out her lips in imitation of one, and it seemed to alarm him more than her giddy laughter had out in the cavern. He pulled a scrap of cloth from somewhere and dabbed at the spot near her temple where he’d found blood before.
“Not too deep,” he muttered. “Come sit—here, on this other blanket, so I can see to it.”
Wren obeyed, sitting patiently as he dipped the rag in the spring water and proceeded to clean the cut. It was unnerving to have Julian’s complete and total focus. His face was so close, his eyes so bright and intent, that it made her stomach clench.
It seemed the cut had stopped bleeding, and once he’d dabbed away the worst of it, he left the wound uncovered.
“They talk to me, you know,” she said. He met her gaze, brow furrowed in confusion. “The revenants. They talk to me… They’ve been talking to me. Ever since we got here.”
He turned away, squeezing out the blood-soaked rag. “I’ve never… I didn’t know that was possible.”
“Neither did I,” she admitted. It made her think, uneasily, of the battlefield, of the “Graven heir” story Julian had told her. Nothing made sense anymore, and it seemed the rules no longer applied—to bonesmiths or to the undead. Or maybe Wren wasn’t as well informed as she’d always believed. There was magic here—more magic than in the world above. It made things that shouldn’t be possible, possible.
She thought she’d been sitting, but the next thing she knew, she was on her side, face pressed into the cold stone floor of the cave, and Julian was shaking her gently.
She attempted to lurch upright, forgetting for a moment where she was, her brain scrambling through the bridge, the fall—the revenants—but Julian pushed her back down.
“Easy,” he said. “You’re safe.”
Wren blinked at him for several frantic moments, then nodded. Strange to think that being alone with him, an ironsmith, in the Breach, was as safe as Wren had been in days… but it was true.