Page 12 of Cursed Shadows 5

Yet I don’t find sleep. Whether the balms and oils are laced with caffeine or coca leaves, or it’s that the thunderous pulsations of Comlar and the commotion out in the streets of Kithe are keeping me from drifting off, I don’t know.

All I know is I lie here a while, listening.

Lashes shut, I just listen.

The groans and murmurs and hisses of the wounded all around me; the snarls and barbed shouts from out in themain road, still packed full of fae, nowhere for the displaced spectators and warriors to go but here—they all come with the undercurrent of pulsations, that steadythrum, thrum, thrumof the Cursed Shadows.

Cheek smushed, I stare ahead at the limp body of a wounded who looks suspiciously slack faced, and I wonder if the dark one is dead…

Then something else steals my attention.

My lashes flutter—then, fast, my mouth floods.

My healer squeezes by the bed, a basket of assorted breads in her arms. She pauses at my side and gestures an impatient nod to the basket.

I lift a hand and finger through the pastries, the buttered slices of nutty bread, the small scones, the bite-sized pies stuffed with gravies and potatoes and meat.

It doesn’t take a genius to assume I should only pick one from the basket. Yet I snatch a pieanda hefty cream-filled pastry.

The glare of a healer doesn’t spook me. Not anymore.

I find my fear and unease of others, particularly the fullbloods, has faded.

“You eat,” her barbed words are broken, and I think of the thicker, sharper accents of the isles, “then go.”

I’ve only just decided that she has a native language—not the tongue she speaks to me in—when her words sink in.

She’s kicking me out.

I frown up at her, the foods stacked in my cupped hands, and I hold them close to the chest as though she’ll snatch them away from me.

She jerks her chin. “Need bed.”

I trace the gesture to the doorframe.

Nothing grisly meets my eye. Just a crying, red-faced youngling and a limping mother; a warrior leaning against the wall, eyes half shut over tired eyes, but not noticeably wounded; and the rest of the queue is wound around the sheeted tent flaps, and so I can’t see them from this angle.

I stare out to the wedge of the street that I can see and faintly shake my head.

The healer doesn’t see the gesture. She has already turned her back on me and moved on to the next.

I nibble on the pastry first, a sadness weighing me down.

I don’t want to give up the bed.

I don’t want to go out there…

The folk are out there. The ones who might be looking for me. Like Father and Pandora. Like Eamon. Like…

Oh.

Daxeel won’t be looking for me.

The knowing of him always searching for me, always surveilling me, it’s ingrained too deep into my mind, my body.

But now…

Now, I don’t even know if he’s alive.

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