Page 14 of Cursed Shadows 5

I can’t find Father and return home with him. Licht is not for me anymore.

All the rooms and taverns will be booked for the Sacrament… not that I have any coin to pay for a room.

The moment I walk out through that door, push by the line of waiting wounded, I will stagger out into the crowd, and simply look around, unsure of my next step, uncertain of my direction.

There are things I know.

One, I need more medical attention than I was afforded here. The healers here treated me with urgency, stopped the bleeding on my head, salved my bruises and aches. But I need more.

I need the black powder.

Yet, that costs coin that I don’t have.

I am not in the defence of Licht, so I won’t be treated by the light lands, not without cost.

I don’t want to go out there—I don’t want to even see my Eamon, because he has a home to return to.

He will have Hemlock House… and I won’t.

Besides, I will need to tell him about Ridge.

Maybe he will hate me for it. Maybe he won’t understand why I had to kill his lover.

Maybe he will blame me.

The rush of fear is cold like ice in my chest. It charges through my veins, an anxiety I hadn’t let myself feel or acknowledge while I got to curl up on that bed, a bed now taken by another.

I drop my head into my hands.

Against my palms, my face twists and there’s a watery burn that leaks from my creasing eyes. A breath shudders through me—then a hard nudge rocks me.

“Must leave!”

I throw a wet glare at the healer. “And go where?”

Her face shutters.

Her hand is raised, as if to shove my shoulder again, to kick me out before I’m ready to go, but her hand falters.

I swallow, thick, and my throat bobs. “I’m going,” I mutter and push up onto my feet. “I’m going.”

My steps are slow; the ache remains, burrowed deep into my bones, and even my ribs are aching as though there’s a cold blooming in me. Maybe there is. Maybe my mortality is catching up to me, and I’ll die out there in the cold at night, ill and weak.

I almost scoff.

Surviving the Sacrament, the second passage, the savagery of the mountain, the beasts who hunted me, the sacrifices… all to die from lack of home.

“Narcissa.”

I still.

Halfway to the door, I’m wedged between the top of one bed and the foot of another. My spine twists uncomfortably as I look over my shoulder.

The healer’s face is still as sharp as a fistful of knives, stern and cross. But there’s a slight furrow that knits her brow and a slant to her thin lips.

I almost wonder how she knows my name. But of course she does. She like everyone else here will have watched me in the Sacrament, or at least heard from those who did.

The healer lifts her hand—but not to nudge me.

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