Page 31 of Cursed Shadows 5

Forranach wakes me with a rap of his fist on the door. His wife is gone, back to treat the other warriors still in town, and Forranach is the one left to tend to me.

He brings me soup and some bread, then draws me a bath.

The black powder sleep doesn’t let me go for long. After my thorough scrub, my hair is still sopping wet, wound in a cloth turban, and I climb my way back into bed.

The next time a knock disturbs me, it is Niamh, and she comes to check on my wounds. Her own fatigue is in the dark circles around her eyes, the cracked skin on her lips that whispers dehydration.

She doesn’t give me anymore black powder, but does knead more balms and oils onto my flesh before leaving me in the room and closing the door.

The final time I am woken from the black powder slumber is to Forranach, telling me one thing.

“It’s time.”

Time to meet Eamon.

A REBUILD IN KITHE

6

DAXEEL

††††††

Dark lashes border the faint light of the bedchamber.

Curtains are drawn on the luminescent trees outside the window; the only warmth to flicker over the cerulean walls and white trimmed ceiling is the collective, scattered glow of jars filled with fireflies.

Tick, tick, tick.

The fireflies hit into their glass walls, their prisons, too stupid to know they can’t escape through the invisible walls that contain them, too determined to give up.

Tick, tick, tick.

The fine weight of a silk sheet drapes over his hand.

The Warmth has come, and so the furs that pinned him down the last time he woke from the black powder slumber, are gone. Fresh sheets glide over him now.

Daxeel slips his hand out from under the silk and brings it to his face.

Fingertips graze the thick, dewy texture of black bandages pasted to his head. Old and sweaty.

Tris will come soon to change them again. The others, too; the bandages wrapped around his middle, the moss that runs down the length of his spine.

He briefly woke to the healer pasting the moss over his back. The memory stirs, but it comes in fragments. His cheek pressed to a pillow, the silhouette of his mother in a housecloak drifting in and out of view as she loitered around his bedchamber; the frosty presence of Samick sitting in the chair at the wall, and he merely stared out of the window when the curtains weren’t drawn; Eamon’s face warping in and out of view, his hand reaching into the nightstand drawer, luring out a velvet pouch of spare coin—and then gone, because Daxeel blinked, and in that blink, the black powder dragged him down to peaceful nothingness, and when he opened his eyes again, that moment is now, and he is on his back and the bedchamber is empty.

Daxeel lets his hand fall to the pillow beside his head. Lines crease his forehead as he stares at the ceiling, the trim flickering with eager firefly light. But the black powder keeps his mind hollow.

Hollow…

That rings through him.

A thought tugging at his mind.

The frown fades, his face smoothens out like once-crinkled paper before a yawn splits him.

In a mere click of the fingers, he throws the sheets of his body and runs his hands over his tired face.

Without a look down at his healing wounds, the bruises smeared with moss, the salves and balms eased into his skin, the pasted bandages, he kicks his legs over the side of the bed. His feet flatten on the soft rug.

---