Page 62 of The Royal Curse

“Whatever it takes. I leave the details to you. As long as he rides fast.”

Salvius nodded. “One of them can go at once, Your Highness.” He stood, grunting as his knees creaked. “Damn it,” he said, and strode away.

That summed it up well.

And it also seemed to bring my immediate responsibilities to an end. Hadn’t Andreas often been busier than this? Well, sometimes. He’d seemed to have plenty of time to hold me down and fuck me.

I bit my lip until it bled, but I managed to keep the next wave of tears inside, huddling there as silent and still as Andreas until at last Piet brought me the pot of boiled water and a pile of almost-clean linen shirts.

“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” he said softly, setting the pot down on the ground. “They’re the best we’ve got. I’ll boil some other things for bandages. But we used up all the actual bandages we had in our supplies, you know. For bandaging.”

Piet had one of his own around his forearm, and the same weary, gray pallor as everyone else in our party.

“Thank you,” I said, for lack of anything more meaningful.

Piet cast a frowning glance at Andreas, opened his mouth, and closed it again. “I’ll bring you a bite when we have it ready, Your Highness,” he said, and retreated to the fire.

I had to let Andreas’s hand go to start cleaning his wound, but I raised it and pressed a kiss to his knuckles first, not even caring if anyone saw me. His skin burned my lips. I lingered longer than I should have, pushing as much strength and will into him as I could.

And then I gently laid his hand down, moving his arm away from his body to give me room to work, and picked up one of the cloths.

It took painstaking effort, repeated soaking and loosening, to get Andreas’s attempt at a bandage off of him. But it peeled back bit by bit, revealing swollen, shiny, reddened skin, and as I pulled off more of it, patches of deep purple, the color of a rotten plum.

My vision blurred as I delicately sponged Andreas’s wound, a shockingly small opening between two of his ribs. At this point, trying to remove any foreign matter stuck inside would’ve been futile and agonizing, even if I’d had a surgeon’s tools, so I cleaned off as much of the pus and dried blood as I could and then covered it with a pad of linen and wrapped his cloak over his side.

Perhaps it made me a coward, but I couldn’t look at it anymore. I’d touched Andreas’s body more than I had anyone’s, ever, but I couldn’t recall spending much time with that particular part of him. The long, lean planes of his torso hadn’t been a priority for me.

They should’ve been. Kissing my way down every inch of his body ought to have been my only priority when I had the chance.

Instead I’d wasted precious hours wringing my hands over my independence and my self-respect—as if a life alone, without Andreas, could possibly be preferable to kneeling at his feet and begging him to be kind to me, if that’s what it took to make him want to fuck me every day. Or even to look at me.

Andreas had stirred slightly while I worked, little twitches in his fingers and a restless toss of his head. Not so much as a flicker of his eyelids, though, and no sign that he knew I was there. It’d be better for him if he never woke, I knew. An infection like this was an agonizing way to die. But I still sat there, unmoving, all my limbs gone cold and stiff, staring at his face as if I could force him to open his eyes through willing it alone.

If he fought to live, if he would only smile at me…I whispered helpless pleas to Ennolu, praying as I never had in my life. By taking my potion all these years, I’d thwarted Ennolu’s will and circumvented his plans for me. But I wouldn’t, not anymore. I’d do exactly what he expected of me. If he would hear me…

My body ached with the force of my longing and my grief and my rage, every muscle taut, my lungs burning with my held breath, my mouth open in a silent rictus. If he’d made my magic stronger before, why wasn’t it working now? It must have been my imagination, or the dosage I’d taken of my potion had been wildly uncalibrated. Or perhaps Andreas had to be conscious.

Either way, nothing happened no matter how I prayed.

Someone set something down beside me, probably Piet leaving me food. But I didn’t think I could ever eat again. The day went on around us: a light rain pattering on the canvas overhead, an icy breeze whispering down through the clearing from the snowy mountains, the whinny of a horse, Salvius giving orders to change the watch. Andreas remained the same, unmoving and dying.

I’d clutched his hand to my chest, both of mine wrapped around it, and I curled down and kissed it, again and again, my tears as hot as his fever-parched skin.

Until now, I hadn’t put a name to the inescapable feeling welling up inside me and turning my chest to lead. If Andreas had woken, I’d have told him, thrown myself on his mercy, given myself to him without any reservations at all. Been his slave, if that’s what he wanted.

But he wouldn’t wake. He’d never hear me say it.

I turned his hand over and pressed a kiss to his palm, the salt of his skin lingering on my lips and mingling with my tears. “I love you,” I whispered. “Andreas. I love you.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

For a moment the world felt like it held its breath.

And then I gasped at the sudden pain: my fingers and my lips burning as if they’d been shoved into a fire, the flame chasing up my arms and down my throat, licking along my veins, burning, burning, bright in my magical vision. The potion I’d taken sizzled and spat, seared out of my blood, firecrackers exploding along my nerves and down to the tips of my fingers and toes.

Everything went sparkly-crimson and twisted upside down, my magic slamming into me with the force of an avalanche and sucking me under, my lungs full, choking, and that sound was my scream as my blood went white-hot like molten lead.

I shouldn’t have had any magic, or at most a trickle, but there it was—all of it. Pulsating and writhing as if it had a life of its own, suffusing my flesh and glowing through my skin, the last little floating particles of the potion popping into nothingness as they fled the conflagration.

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