Page 30 of The Crown of Moonlight
Flora arrives while I’m still fumbling with the task.The door is partially open, and she pauses on the threshold, carrying a tray with a pitcher and various medicinal flasks and jars.
“You’re up.”She sounds surprised.
“Awake and wishing I could do more to help you.Judging by the smoke, we don’t have long to wait.”
“How can you tell?”She crosses the room to set the tray down on a small table beneath the window.
“The type of smoke, the sorts of things they’ve burned.There’s a pattern to it.”
A crease forms between her brows, but she doesn’t ask the obvious questions.Blue bruises of exhaustion shadow her eyes and bow her shoulders, and a small bit of straw clings to the heavy flame-gold braid that tumbles across her shoulder.My hand itches to pull it out.
I hate the thought of her in danger.The smell of smoke reminds me of the way the Butcher destroyed the last family who sheltered us, and I despise my weakness even more.
“I think we’re nearly as ready for the soldiers as we can be,” she says.“There’s still a part of me that’s tempted to shut the gate and lower the portcullis and deny them entry.”
“Vheara would take that as an invitation.”
“I assumed so.”She steps closer and lays the back of her hand across my forehead to test for fever, then insists on checking the wound beneath the bandage.
I stand still while she pulls the dress aside.She’s so close, it’s impossible not to be aware of her, but I want to avoid doing anything that will make her feel vulnerable.And I remember the feeling of her magic as she healed me, the sheer force of it, the smoke roiling off her skin.
The silence between us is swollen with unspoken things, and we both look away as the fabric slips from my shoulders to my waist.Flora reaches out to hold the fleece in place over the bandaging around my chest.Her knuckles skim my skin, and a shudder ripples through me.
She stills, her fingers hovering above the section of fleece where I’ve tucked the three Veilstones.“Is this where you put the rings?”
“You can feel them?”
“There’s a vibration.A hum.But would a Grey sense them?”
“Not without a rune or a gift for magic-sense leftover from when they were Siorai.In that case, they’d sense that both you and I have magic anyway.If we have no other choice, I can create an illusion of stillness to dampen all the magic around us, but we would need to stay close together, and I don’t know how long I could hold it.”
There’s no point in saying more.There are too many variables and too much that can go wrong.Flora knows that already.
She removes the fleece from the ribbons that bind it in place and catches the rings in her palm.Behind those cloud-grey eyes, her mind is spinning, and she bites down on one side of her lower lip.
“How do the rings work?”she asks.“They’re pulling magic here from Tirnaeve, that’s obvious.But how?It shouldn’t be possible.”
“A seal can never be perfect.Even after the doorways were shut at the time of the Compact, there were thousands of tiny fissures around each door where the magic could trickle through.But the flow was reduced when Vheara seized control of the doorways after she escaped the Gloaming.She added a second seal on top of the first, which allows less magic to seep in and limits how much our Veilstones draw.”
Flora seems unaware that her hands have gone still.They rest lightly on the bandages across my chest.Her warmth sinks into me, and I’m afraid to move, afraid to call attention to that small, fleeting contact—the kindness I increasingly crave.
I want to stay in this moment, to forget the death marching ever closer.
But then she clears her throat and briskly rolls the fleece back into place, retying it with the strands of ribbon.
“There’s no blood on the bandage,” she says, “so at least the bleeding has stopped.Try not to tear it open, and I’ll clean it again when I get back.”
I try not to think about what could go wrong for her out alone with Vheara’s soldiers and Greys out hunting, but the knowledge hangs between us like an axe.She looks away, and I clench my hands to keep from reaching for her.
“Finish dressing, and I’ll take you up to sit with my mother,” she says, her voice quiet in a way that says more than she wants to reveal.
She’s about to step away, then her eyes catch on the rows of oathbands etched around the biceps of my left arm.Until the magic activates, they look like nothing more than ink blacked into my skin.But they light up and slither away when Flora reaches out to touch them, reflecting gold in her eyes as the individual runes glow with cold fire, then wink out again.
Flora jerks her fingers back.“Those aren’t decorative, are they?We have some ancient runes that look similar, but I’ve never seen any that move.Are they like letters lighting up to make a word?”
“You’re not far off.They represent the oaths I’ve taken to the king and the Anvar’thaine.The layers of magic poured into them run so deep that the runes are sentient.”
“So they’re thinking when they move like that?”Flora asks.
