Page 103 of Beneath a Shattered Sky
“What about the Fomorians?” I ask.
Bree shrugs. “It looks like Caed slaughtered them all.”
He…what?
I blink at the exhausted Fomorian now being poked by Lore. When the redcap is certain that Caed is out, he whips his hat from his head and stuffs itinsidea particularly vicious wound to his chest.
“Lorcan,” Jaro censures.
“What?!” Lore shrugs, tugging the cap free and swiping it across Caed’s face next. “Waste not, want not!”
Caed coughs up more blood, which Lore happily collects, before sighing. “Fine. I’ll take him back to camp.”
In the next second, Caed is gone, and a moment later, I’m beside him. Goddess, even though a lot of the blood on him hasmysteriouslydisappeared, he still looks awful. I grimace as I survey the wounds across his body. Jaro returns next, and busies himself by bustling around the camp, relighting the fire and checking our mounts as they return one by one.
I guess he’s babysitting me, but he’s also giving me the illusion of privacy, which I’m grateful for. Now that we’re away from the iron, I can feel trickles of his pain along our bond. It’s nowhere near where it should be given the severity of his wounds, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s because he won’t draw from me, or because Danu’s curse prevents it.
“Titania,” I murmur, dropping to my knees beside Caed.
The spirit of my grandmother appears beside me, her colourful skirts passing through his arm from her nearness.
“Not again,” she says, looking at him sadly. “This is becoming a bad habit.”
My gut twists as I nod, reaching for her hand with mine. “We can heal him before he comes around.”
At least that way, he might sleep through the pain.
The healing is slow, and my eyes burn by the time the chest wound is sealed completely. Someone stabbed him in the heart—tried to truly kill him—and my own clenches at the thought.
A golden leaf falls onto his chest as we finish, and I brush it away impatiently before giving in and starting the process of washing the remaining blood from his skin. I’m halfway done when Jaro comes to sit beside me. In silence, he takes in the lines of Caed’s curse mark as I wipe the inked skin clean. The wolf’s head at the top is clear as day, and so is the hat in the third frame. Closest to his wrist, there’s even the faintest smudge of black in the rough shape of a harp.
“Do you think Drystan will ever…?” I trail off, staring hard at the second frame down.
The one that remains completely, hopelessly, empty.
Jaro doesn’t answer me, and neither does Titania, who drifts a little farther away, giving us some privacy. My breath hitches slightly.
“I don’t think… I can’t…”
His arm wraps around my shoulders, and I rest my head against his collarbone, breathing him in. “It may not come to that.”
“It will.”
“You don’t want him to die.” At my slight little head shake, Jaro presses, “Do you love him?”
There it is. The question I hoped he wouldn’t ask. I’ve already confessed to mostly having forgiven my Fomorian, but love? That would make this already tense situation worse.
“I don’t know.” The confession hurts. Loving Caed isn’t as simple as loving the knight beside me. “Even if I did, it would change nothing.” I shouldn’t have let myself get this attached to him. I should never have accepted his invitation to the lantern festival. “The smart thing to do would be to keep my distance, wouldn’t it?”
My wolf doesn’t answer that, either. Perhaps because he, like me, is all too aware that it might be too late.
Come Beltaine, there’s the very real possibility that one of my mates will kill him. If I’ve been stupid enough to fall in love with him by then, only heartbreak can come of it.
Caed coughs, shattering the moment, but I can’t focus on him because Lore has blinked another high fae into the clearing and left him propped up against a tree to my left. This one is clearly wounded, albeit not tortured like Caed was. Someone has tied a makeshift bandage around his midsection, and sweat pours from his brow, likely meaning he has an infection on top of it all. A scarred priest follows him, then Prae, Gryffin, and the rest of my Guard.
Wiping my burning eyes—because I can’t let Drystan see me crying over Caed—I blow out a breath and subtly shift away from Jaro as I search for my composure.
“Let me,” Prae mutters, taking the cloth from my hand the second she sees Caed on the floor.
