It’s odd, though, the way things can leap into your hand the moment you stop reaching for them. Because it was only after I finally ate my stew and put my head down, only on the very edge of sleep, that Skallagrim’s sentence finally clicked.

When I have the words, he’d said. The words to tell you what you mean to me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Skallagrim

Nearly forty days after our arrival at Callabarra, Suvi turned to me and said, “I want to leave.”

My own mind supplied the last word of that sentence: I want to leave you. With my heart squeezing, squeezing until every beat hurt somewhere deep inside, I hissed with furious fervour, “You can’t.”

Her soft brows crinkled inward, a sign of confusion. Or irritation.

“We have to stay in this room?”

We. She said we.

“You... you just want to leave the room,” I clarified, feeling terribly off-balance. I tightened the muscles along my back and tail, thrusting my wings outward then back in to try to centre myself.

“Yes!” she replied. “I’m strong enough to walk. I’ve been doing my drillz.”

I still wasn’t entirely sure what her human drillz were. They seemed to be a set of exercises. But whenever she tried to explain the process to me, she said it was related to a human activity called hawk-ee and I did not know what hawk-ee was. Maybe some sort of military engagement. The drillz looked like they could be basic training for some sort of warrior, I supposed.

Though imagining Suvi as anything close to a soldier was... difficult. Not because I necessarily thought she was weak – at least, I assumed she wasn’t any weaker than the other soft-fleshed people of her world – but because gentleness seemed to be bred into her very bones. She could be stubborn, and she had her moods, of course, but there was no denying the goodness in her, the shy sort of kindness at her core. I tried to picture her killing a man and it did not feel like anything near truth. I was not the only one who’d noticed – more than once, Jolakaia had quietly remarked to me that Suvi followed the way of cotton without even knowing what it was.

Besides, Suvi hadn’t wanted or used the knife I’d given her back at the abandoned house. She hadn’t even noticed that it had been taken away during her fever (Jolakaia told us that only the Mother’s Claws could carry weapons in the temple). A missing weapon would have been one of the first things a warrior noticed upon waking.

So. She was not a soldier. But still she faithfully did her drillz to regain the muscle that had atrophied in bed. At first, it had started with a few walking laps around the room. Slowly, walking had become jogging. Then jogging had turned to short sprints back and forth, touching invisible points on the ground as she pivoted. (It was very hard not to stare at the bouncing of her breasts beneath her robe when she ran, but by the skies I was a strong male and I could do hard things if I set my mind to them and if I sometimes faltered, if I occasionally failed, then no one would be the wiser anyway.) She also did squatting movements and lunging movements and sometimes looked like she was pretending to grip something like a shovel or a spear.

Suvi stared at me with eyes so shiny with expectation that the grey centres of them practically looked silver. I could think of no good reason to stay in the room if she did not want to. I did not plan to remain in this room or even in Callabarra indefinitely—only until she had recovered—and that recovery largely seemed to be complete. There were still two guards stationed at the door outside in the hallway, and no one had specifically given us permission to wander, but it wasn’t as if anyone could stop me. I made an internal vow not to break any more bones, then hastily added the stipulation, but only if no fools get in my way.

I could only be expected to endure so much.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Her eyebrows crawled upwards in surprise.

“Wait, really? Now?”

“Yes, now.” Her surprise at my words bothered me. It bothered me that she thought she could plainly tell me what she wanted and yet also assumed I would say no. She obviously did not understand that I would do everything in my immortal power to take care of her, to keep her happy, to do whatever it was that she wanted.

But then again, when I’d thought she’d been asking to leave me, I’d immediately refused her.

Well, acquiescing to that particular request is not within my power, I reasoned savagely with myself.

I briefly wondered, for the very first time, if there were no looming threat of darkness, would I be willing to let her go? If I did not need her as some sort of antidote, some sort of anchor, would I still want, need, to keep her like this? Would I still feel the same possessive, protective urges towards her – the desire to hold her, to hoard her?

If there were a way to return her to her people, could I do it?

Would it hurt?

Merely thinking about it hurt, so I stopped. I focused on things I could control and make sense of in this very moment. Right now, all Suvi wanted was to leave this room and, blast me into the cursed stone sky, I could at least make that happen for her without losing my mind philosophizing about what it might mean or how it might feel.

As if to demonstrate my devotion to her will, I used my power to snap open the door that led into the hallway with a resounding thwack. The two guards outside jumped to attention and peered inside at us.

“We are taking a tour of the temple,” I told the two of them as I wrapped my arm around Suvi’s narrow shoulders and led her through the doorway. Though my tone, and frankly the words themselves, left no room for opposition or complaint, the blasted Mother’s Claws still found a way to try.

“But the Honoured Eye has not-”

“If Koltar has a problem with it, tell him he can seek me out directly to discuss it,” I interrupted brusquely. I was merely irritated by the guards; I was not yet enraged. But the way Suvi was already cowering back towards the sickroom, as if afraid that she was doing something wrong— as if afraid that these cotton-headed idiots had some sort of authority over her and she was breaking their ludicrous rules—was rapidly bringing me to that point. I tightened my arm around her, not allowing her to retreat any further.

The two guards eyed each other, then both jerked their snouts up and to the right in approval.

As if I sought such a thing from ones such as these.

I cannot wait to get out of here. I was not sure where we would go or what we would do once we left Callabarra, but as long as I had Suvi at my side I supposed it did not really matter.

“I have seen very little of this place and I do not know the layout,” I told her as we walked through the hallway. “We will be wandering.”

Despite my ignorance about the temple, I knew more of it than Suvi did. Her eyes were round as river stones as she took in the high-ceilinged hallway with its many tubes of light. I did not need her to say it to know that she remembered none of this, even though we’d been in this hallway before. She’d been too sick to notice any of it.

My fingers twitched against her shoulder. I could not think of that night, think of Suvi suffering, dying in my arms, without the demented, flapping wings of panic rising hard against my ribs. My breathing felt oddly tight. I forced myself to stay present in this moment with her. Last time I may have carried her through this place, but now she walked with her own two tiny feet, strong and steady beneath the safeguarding sling of my arm.