Flamecaster (Shattered Realms, #1)(82)

Ash turned back to the queen. Her breathing was already slowing. Soon she would forget to breathe, her heart forget to beat. The poison was abroad in her body, hunting down the spark of life so it could be extinguished. There was no easy way to call it back. The best he could do until Karn returned was to support her breathing and keep her heart going. He leaned close, feeling the whisper of her breath against his cheek, the thread of her pulse in her wrist. When her heartbeat faltered, he pressed both hands against her chest and used flash to compress and release the heart.

It seemed to take forever, but finally Karn was back, with a bottle of warm, murky liquid. Ash sniffed at it, nodded, and said, “Good. Now sit her up as best you can.” He felt Lila’s presence behind him. “Each of you, take an arm and hold her steady.”

Tipping her chin up, Ash poured half of the preparation into her mouth. “If you can hear me, Your Majesty, please swallow.”

He wasn’t sure if she heard him or not. He massaged her throat. She coughed and choked a little, but he managed to get most of it down. They waited. For an awful moment, she lay still and cold. Then she took a deep breath. Released it. Took another. The color returned to her pallid cheeks. Her breathing strengthened, and her heartbeat, too.

Karn and Lila both breathed out, as if they had been holding their breaths.

“Good work, healer,” Karn said softly, not bothering to hide the relief in his voice.

Ash held up the bottle with the remaining antidote. “Give this to the taster,” he said.

Lila cleared her throat. “He’s dead,” she said. “You may as well give her the rest of it.”

Ash turned back to the queen. “Your Majesty,” he murmured, stroking the damp hair off her forehead. “Can you take a little more?”

She opened her dark eyes and smiled at him, as if she would know him anywhere, as if they were old friends under the skin. “I had the most wonderful dream,” she whispered. “I dreamed that I had died.”





29


VISITING HOURS


It’s one thing to be locked in a dungeon when you’re nearly dead, and it doesn’t matter much where you are. But Jenna was feeling better, and getting restless.

Though she’d worked underground for half her life, she was a person who needed to see the sky, even briefly, every day. She wanted to feel the wind in her face and breathe in all the scents it carried. Not that there weren’t smells in the king of Arden’s dungeon—she just didn’t like any of them. She needed a bath. She didn’t even want to be with herself.

Jenna was still manacled to the wall, but Karn had given her a longer chain, maybe convinced that she didn’t intend to hang herself. So she used the extra bit to pace back and forth, burning off energy and trying to build her strength back up. If she had the chance to escape, she wanted to be ready.

She’d slid her pendant out of the lining of her velvet coat and had hidden it between two loose stones in the wall. She was tempted to put it back on, but worried that it would be discovered.

She was hungry, too—starving, in fact, like her body knew that it had fasted for a week and was making up for lost time. She had no way to mark the time, but it seemed forever since anyone had brought her food.

That wasn’t the only thing she was hungry for. She’d hoped the healer, Adam Freeman, would have come back to see her by now.

She was drawn to him in a way she hadn’t been since Riley, back when she was just a lytling, and easily smitten. It’s not easy to muster up a romance when you’re cold, and exhausted, and dirty most of the time. It didn’t help the cause that she’d been walking the world as a boy ever since Riley died.

Besides, after Riley, she’d realized that love was just a setup to get your heart broken.

So now she was locked in a dungeon, dirty as a miner on a bender, and she was falling for the enemy’s healer, who might be a wolf. Maybe she hadn’t learned much after all.

Wolf, she repeated in her head, like a besotted farm girl. She really should stop calling him “healer” and “Wolf,” but Adam Freeman didn’t sound right, somehow, and so she had a hard time saying it. Even when he said it, it sounded like a lie.

She was getting tired of the tight circle she could make around the bed. She scanned the room. The torches were mounted high on the wall. If she stood on the bed, she might be able to reach them.

Then what? Play with them? They wouldn’t burn hot enough to melt her shackles.

Still, for something to do, she climbed up on the bed and stretched up high, reaching, feeling the pull in the wound in her belly . . .

She heard somebody fumbling at the door and dropped like a rock, hitting the bed hard. Was it the healer? Her heart accelerated.

But, no. The door swung open to reveal Destin Karn with a goblet in one hand and her jeweled dagger in the other.

Oh.

“What was that noise?” His eyes flicked around the room.

“What noise?”

“Just now.”

Jenna gave him a look like you might give a lytling who’s making up stories. “I didn’t hear it.”

Karn crossed to the bed and pulled up a stool, resting the blade across his knees. At least the blade was clean now.

He raised the goblet. “Happy Solstice, Jenna,” he said. He took a long drink.

“Is it really Solstice? I didn’t know.”