Incendiary (Hollow Crown #1)(13)
“I’ll do what I can,” Sayida says. The needle and thread are on a swatch of clean cloth, and she washes her hands with a square of soap in the river.
“The rest of us will make camp,” Dez says, trying to catch my eye.
I refuse to look at him. He doesn’t understand. He can’t. I don’t want him speaking on my behalf. It only makes things worse with the others.
Above us, dark clouds move quickly across the sky, leaving a cool breeze. Perhaps the goddess is still looking after us, and perhaps this is her mercy on rebels always running from a mad king—a reprieve from sweltering heat.
I sit on a patch of dry grass while the others finish building a ring of stones for a fire. Sayida cuts another swatch of relatively clean cloth with her pocketknife and uses it as a rag to blot as much of the blood around my wound as she can.
I try to stare at her face and ignore the burning sensation that spreads across my shoulders and chest. Sayida’s eyes and hair are dark as midnight, and the gentle outward slope of her nose is accentuated by a tiny diamond stud on the left nostril. Her skin is the light brown of the sand dunes in the Zahara Canyons with a smatter of black beauty marks across her chest. She always has a slightly red tint to her lips, a habit left over from her time as a singer four years ago. Now, nearly nineteen, she’s still the nightingale of the Whispers, singing as she mends our cuts and sews up our wounds. It’s almost enough that you don’t think about the pain. Almost.
I grimace, tensing my shoulder as she puts pressure on the wound.
“Sorry! Mother of All, this is a long cut, Ren,” she says, never taking her eyes off her own swift fingers. A nervous chuckle leaves her lips. “But, of course, you knew that.”
“Now I’ve got matching scars on either side of my neck,” I say, maudlin. “The world simply insists on attempting to behead me.”
“Or Our Lady of Shadows has sent her guardians to watch over you.” Sayida strikes a match and runs a long needle through the small flame.
I make to laugh, but something about the fire makes me gasp and nearly fall backward. It’s silly, utterly pathetic how I can build a flame at camp and run through a razed village and watch a boy’s memory of a guard set on fire, but then this small drop of flame causes me to lose my breath.
“Ren?”
It’s happening again. Why is it happening now? Sayida squeezes my arms to try to snap me out of it. My body feels paralyzed as my vision splinters with pain. A memory I keep locked in the Gray breaks out.
Small hands grip the windowsill of the palace. Diamond glass panes reflect my face back to me. The stark black night sky explodes with the bleeding orange and red of sunrise. My rooms fill with smoke. It sifts through the seams around the door.
Fire! Not sunrise, I realize. Fire.
My head spins and I crouch down, grabbing hold of my knees for support as I struggle to breathe. Someone calls my name, but it’s like they’re a hundred meters away, and the brilliant colors of my memories still swirl dizzyingly through my vision.
Then something soft brushes against my cheek.
Dez. The callused pad of his thumb rough on my skin. Be calm. The word chimes around me, through me. My body relaxes, muscles unraveling like string pulled from a tapestry, and as my heart slows, Dez’s warm magics fill my senses. I’m overcome with the need to be calm, still. And suddenly, my mind feels clear. The Gray retreats and I slam the door shut. Sayida and Dez have moved me away from the camp and to a soft patch of grass. How was I so out of it that I didn’t even feel it?
I curse and slam my hand into Dez’s hard chest, regretting the shock of pain it brings me. “I told you I don’t want you to—”
“I’m sorry,” Dez says, his voice low but steady. He’s not sorry at all. “Sayida can’t sew up that wound if you’re shaking.”
“Are you done yet?” Margo asks, her sharp blue eyes on Dez. “We need help with the bedrolls.” Then her eyes flick toward me, and her upper lip curls into that familiar sneer. I can’t be certain if she’s upset because Dez used his magics on a fellow Whisper, or because he touched me so intimately. Perhaps both. Perhaps it’s just because no matter how much I bleed or run or fight in the name of the Whispers, my existence is a reminder of everything that has been lost.
Dez grunts an apology and silently withdraws to add a log to the fire.
“Come now,” Sayida says to me, returning to her suture kit. “Esteban, would you be so kind as to share your drink?”
Esteban, who has begun preparing our meal, scowls. “It’s probably already infected. You’d be wasting good drink.”
Dez stares at Esteban with the kind of steel that has made better men soil themselves.
“Just a splash,” Esteban grumbles to Sayida, but narrows his eyes at me when he tosses the flask to her hands.
“Ignore him,” Sayida whispers in my ear. “It won’t hurt too badly, but you can bite down on your belt if you’d like.”
“I think we have different definitions of ‘won’t hurt too badly,’ ” I say. “But I’ll be all right.”
She giggles when I glower at the slim flask of aguadulce. The drink might be made from the sugar cane stalks plentiful in the southern provincia, but there is nothing sweet about the clear liquor. Once Dez poured it over an open cut on my leg before digging out a thick shard of glass that was lodged in there. I couldn’t walk for weeks, and I couldn’t stomach the smell of aguadulce for even longer.