Reign of Shadows (Reign of Shadows, #1)(14)

“Dinner ready?” she asked, patting her hands and arms dry with the towel.

I nodded. “Almost.”

Sivo resumed sharpening his blades. “How is he?”

“If his fever breaks, he’ll live. He’s young. Strong. Whether or not he will walk again is another matter.” She moved beside me. I felt her gaze on my face. “What were you thinking?”

I sighed. “I was thinking they would die if I didn’t help.”

And I was thinking I was tired of being alone. That I would go stark mad staying all my days inside stone walls with never once encountering another soul.

I didn’t say that, of course. It would make me seem ungrateful. It would make it seem like Perla and Sivo weren’t enough—that they hadn’t done enough for me.

When the high chancellor slew my father and my mother after she had just given birth to me, Perla snatched me from the nursery and fled. Cullan had clearly been waiting for an opportunity to seize power, and he found it the night of the eclipse, in the outbreak of chaos and wave of blood and death.

I shouldn’t have lived. If not for Perla and Sivo, Cullan would have ended me, too.

I held my tongue, determined not to say anything that made this life they had miraculously carved for us seem too little.

“And why should whether these strangers die concern us?” Perla grumbled. “It’s enough to keep just ourselves alive.”

I felt Fowler’s arrival even before I heard him step from my bedchamber. I lifted my head, wondering if he had heard Perla’s comment. And if he cared one way or another.

His tread vibrated along the floor with a stealth that even Sivo couldn’t manage.

“He’s asleep,” he announced.

“Fallen unconscious more likely,” Perla responded. “Pain will do that to you. Knock the fight right out of you.”

After a long pause, he replied, “If that’s what pain does, it’s a wonder any of us still live.”

I stopped sawing on the bread and lifted my head in his direction. We all fell quiet at these words, and I knew that Sivo and Perla were staring at this stranger, wondering at him. Afraid of him.

And there was me, overcome and eaten alive with curiosity, the back of my neck prickling with awareness. I wanted to know about him. Where did he come from? Where had he been? Where was he going?

He was too new to be anything other than fascinating.

Heat scalded my cheeks and I lowered my head lest anyone see how he affected me. I concentrated on arranging the thick slices of bread into a basket.

“It smells good,” Fowler offered, easing the awkward stretch of silence.

“Help yourself if you’re hungry,” I offered.

“Of course he’s hungry,” Sivo proclaimed. “A strapping fellow like him needs his nourishment if he’s to make it on the Outside.” A nongentle reminder that he was to go. Sivo wasn’t much for subtlety. He might as well shove Fowler’s belongings at him and show him the door.

I set the last slice of bread in the basket and dusted loose crumbs off my fingers, and heard myself saying, despite what he’d already told me, “Well, I’m sure he won’t depart until Madoc is on his feet—”

“I’ll leave on the morrow. At midlight.”

He hadn’t changed his mind. Had I expected him to? That somewhere over the course of a day, with warm bread in his belly and walls safely surrounding him, he might have changed his mind?

I turned my head in his direction, still inclined to persuade him. “But your friends—”

“They’re not my friends.” His voice dropped hard and absolute. “We traveled together. Briefly. I have to keep going.”

His deep, rumbling voice wrapped around me, squeezing like a fist. He had to keep going. Alone. That’s what he meant. He wanted no one. Like one of the slippery fish that I managed to seize for a fleeting moment in the stream before it escaped through my fingers. Gone.

There was no keeping him here. He would be leaving. “Why? Why would you want to go out there? It’s safe in here.” Strange, I mused, that I would be using the same argument Perla used against me every day. Perla, who preferred to die in this tower. This thought scudded through me with a wilting shiver. Dying in the tower. Living the entirety of my days within its walls. My presence, my life, unmarked. Unremembered. Unimportant. As though it never happened at all.

“Luna, don’t be rude. The young man has a right to come and go as he pleases. We can’t force him to remain.” In Perla’s voice, buried beneath the muted tenor, was the message for me to simply let him go. Release him and good riddance.

“There’s a place. The Isle of Allu.” Even as he said this to me, there was a thread of something in his voice. Surprise, perhaps, that he felt compelled to justify his actions. “It’s reported to be free of dwellers—”

“Oh, and the sun shines there, too, I am certain,” I snapped. “What a lovely fairy tale.”

And yet even the remote possibility of it intrigued me. Which only infuriated me because I would never know if such a place actually existed. He could leave. He could go in search of this fantasy island. Whether it existed or not, he would never return to tell me.

I turned, my movements sloppy in my frustration. I grasped the lid off the pot, forgetting to grab the mitt to protect my hand. I cried out and dropped the lid.