The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(25)

She was sick all over the tundra’s moss and bracken. He held her hair away from her face. Some part of her that apparently cared didn’t know how he could stand to touch her. He wasn’t clean, but she was beyond filthy.

He gave her water. She swished it, spat it out, drank, then eyed the canteen in her shaking fingers. She appreciated that he’d come well supplied—for three people, even—but he kept producing things she needed, and packing them away when she didn’t, and building fires and leading the way and doing every thing, that she almost wished he wouldn’t.

“Why don’t you hold on to that.” He nodded at the canteen.

Her fingers tightened around it. “Don’t condescend to me.”

He touched his scar. “I didn’t mean to.”

She got back on her horse. “Let’s go,” she told him.

Nightfall presented a new set of issues.

“There’s only one tent.” He cleared his throat. “But there are three bedrolls.” He waited—to see, she thought, if she’d insist that he sleep outside, but she felt that that would be admitting too much, even as she refused to consider exactly what she would be admitting. So she gave him a curt nod.

He didn’t build a fire, which made her think he was still worried they might be seen. “We should be traveling by night,” she said, “and sleeping by day.”

He shook his head. He didn’t look at her.

“I’m wide awake,” she insisted.

“You should try to sleep. Things should be normal for you.”

This, if the pattern of the day was any proof, should have made her wild with irritation. But his expression as he unloaded the folded tent was slow and heavy. His hands were busy. His eyes, though, were quiet. Silver in the dark. Shining. Like water.

“All right.” She huddled, arms tight around her knees. She tried to stop her bones from rattling. She didn’t want to be sick again. She turned so that she wouldn’t see him, and listened to the sounds of him setting up the tent.

Even in the tent, with the heat of him barely an arm’s length away, she was desperately cold. She longed for her nighttime drug. She could taste its metallic flavor on her tongue.

He’d already given her all the spare clothes he had. That first night, after the horses came, he’d opened a pack near the body of his friend and pulled out a coat. He’d stuffed her limp arms into it. She had recognized that it was his by the way that it smelled. Her own clothes seemed to have been cut from a sack: dun-colored, long sleeves, trousers. She hadn’t been wearing this her whole time in the prison. She’d remembered this as he’d bundled her and she’d drowsed in the gorgeous haze of her nighttime drug. She remembered when her clothes had changed and why. She could still feel the buttons of her dress popping open along her back. A rash of cold and terror as the air hit her skin. The pain. But the drug was soft and she was sleeping then and what did clothes matter, anyway?

Now she was nowhere near sleep. She was a curled worm under a mound of cloth. He’d tucked the second bedroll over her, then got out of his and gave her that, too. There was nothing left for him to give her.

His voice came through the dark, hesitant. “Kestrel . . .”

“I wouldn’t be cold if I were asleep,” she said through jittering teeth. “I need to sleep.”

A pause. “I know you do.”

“Give me something to sleep.”

“I don’t have anything like that.”

“Yes, you do.”

A longer pause this time. “I don’t.”

“You have that ring.”

“No.”

“Use it.”

“No.”

“I want you to.”

“I don’t really know how to use it. It could kill you.”

“I don’t care.”

He was angry. “I do.”

She knew why his eyes had been too bright earlier. Her own were stinging.

He shifted. She kept her back to him as she felt him move closer. The warmth of him slowly fitted along her spine. It was like sinking into a bath. His words brushed the back of her neck: “Just to keep you warm,” he said, a question in his tone.

“You say that we’re friends.”

“Yes.”

“Have we done this before?”

Another pause. “No.”

Her shaking quieted to a shiver. She found that she’d moved even closer to him, had sealed herself against him. His heart beat fast against her back. He held her, and the weight of his arm made her feel more solid, more real, less ready to shatter into mirrorlike pieces. She calmed, relaxing into his warmth.

She still didn’t sleep. Neither did he. She could feel his wakefulness. She thought, fleetingly, that it was like him not to fall asleep before she did. She didn’t know how she could believe this to be true. It was hard to reconcile with the one memory she had of him: his face in the market, across a distance. An enemy’s mouth, enemy’s eyes.

But he was here, he had saved her, and he’d asked nothing of her except to remember, and had stopped asking even for that. She knew his scent. Knew that she liked it. His hand reached to touch the pulse in her neck. He kept his fingers there, slightly too firm to be gentle, as if he doubted she was alive.

Had they really never shared a bed? No. She would remember that. Wouldn’t she?