Suddenly Quin sat ramrod straight, startling her. “We only wanted . . . she was lying there on the stone . . . so still . . . so cold . . .”
A chill swept down Mia’s spine. “Who was lying there?”
“We didn’t mean for him to find us. I never meant to . . .”
“Who? Who found you?”
He sank into her arms, mumbling nonsense. Was this febrile delirium or a last confession? When he coughed his lips were streaked with blood. Mia knew enough about anatomy to know this wasn’t a good thing.
She ripped open his bridegroom jacket and then his shirt, popping off several gold buttons in the process. His chest was smooth and hairless, a clean slate for the blood leaching from the gash. She’d never seen so much blood. It was everywhere. The white oyster silk of her dress was soaked a deep, pulsing red.
What bitter irony. Here she was, in the tunnels beneath Kaer Killian, holding a bloodied wedding gown. She was living out a grotesque parody of the very escape she’d plotted for herself and her sister. How naive she’d been, hatching schemes of boar’s blood and faked murder. Real murder was a different thing entirely.
She stared down at the prince’s ashen face, his shirt torn asunder, golden curls mashed to his forehead with sweat. He’d never looked so young or innocent. Hard to be an incorrigible ass when you were dying, even for someone as gifted at assery as the prince.
“Stay with me, Quin.”
In seventeen years she’d only seen one dead body, and it was eerily neat and sterile, her mother’s flesh unmarred by any visible wound. Until now, Mia hadn’t known a person could hold so much blood. Reading about the ten pints in a human body was one thing; marinating in them was another.
She was accustomed to having the right answer, but she didn’t have it now. This was a test she was going to fail. Barring a miracle, he would die in her arms.
The candle flame winked and twirled, then sputtered out, shrouding them in black.
Mia was bone tired. She couldn’t give up. Not now. Not like this. In her mind she paged through every book she had ever read: all the anatomical sketches she’d drawn as a Huntress, the physiology lessons from her father, her mother’s medical skills. Maybe she could stanch the flow of blood. Maybe it wasn’t too late.
Instinctively she tore off her gloves and flung them aside, pressing her hands to Quin’s chest. For once she felt no cold rolling off the prince; only sickly heat. The trick was to apply pressure. The trick was to let him know he was not alone. The trick was to do everything in her power to make sure he didn’t die here in this dark tunnel, without his family, without his dogs.
“Stay with me. Please.”
To her surprise, her voice was cracking. She’d never felt more alone.
Her body was a wrung-out cloth. In her mind she watched all her hope and strength swirl down a giant porcelain drain. A crush of feet and metal sounded from above. Either the guards would find her with the prince dead in her arms, or the assassin would drop down into the tunnel and kill them both.
Was there wind in the tunnels? It suctioned her skin, siphoning the air from the corridor. She wanted desperately to sleep. She started to drift off, then jolted back awake. How could her body mutiny at a time like this? She fought to maintain control. But her fingertips were numb and heavy on the prince’s chest. Her eyes stung, her eyelids were leaden.
Mia’s head drooped, her limp curls brushing Quin’s face.
She pressed her ear to Quin’s chest, listening frantically for a heartbeat. Nothing.
She’d lost him. It was over.
“Tickles.”
Mia’s eyes flew open. Had he just spoken?
“Your hair.” His voice was a fuzzy murmur, as if he were lying at the bottom of a long chute. In the dark she felt him lift a shaky hand and part the curtain of ringlets splicing the air between them. “It’s everywhere.”
She sat upright. Heart racing, she squinted into the fathomless black. But it wasn’t fathomless: hazy light seeped in from some unseen cleft in the rock. Quin’s cheeks were tinged with color. His iridescent eyes were clear and open—and also baffled.
Mia was baffled herself. How was the color flooding back into his face?
He sat up, then sank back onto his elbows, woozy. “What happened? We were in the Chapel, saying our vows. The last thing I remember . . .”
Quin stared at the arrow on the ground. Then he looked at his wound.
“You shouldn’t—” she started to say, but it was too late: he touched the hole in his chest. Mia winced, waiting for him to cry out. But he didn’t even flinch. He simply stared at his fingertips, dazed.
There was no hole.
In the weak light, she saw the impossible: the flesh had stitched itself back together, stanching the flow of blood. The gash was no longer oozing; it was white with notched pink ridges, already a fish-bone scar.
“Four gods,” he said.
Mia’s mind was reeling. He should have died. She stared at her hands, still wet with his blood.
“You healed me,” the prince said quietly.
No. It wasn’t possible. She had spent three years studying the human body. A wound of that depth and severity did not vanish from a simple touch.
Unless.
Unless.
“You’re a Gwyrach,” Quin said.
Chapter 12
Times of Unimaginable Duress
MIA HEARD THE WORDS Quin was saying, but she couldn’t comprehend them.
“I—I’m not a Gwyrach,” she stammered. “I can’t be a Gwyrach.”
“You healed me with your touch.” He poked gingerly at his wound. “It doesn’t even hurt. Like it never happened.” His eyes narrowed. “In the Chapel, during the ceremony . . . you were enthralling me, weren’t you?”
Mia’s stomach pitched. Molten lava popped and boiled inside her chest; she swallowed hard to stop the rising bile. Everything she had ever known, every hard-won truth: gone.
“I wouldn’t—I can’t—I would never do that.”
The words came out mangled. Even as she said it, she knew it was a lie. Now she saw the wedding ceremony in a new light: the honeyed heat, the fiery sparks boring into her skin. She had enthralled him. She must have enthralled him in the library, too. What she had naively mistaken for budding attraction was her own dark magic.
How could she be so obtuse? She had studied it in a hundred books, knew the signs, the symptoms. She had touched his hand in the library and again in the Chapel. Both times Quin had been sweating and breathing heavily, his heart beating so loudly she’d felt it thrum beneath her own skin. She had, unwittingly, spiked his blood with desire. She had made him want her.
But hadn’t she been wearing gloves?
To enthrall someone is to enslave them, little rose. You’ve stripped them of consent, robbed them of their choice. And without choice, what are we?
The king’s guards slammed through the Sacristy overhead. Joined by the Hunters, no doubt. A grisly truth settled into the pit of her stomach.
She was a Gwyrach. If they found her, they would kill her.
Quin wobbled to his feet. “We have to run.”
She blinked. “I’m not sure I—”
“Someone clearly wants me dead. And once they discover you’re a Gwyrach . . .” His face was grim. “Your Hand will be the latest addition to my father’s Hall.”
Fear thrashed in her chest. “You would reveal me?”
“No, Mia. I’m not as evil as you seem to believe.” He gestured at his wound. “But it’s a little obvious, don’t you think?”
He was right. The regrown flesh was an unnatural perversion; it could only be a product of magic. They were both doomed.
Yelling broke out overhead, then a crash of steel and brass. A wild notion flashed through Mia’s mind. It was completely illogical, wholly unreasonable, something she would never have cooked up in a million years . . . and it just might work.
She summoned all her strength and stood.
“I know a way out,” she said. “Follow me.”
She’d spent days agonizing over her carefully inked map of the tunnels, but in the end it wasn’t the map that saved her. As she led Quin through the corridors, she invoked her father’s swift, sure footfall the night before. His parting gift.