Chapter Seven: Only One Bed

Kaelric's wounds were far worse than Lia had believed.

Though she had drawn most of the shadow-venom out, traces still seeped into his channels. For the next three days he burned in recurrent fever, lucid one moment and delirious the next, and the first words he spoke on waking were always the same question: "Isolde... have you caught her yet?"

Lia kept watch at the edge of the pallet, changing his dressings and giving him water, drawing the lingering venom out of him little by little by the methods taught in those tattered pages of her mother's old ledger. She discovered that, since the vow had been sealed, she could "see" the injuries inside him—like a dark river running through the black, her shadow could follow the vow to the very source of each of his pains.

"Not yet," she answered for the hundredth time. "The palace is searching the whole city. Isolde has simply... vanished into thin air."

Kaelric closed his eyes and said nothing. After a long while he asked, his voice hoarse, "Has my father... already ordered you arrested as my accomplice?"

Lia's hand stilled.

She did not tell him. King Ashfall the Third had raged after the Grand Sacrifice and ordered both her and Kaelric placed under house arrest, with a specious justification: the direct line of shadow had surfaced, and the Flame Prince lay gravely wounded, so collusion must be suspected and both kept under strict guard. But the wording of the edict carried a clear intent to kill—Isolde had escaped, the Ashfall dynasty needed a shadow to blame, and she was ready-made for the part.

"Don't worry," Lia said, lowering her head and going on changing his dressing. "I won't let them take you away."

Kaelric opened his eyes and looked at the girl kneeling beside the pallet to bind his wounds. The lamplight fell on her downcast brows, and on a face once smudged with coal dust, now scrubbed clean, it cast a stillness almost transparent. His gaze, for an instant, softened.

"Why did you save me?" he asked. "You should have... hated me enough to want me dead."

Lia's hands stopped moving. She did not look up; her voice was very soft. "Because... you didn't burn me, either. You said that this thing was wrong from the very beginning."

"That is not enough," Kaelric said. "The people I have burned—you could not count them."

"But the one I saved... was you."

Lia raised her head and looked at him. In those dark eyes there was no hate, no resentment, only a stillness that bordered on obstinacy.

"Shadow blood runs in your veins, yet you have spent your whole life burning shadow-casters," she said. "I think you know better than anyone how many of the ones you burned were innocent. You are no executioner. You are simply... caught between fire and shadow, not knowing what to do."

Kaelric looked at her for a long, long time, and did not look away.

Outside the window the Blood Moon had already set, and a pale green dawn was paling the edge of the sky. Lia rose to put out the lamp, and halfway there she heard Kaelric, behind her, say something very softly:

"Thank you, Lia."

She did not turn around, but she heard her own heart miss half a beat.

That very night, the court physician Isaac pronounced that the Flame Prince's wounds were too grave—he must leave the palace to recover, if the lingering venom were ever to be cured at the root. The old king, suspicious though he was, gave way in the end: Kaelric was set on his own course, and he had shown the Flame Seal. Only two trusted guards were sent to accompany them.

It was called a recovery journey, but their destination was the Temple of the Sunken Moon.

"The last direction Isolde vanished in is the Temple of the Sunken Moon," Kaelric said, sitting in the carriage, his face still pale but his gaze as sharp as ever. "Your mother's ledger names that place too. The key to every riddle lies there. We go to find the answer."

The carriage left the capital and headed north, crossing the wasteland beyond Ashfall city, toward the Temple of the Sunken Moon.

As the darkness deepened, they stopped for the night at an abandoned hunting lodge on the edge of the wastes. The lodge had fallen into disrepair; only one room was fit to sleep in, the earthen pallet half-collapsed, barely laid over with two layers of dry straw.

The two guards kept watch over a fire outside the door, leaving the only sheltered place to the prince and the "young lady."

Lia stood in the doorway, looking at the cramped little room—barely large enough for one body, scarcely enough space to turn around—and then at Kaelric, seated at the edge of the pallet with an air of perfect entitlement. For a moment she did not know what to say.

"There is only one bed," Kaelric said, lifting his eyelids, his tone unreadable. "You sleep inside. I sleep outside."

"Your Highness—"

"Lia." He cut her off, a trace of a weary, almost indulgent smile in his voice. "We are bound by the vow now. If you die, I die. If you are hurt, I am hurt. I am not about to harm myself."

Lia's face flushed crimson in a single heat.

She lay down slowly on the inner side, hunching herself into a small knot, her back pressed hard against the cold wall, leaving a full arm's length between her and Kaelric. The dry straw rustled. She could feel him lying flat beside her, his breathing even, like a silent, scorching mountain.

"Are you cold?" he asked suddenly.

"N-no." Her voice was muffled in the straw.

A strong hand reached over her from behind and draped a military greatcoat he had shed over her shoulders. The coat carried the warmth of his body—dry, burning—and the faint smell of scorched tobacco.

"You're lying," Kaelric said.

Lia did not dare move. Yet her heart beat as though it would break through her chest.

She heard him laugh once, very softly, in the darkness—like a single spark, now there and now gone.

"Sleep," he said. "We have a long road ahead of us tomorrow."

That night, for the first time in her life, Lia Voss slept deeply and peacefully beside a man who should have been her enemy.

Her shadow curled between them like a weary beast that had at last found its home.