Page 53 of Heart’s Rescue

Arryn

About the Heart

So I’m dying. So that’s great.

I push my sleeping roll through the shelter’s entrance and try to keep from rubbing at my arm. It doesn’t hurt. In fact, it doesn’t feel like anything at all. I could almost pretend that cut, and those strange black lines that creep like spilled ink from beneath the scab, aren’t there at all. Haven’t I been trained to ignore painful things my entire life?

I push out a breath and come to my feet. Rowan is untangling ropes from trees; already, half of the canvas shelter is sagging on the snow. I rub my hands together and walk over to him.

“What can I do?” I ask.

Rowan glares at me as though I’ve just insulted his family. Stars, he’s gone from friendly and smiling to angry and scowling so fast it makes my head spin.

“Or I can just stand here and be useless,” I grumble. “Your call.”

Rowan turns away, but not before I see what looks suspiciously like a smile curve his lips.

“Fine,” he says. “Coil the ropes.”

He shoves a mess of thick, wet rope at my chest. I take them and follow him as he unties their ends from the trees and pulls them carefully from the canvas loops on the shelter. The rope is wet, and it soaks through my mittens. It’s snowing, or doing something that’s almost like snow, and the little flecks of ice falling from the darkness above us make a strange pinging noise as they hit my hood.

I’ve seen Rowan coil the ropes before, so I try to do what he did, looping them around in my hand and then knotting the ends together. It doesn’t turn out well; in my mind, I’m already making illusion flowers as my punishment for my shoddy work by the time Rowan rolls up the shelter and collects the ropes from my arms. He doesn’t say anything.

“I can carry that,” I say.

Rowan looks at me. It’s the same kind of look he gave me when I told him I could read a map, and all the frustration I felt about messing up the ropes again and again flares into one single burning point of light in my chest.

“I can do something!” I snap. My voice comes out high and pinched. “I’m not dead yet!”

Rowan turns away. His silence feels like ice.

“I— You— Damn it, Rowan!” I scream.

I stomp my foot hard on the snow. Ice snaps under my boot. It’s a strangely delicate sound; for a moment I could almost believe it’s Mother’s elegant dwarven china I’m smashing under my heel.

Rowan turns back to me and meets my eyes. He’s gone from looking angry to looking miserable. His eyes drop to my left arm, then flicker back to my face.

“They don’t have the flower in your world?” he asks. His voice is flat, his face blank.

I pull in a breath. Something deep inside my chest hurts. No, of course they don’t have that flower. If they did, I would have heard about it. I would have seen it on display during the solstice celebrations on Mount Victory. At some point, Mother would have asked me to make an illusion mimicking that flower. Something that big, that splashy, it would have been all over the Royal Court.

But Rowan knows that. I’ve already answered that question, just subtly, answering without really answering. Answering like a noblewoman. And Rowan has cut right through all my layers of subtlety and nuance to ask another veiled question: Are you going to die if I send you back?

My teeth sink into my lower lip. Am I going to die? Rowan said it’s slow. He’s described the flower in enough detail for me to repeat it. I can see Mother going into a frenzy, sending couriers to even our most remote trading outposts to hunt for any trace of the flower. Stars, they put Princess Elanerill into a magical sleep to keep her alive, didn’t they?

Her tower shines in my memory, its crystal roof so high above the castle’s ramparts and so far from her heart in the Lands Below. Wouldn’t Mother love that? If I could be put on display, locked into a crystal case until she could find the flower that would save me? By the stars and moon, think of the marriages she could arrange for me if I was unconscious.

“No,” I say.

The truth stings as it comes out. I swallow the poison. Rowan spins on his heels, his head tilted toward the glowsoft orbs drifting through the gloom.

“Shit,” he hisses.

“Where does it grow down here?” I ask.

Rowan shakes his head back and forth as though denying my question. Or possibly denying my very existence.

“There’s only one place it grows,” he finally says. “The king’s inner courtyard.”