Page 38 of Hearts Lost

ITHRONEL

WE SHOULDN’T

I’m on my feet, pacing the edge of the trees as my little campfire flickers behind me. That big shadow animal saw something unusual, something that sparked interest but not alarm, and now I’m being an idiot. Because there have to be hundreds of things in these woods that an animal would find mildly interesting, and only one of them would be Aloserin.

I huff out a sigh, pull my arms tight around my chest, and frown into the woods. Just because I find Aloserin interesting. Aggravating. Infuriatingly attractive. There’s no reason for the shadow animals to find him anything at all, of course, and they’d treated my increasingly frantic mental request for information with total disdain. Aloserin and I were something to be feared, at first, and now we’re rapidly approaching the same level of interest as a rotting tree stump.

There’s a crashing sort of sound from the shadows under the trees, and my heart leaps into the back of my throat. It’s an awkward, clumsy noise, not the kind of sound a shadow animal would make. Hope flares in my chest like a spark flying from flint.

“Aloserin?” I call.

My breath catches in my throat as I wait for a response. There’s nothing, nothing but the heavy, waiting silence beneath the trees. And then—

“I’m here,” he answers.

Relief crashes through me, pummeling me like the waterfall. I haven’t even caught my breath, I might never catch my breath again, when Aloserin pushes a branch aside and walks into the firelight, his hair wet, one knee torn and bloody, his dark eyes fixed on me like I’m the beacon he’s been following all his life.

“Aloserin—” I begin, but he pushes past my words and the frantic fluttering of my hands to close me in his arms.

His embrace is soft. Everything about this man feels as hard as his steel blade, but his touch is soft. As soft as his kiss.

“Ithronel,” he whispers. “Thank the stars.”

I open my mouth to make a frantic little gasp, and he pulls away. He glances at the fire, off toward the area where I’d last seen the river, and finally back at me.

“I am so sorry,” he says. His face twists into an expression that makes me think those words hurt. “I’m— I’m terrible at this.”

I try to shrug.

“Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself,” I manage to stammer, although my throat feels like it’s trying to close up on me. “It wasn’t that bad of a kiss.”

Aloserin blinks, then shakes his head as if he’s trying to dismiss my pathetic attempt at humor.

“Not… that,” he says.

Shit. I bring my hand up to squeeze the back of my neck and try to look anywhere but at the man who is trying to be serious right now.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry. I’m making it worse.”

Aloserin’s fingers brush my cheek. I turn to meet his eyes, then immediately regret it. He’s looking at me in a way that makes me feel like I’m going to burn up from the inside.

“You haven’t made anything worse,” he says. His voice is deeper, and thicker, and it sounds like every word he speaks has been carved from ice. “I would have died down here without you.”

I shrug again as my pulse throbs inside my skull, because that’s what I do. I shrug and I laugh and I write things off. Nothing bothers me.

“I’m sorry too,” I stammer. The words come slowly, like I have to stab each one separately. “I shouldn’t have— I mean, you know—”

I wave my hand in the vague direction of the river as my cheeks burn. Damn, I never should have hugged him in the river. I never should have mentioned the word kiss. And now we just need to agree to act like this didn’t happen, and we’ll never speak of it again.

“Anyway,” I say, dragging my attention away from the trees and onto Aloserin’s muddy boots. “What happened to your knee?”

Aloserin frowns, then glances down as if he’s just now noticing his own body, with the jagged rip in his pants and the bloody scrape on his knee. I follow his gaze, then really wish I hadn’t. He’d run off without a shirt, and he’d come back soaked. Water glistens in the scattering of tight curls across his chest that I should not be staring at.

“Let me,” I say, forcibly dragging my eyes off of his torso and marching them across the fire to the messy little pile of cloaks and daggers and everything else we’d pulled through the waterfall. “I’ll, uh, find something. For you.”

My hands shake as I dig through the cloaks to find the sleeves I’d cut off of my dress on my first morning in the field of blue grass. One sleeve still holds those two silver spheres, Grathgore’s deadly weapon aimed at the heart of the Kingdom of the Fall, but the other is almost empty. I take Aloserin’s dagger, cut a few strips off the end of the empty sleeve, and then turn back to him. Aloserin is sitting by the fire examining his bloody knee through the rip in his pants. The injury doesn’t look too bad, just a scrape, but my chest still twists at the sight. I hold the strips of my sleeves out to him.

“Here,” I say. “You know. Bandages.”