Page 66 of The Blight of Hollowmire

“Well, neither do I!”

“Then, I suppose we’ll both have an exceedingly quiet and comfortable night,” she says, though the tone of her voice makes it sound like she’s committing to lead a charge up a well-defended hill to an impenetrable fortress.

We move around one another quietly after that, too tired for continued argument. Vireth disappears behind the folding screen near the washbasin to change while I strip off my coat and carefully loosen the bandages around my leg and shoulder.

My wounds are healing unnaturally fast. They’re not completely gone, but enough that the jagged tear left by the bogunder has already pulled itself mostly closed. I touch the smooth, pink skin of the scar carefully. It feels strange beneath my fingertips—like no wounds I’ve recovered from, and my ancient body is a map of healed injuries. It’s not painful beyond a dull ache, and I would swear I can already feel strength returning to the muscles beneath. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think I was changed, somehow.

Fabric rustles softly behind the screen, and my imagination immediately becomes my greatest enemy. I stare firmly at the opposite wall while reminding myself I am a grown man with a lifetime of brutal experience as a knight, not some moonstruck stableboy undone by the sound of a woman removing her tunic nearby.

Unfortunately, this speech accomplishes absolutely nothing. When Vireth emerges a few minutes later wearing a loose sleeping shift, every coherent thought leaves my body anyway. Gods above, this temptation may be my undoing. Her hair hangs completely loose now, pale as winter frost in the dim firelight. Without the braids constraining it, the antlers show more clearly beneath the silver waves sweeping around them. The sight should be alarming, or at the very least, unsettling—especially in the wake of everything we just heard in the seer’s cottage. Instead, the only word I can settle on is beautiful, followed by a much quieter, insistent one that whispers through me, daring to be acknowledged—mine.

Vireth catches my expression and points accusingly. “There. That face again.”

“I’m not making a face,” I argue pointlessly, sounding about as juvenile as I feel.

“Yes, you are. You look as though you are losing a moral argument with yourself. If you attempt to ravish me in the night, Renard, I will stab you.”

I drag a hand down my beard. “I assure you, I have never ravished any woman who did not wish for such. I am too tired and too sore to do anything other than sleep.”

“Hmph,” she grunts. “I’m taking my dagger to bed.”

“As you wish,” I grumble. “If it will ease your fears and allow me some peace, take your sword and mine.”

“That’s not necessary,” she says airily. “I’m more lethal with a small blade, anyway.”

I chuckle at that. Gods, I like her. Not just as a companion, not just because she is beautiful, not just because she is fae, not just because I will admit that I want her. No. The strange woman has wormed her way past my defenses in such a way that even our arguing feels comfortable.

Vireth slides beneath the blankets first and turns toward the wall while I extinguish the candles beside the bed. Only the hearth light remains afterward, low and golden and soft enough to blur the room into shadow.

After washing up as best as I can with the washbasin, I settle carefully onto the mattress beside her, acutely, uncomfortably aware of every inch between us. The inn may be modest, but the bed is a decent size—clearly built for larger fae bodies. This bed should feel spacious enough.

It does not.

Vireth lies close enough that I’m near madness with the very scent of her—the rosemary soap lingering faintly in her hair beneath the ghosts of smoke and damp forest soil that always seem to cling to her. It’s like laying in a field of herbs on a midsummer’s eve, when the bonfires have died down and all the mead has been drunk. Longing forms a splinter beneath my skin, all the more irritating because I don’t think I’ll be able to pluck this from my flesh.

Neither of us speaks for a while, the tension pulling taught like a bowstring. Finally, she mutters into the darkness, “My head feels like someone is driving nails through my skull.”

Concern rises before caution can stop it. “How bad?”

“Well, I’m considering removing the antlers myself.”

“Given what Ursula implied about the persistent nature of this change for you, that seems deeply inadvisable.”

“Yes, well. Desperation breeds innovation, I suppose. Mayhap I will ask you to lop them off with your sword when you have a spare moment.”

I hesitate only a moment before saying quietly, “Come here.”

I’m met with silence, and then, suspicion, which is a fair response.

“Why?” she asks.

“Allow me to help.”

“…with what, exactly?”

“Starving ravens, Vireth. With your headache.”

“Oh, have you secretly become a healer in the precious few moments that we have not been together in the last several days?”