Page 106 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

Father must have heard me clattering through the house in a panic. He came out of his room with clothes thrown on over his sleep shirt—a coat, trousers, boots. His appearance caught me off guard; he looked rested and clean. His brown eyes—myeyes—were clear and sharp.

Hope fluttered in my chest as I beheld him. He looked so much himself, so different from the drunken, staggering man who’d yelled at me in the morning room and thrown his glass. But I pushed hard against the feeling, kept my face composed. As much as I wanted to—as much as I loved him, even with all his faults—I could no longer trust him.

In that moment, with the memory of Ryder’s despairing face so freshly seared into my heart, it felt like I couldn’t trust anyone, perhaps most of all myself.

“Talan?” Father asked quietly.

I nodded, joining him as he strode down the hallway. “He’s badly hurt. Gemma went for Madam Moreen. I can only hope that will be enough. I didn’t get a good look at his wounds.”

“Madam Moreen is one of the finest Anointed healers I’ve ever known. She will save him, whatever his wounds.” Father spoke with such confidence and moved with such fluid grace as we hurried downstairs that the eager child’s heart inside me leaped with happiness. Father knew what to do; Father would make everything right. But the woman I’d become was skeptical. Fleetingly, I wondered if I would always feel torn between these two parts of myself. Would I always be a creature of conflict, of contradiction?

“What did he say?” Father asked. “Did he bring news?”

“He says he found Moonhollow,” I told him, with some hesitation. “That was all he said before falling unconscious.”

Father nodded. He seemed utterly unsurprised, so Gemma must have told him some of what we had learned from Yvaine and from the harpy, Nerys. I wasn’t sure if I should be glad or angry.

“If it’s true, then we’ll have to move quickly,” he said. “Something could have followed him here. The way to Moonhollow could shift or change before we have the chance to go there ourselves.”

“Talan wouldn’t have come here unless he was sure there would be no danger to us,” I insisted.

“We can’t be sure of that. Even demons can lose their reason when badly hurt.”

At the bottom of the stairs, Father stopped me with a hand on my arm. Though his grip was gentle, I flinched at the contact nevertheless. At once, he let go and stepped away. He didn’t quite look at me, but I saw the remorse on his face. My two selves still warred—one full of pity, one flaring with anger. One desperate to return to Ryder, one dreading the next time I would see him.

“I must wake Mr. Carbreigh and his crew,” Father said quietly,“tell them to be on alert.” He glanced across the entrance hall at the morning room, where everyone was gathering. “I’ll be back soon.”

Then he left, sweeping out the front doors with a snap of his coat.

The ruckus had woken some servants—Lilianne, Gemma’s maid, and my own, Hetty, and two wide-eyed kitchen maids—but Gilroy ushered them away, his stern voice brooking no argument. I hurried past them into the morning room and shut the door behind me.

Talan lay on a broad table someone had dragged into the room’s center—Madam Moreen’s nurse, probably. Bili was also her son, a strapping young man with quick hands and an iron stomach whom Madam Moreen had trained at her knee since he was a child. He was brisk and efficient, though not as impressive as Madam Moreen herself. She was a ballast of a woman, slender but solid, with smooth brown skin like polished oak and eyes hard and clear as cut glass. She’d been with my family for as long as I could remember, and I’d never been so glad to see as her as I was in that moment.

She glanced up at me, frowning. Her pressed white nightgown was already splattered with Talan’s blood. “Good, you can help hold him, my lady. I’ll have to cut away the infected flesh before we can sew him up.”

I obeyed at once, my stomach turning as Talan’s body came into view. He’d been stripped of his clothes, though Madam Moreen had thrown a sheet over his lower half—a sheet that was already soaked through with blood. The wounds were worse than I had thought: huge gashes across his chest and stomach, some running ragged down his sides. Something had torn into him, leaving him in ribbons. And even worse, the edges of the wounds were a sick purple-green color, like a bruise—and the color was growing, spreading.The infected flesh, Madam Moreen had said. My gorge rose. Infected withwhat?

“It’s all right, my darling,” Gemma was saying, her voice remarkably calm, though I saw the fear on her face, how her eyes glitteredwith tears. She held on to his left arm, her grip firm. “Madam Moreen is the best healer in Gallinor, better even than the queen’s healers. She’ll have you fixed up before morning. And I’m here, I’m right here beside you, and I love you, Talan. Do you hear me? I love you.”

He looked up at her in obvious agony, his breath labored. “Gemma,” he choked out. His eyelids began to flutter closed. “Gemma?”

“I’m here, my love, I’m right here.” Gemma looked up frantically. “Madam?”

“He’s lost a lot of blood, my lady. He’s bound to fade in and out. Bili, are you ready?”

Her son took a slender knife from the array of tools laid out neatly on a nearby divan. He opened a vial full of acrid-smelling liquid and doused the blade with it. A smell like burning filled the air. I knew what that meant; the knife had been cleaned. Now Madam Moreen could start cutting.

“My lady?” she said, with a sharp glance at me. “His right arm, please. He’ll fight us.”

I obeyed at once, grasping Talan’s upper right arm and holding on tight, hoping my grip wasn’t adding to his pain.

As if sensing my reluctance, Madam Moreen said, “Don’t worry about hurting him. The important thing is to get the poison out.”

At once, I recalled the queen’s ball. Whatever was in Talan, it looked far worse than the venom that had hurt me that night, and there was certainly far more of it. My chest ached with pity, with horror, and without even thinking, I began to sing a lilting tune, one of the thousand lullabies that lived in my mind’s catalog of music.In war, there is no room for grief or terror, Ankaret had told me. I thought of running at her through the trees at Ravenswood, dodging her fire, singing my battle chant as I thought one thing again and again, my music focusing the word into a blade:Stop.

My eyes burned to remember it. Not long after that, the preciousnew world I’d been building with Ryder had shattered under the weight of his confession and my own frantic, spitting anger. And there in the morning room, with a song in my voice and terror lodged in my throat and my heart breaking, it seemed impossible that I could rebuild it.

Then Madam Moreen began to cut, carving away dark ribbons of infected flesh. They wriggled grotesquely, as if they were alive, as if they contained some burrowing, wicked thing. She dropped them on rags held out by Bili. He hurried to the roaring fire and tossed the dark bundles into the flames. Horrible shrieks rang out from the hearth as they burned.

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