Page 107 of What Blooms from Death

He let out a small cough. “I’m curious, though, about what truly interrupted us that evening. You pulled away from me as though you’d seen a ghost. And then we were distracted before we had a chance to talk about any of it.”

I averted my eyes; it made it easier to stop thinking about what might have been. “I…I had a vision. My unpredictable magic at work.”

He nodded slowly, knowingly. “…I suspected that might have been it. Zayn told me you saw something when you touched Red, too.”

“In the case of the loft, it was some sort of performance that I believe took place in Kaelen’s manor at some point in the past. Which I guess lends credibility to what Bastian claimed—that Erebos was once a thriving city in this kingdom called Rivenholt.”

He pulled on his jacket, fastening its buttons with elegant precision despite his thoughtfully distracted gaze. “So many unanswered questions,” he said, more to himself than me. “We’re going to have to stay here until we figure all of this out, aren’t we?”

“It looks that way.”

I absently reached for my shoulder. It ached dully, but not as badly as before. Some balm he had put on the scars—or maybe some faint show of his magic at work? I’d heard that some wielders of Light magic could use it for healing, though I’d neverwitnessed him or anyone else doing it; it was a very advanced facet of such power, allegedly.

“Thank you, by the way,” I said.

“There’s no need,” he replied.

“There is—for saving me in Erebos. And for…for the bandaging and everything.”

He acquiesced with a wave of his hand. “I don’t know the answers to any of the things your brother said, or about where we go from here. But I know how to tend to wounds; I’ve had plenty of practice at that, at least.”

“Because of your experience tending to the ones on your back and chest?”

He went very still.

“I…I’m sorry,” I said, quickly. “I didn’t mean to see them, I just…I was checking on you, and…” I swallowed hard. “To be fair, you were half naked in my window when I woke up. It was difficultnotto stare and…um, to see.”

He shrugged, trying and failing to roll away the obvious discomfort he felt. “I ran out of energy to finish changing.”

“…You did seem exhausted.”

A muscle ticked in his jaw, a flex from holding back whatever he’d started to say.

He headed toward the door. I assumed he wasn’t going to say any more on the subject, or otherwise acknowledge it at all.

But then he drifted toward one of the room’s two ornate, standing mirrors, pausing to study his reflection in it, pulling his jacket and shirt down so he could more clearly see the highest of the marks on his chest.

He noticed me staring. Without taking his eyes off his reflection, he said, “When I was six years old, I came down with an illness that nearly killed me. A spell or some rare poison snuck into my food by some enemy court, we suspected—we never truly figured it out. The doctors tried everything to oustthe sickness from my body. The only thing that seemed to have any effect at all was bloodletting. That’s where the first row of these scars came from.”

“…And the rest of them?”

“I carved them myself, after being left alone for too long. I woke in a feverish panic and grabbed one of the ceremonial knives on display in the hall outside my room, I’m told. I don’t remember any of it, but I likely would have bled to death that night, had some of the servants not found me as quickly as they did.”

That explained why the ones on his back were messier; he hadn’t been able to reach there as easily.

“A bright light alerted them to my alarming state, they claimed, though I don’t really remember that, either.”

“A light…your magic?”

He nodded. “I assume. After this incident is when it first emerged.”

“You weren’t born showing signs of it, you mean?”

He shook his head.

“…But you’re an innate magic wielder, I’ve always heard. A legendary one, at that.”

“That’s what everyone in my kingdom was told, too. And perhaps it’s the truth; maybe it was always inside me, only waiting for something like that infection and fever to trigger it. I’m not sure. I just know something strange happened that night.” He ran his fingers through his pale hair, magic softly lighting his palm and making the strands shimmer like frost in the moonlight. “I still have nightmares, sometimes,” he said. “Shapes I can’t make sense of. Blood covering my chest and back. A voice calling my name until I wake up.”

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