Page 13 of Cursed Shadows 5

If he is, he’ll be deep in black powder, what with all his wounds. Might be being treated at Hemlock House, a personal healer paid for by the wealth of his family.

Not here, slumming it with the rest of us.

Again…

That is if he is alive, if he survived that pummelling, that violence from the Cursed Shadows and the iilra.

I touch my cupped hands to my chest. The pie crumbles in my tightening grip, flakes of pastry dusting all over my lap.

I don’t feel him.

Not anymore.

No echo in my heartspace.

It’s just… quiet.

The silence is so thick and calm that I fall into it. Sitting here, on the narrow bed, barely touched snacks in my hands, the moans and whimpers of the wounded, the racket outside, none of it exists.

I touch a blank space in me, where the tether once was, an echo, and it feels as though I topple into a place of darkness where I simply float.

I sink into it.

My shoulders sag as I flop back down on the bed.

I stare up at the ceiling and, numb, I lift a squished pie to my mouth.

I don’t taste it, the savoury gravy slicking over my tongue, the pastry crumbling on my lips. I just eat. Monotonous. One lift of the hand, one bite, chewing and chewing, swallow, again and again, until there is nothing but crumbs in my hands and smears of gravy on my chin.

Before I can even brush away the mess from my face, the healer reappears and shoves my boots into my arms.

My face crumples into a scowl.

Her response is a curled lip before she’s sweeping towards the doorframe.

My scowl aims at the waiting fae as I slip off the bed.

The bite of the cold floorboards is enough to curl my toes as I shimmy up my trousers.

The firm bodice is useless, cut at the seams, discarded on the floor.

I drop onto a stool.

The limp of a wounded litalf passes me.

As I tug on my boots, I lift my gaze and watch the weightedthud, thud, thudgraze between me and the bed I only just left.

The healers don’t so much as change the sheepskin before they are ushering the bulky male onto the bed. No time, maybe no fresh blankets or fleece, I don’t know. But I grimace all the same, then snatch my pastry from the foot of the bed before his boots can touch it, then I stuff it into my mouth.

I chew, hard and fast, a race to stomach it before I have to get up from this stool and walk out there into the chaos.

I make to reach for my backpack on the floor… But it isn’t here. Gone. Lost in the Sacrament, somewhere on the summit.

There’s something odd about it. The niggling feeling of forgetting something, or maybe it’s just that I don’t want to go out there, into the crowd still thick in the street. Because, really… I have nowhere to go.

I walk out there, and then what?

I can’t go to Daxeel’s home. Hemlock is not for me anymore.

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