Page 71 of Threadbound

Bran felt his cheeks heat slightly. He knew he’d lost weight, but he hadn’t thought it would be significant enough that Jamie would notice. “It isna so bad,” he replied, which sounded weak and pathetic even to him.

Jamie sighed, poking a few more noodles. “You can’t go back to eating garbage,” he said, and the firmness in his voice made it clear that he wasn’t going to accept Bran’s refusal. Annoyingly, Bran really couldn’t politely decline, either—one of the problems of being obligated was that one was obligated to do as one was told. So if Jamie told him he had to stay here again, he’d actually have to do it.

Which would only deepen his debt.

Bran wondered for a brief moment if he’d found himself trapped in a cautionary tale—the hapless victim of a conniving human seeking to exploit his magic for some sort of nefarious purposes.

Except that Jamie was about as far from nefarious as it was possible to be.

“I dinna want to owe you any more,” Bran replied softly. It wasn’t a refusal—just an explanation. If Jamie misunderstood and released him from the obligation to stay, all the better.

Jamie made a distressed sound, which only compounded Bran’s guilt. “Did you—Was it—How bad was it?” he finally asked.

Bran raised dark eyebrows. “How bad was what?”

“Recovery? Whatever you had to go through in… wherever you went.”

“Elfhame,” Bran answered absently. “I was… verra sick. For a while. My father and sister are both healers—our equivalent of doctors, I suppose. I…” He shifted, uncomfortable, and put a piece of biscuit in his mouth to buy time to figure out the right words to explain. “It took weeks before I was able to sit up. To eat solid food.”

“Shit,” Jamie breathed, and his bottomless blue eyes were wide with empathy. Bran tried not to let himself be drawn in by that, and mostly failed.

“I am… mostly recovered,” he said softly.

“Mostly?” Trust Jamie to pick up on that.

“Mostly,” Bran repeated. “I might still recover more.”

Jamie narrowed his gaze. “By half-starving to death eating out of trash cans?”

The annoying part was that the half-breed had a very valid point. “No,” Bran grumbled in response, then took another bite of the pasta, which Jamie had referred to as ‘mac ’n cheese.’ Bran liked it better than the other noodle dish Jamie had made, but whether that was the food itself or the fact that he was no longer dying—or, at least, not quite so quickly—Bran didn’t know.

“If you weren’t completely recovered, whydidyou come back here?” Jamie wanted to know, taking another bite of his own dinner.

Bran ate a few more bites, stalling.

He didn’t want to give Jamie the real answer because he knew it wasn’t going to be well-received.

But Bran couldn’t think of anything other than various versions of the truth. He could have lied, he supposed, but he already owed Jamie so much, he didn’t think it was fair to lie to him on top of the rest.

It was one thing to lie to a human you owed nothing to—particularly if that human was trying to use you, the way the stories talked about. But that wasn’t Jamie. Even knowing thatBran could spin things with magic, he hadn’t so much as asked for a biscuit—not that food was something that could be spun, or Bran wouldn’t have had his meal problem. Things with magicinthem weren’t spinnable, and most plantlife had magic in it. Pieces of some plants could be spun, as with cotton fibers or hemp or reeds. But most plant materials—leaves, flowers, fruits, even wood—had to be harvested. It all depended on where in the plant the magic lived.

The same rule applied to other natural things. Pure metal could be spun, except for iron. Leather and wool could also be spun, but not bone or flesh. It had to do, his father had explained patiently, with something’s magic potential. Skin—unless it belonged to a Selkie—didn’t have strong magical potential, unlike blood or flesh or bone. Hair and feathers did, but wool and most fur did not. Some stones—chalk, slate—could be spun, but not crystals or gemstones like obsidian or agate.

It was easy enough for a magus like Bran to know instantly whether or not something could be spun using magic—the tingle in his fingers, although erratic, told him that an object had magical potential. And there was a deadness to things that were neither magical nor spinnable—like plastic or glass or human steel. Gold and copper and silver, those he could spin. Iron he could not—iron, like some crystals, muted magic, and it was dangerous for fae to have too much contact with iron.

It was why Bran had been so worried about the fact that the doctors at the human hospital had wanted to give him blood. Fae blood didn’t have nearly as much iron as human blood. He’d asked his father, and Cairn had patiently explained that fae could be poisoned by too much of it—but that humans had and needed a lot more iron in their bodies. Bran had asked how it was that half-breeds could exist, and Cairn had replied that if the mother was fae, she would often be poisoned slowly by her own child and killed in the birthing of it. Human mothers fared betterbecause their bodies had no problem with iron. If they were going to die, Bran’s father had continued, it would be because of the child’s magic.

And that had spurred Bran to ask if all half-breeds had magic, to which Cairn had cryptically responded that he didn’t know many, but he’d never heard of a half-breed who hadn’t had at least some.

Bran had kept the bitter remark that he was tied to one who didn’t have any magic to himself.

Then Jamie cleared his throat, and Bran realized that his stalling had turned into rudely refusing to answer, even though that hadn’t been his intention. “Sorry,” the half-breed muttered. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t?—”

“Because of you,” Bran blurted, immediately regretting what had just come out of his mouth.Lugh damn it all.

“Me?” Jamie sounded a combination of worried and possibly offended.

“Not—I dinna mean—” Bran sighed, exasperated.

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