Page 84 of The Courting of Bristol Keats
Cosette elbowed her way past Kasta. “We’re wondering if you had any ticks on you before you got here.”
Maybe Bristol was still wound tight from her experience in the maze, Braegor’s oozing eye still fresh in her memory. Or maybe it was Tyghan’s blood that still stained the front of her shirt that left her on edge. Maybe she was still crazed with worry about Rose and simply had no time for their nonsense. But something inside her snapped. She was tired of being sniffed at like she was an unwashed mutt. A messy inconvenience. Tired of being nothing. Now was not the time—
“No!” she shouted. “Believe it or not, we do bathe in my world! Regularly! I do not have any vermin—no lice, no fleas, no ticks! And if my scent isn’t to your liking, you can just cover your sensitive noses that have no place in my business to begin with. If you had any sense at all, you would know now is not the time to be asking me this! I’m not—” Her voice cracked. God, she hated it when that happened.
Tyghan stepped forward, his hands raised in a gesture of truce. “Keats,” he said softly, “we’re not talking about vermin. A tick is something else here. It’s a weapon. You probably saw Dalagorn shoot some into the forest when you came. They make the dangerous creatures scatter and clear the path—they don’t want to encounter a tick even for a few minutes. It settles deep beneath the skin. It doesn’t hurt. You can’t even feel it. Do you have anything on you, something small that you might mistake for a birthmark?”
They all stared at her, waiting. She remembered Dalagorn shooting his small innocuous arrows into the shadows, and then the skitter of something in the leaves and the squeal of creatures running away.
“Lots of people have birthmarks,” she answered.
“But do you?” Melizan asked.
She’d always had it on her lower back. It was pale, a tiny thing, smaller than her fingernail. Cat and Harper called it a ladybug. It was cute, they said.
“It’s only a birthmark. I’ve always had it. It’s nothing new.”
“How long?” Tyghan asked.
“Always.It’s always been there.”
Cosette sighed. “May we see it?”
Bristol took a step back. This was ridiculous.No.All this fuss over a tiny mark that was little more than an overgrown freckle?
Her chest tightened. They waited expectantly, including Tyghan.
She spun, her pulse racing, and yanked her shirt loose from her trousers. She lifted it partway up her back. Before she even exposed a few inches of skin, there was a gasp.
A hiss.
Then words she had never heard before that sounded like curses—and a few that definitely were.
Deivdas.
Kerdah.
Blazes.
Fuck.
Tyghan stepped close and pulled her shirt down. “We’ve seen enough.”
Bristol whirled around. Her heart banged in her chest. “What is it?”
Tyghan shook his head. “It’s not a birthmark.”
CHAPTER 58
They reconvened in Madame Chastain’s treatment chambers and Tyghan summoned the High Witch and Eris. The whole walk there, Bristol demanded to know what they saw, but Tyghan only said they would show her when they were in the privacy of the treatment chamber. Once there he continued to delay her viewing it, but she insisted.
“Would you like everyone to leave first?” Madame Chastain asked.
“No,” Bristol answered. What was the point? They already saw part of her back. Why not see it all? Dispel their doubts. Maybe it was only a bad bruise from when Braegor sent her flying to the ground. She landed hard. Her throat may have been healed, but she still had plenty of scrapes and cuts. Or maybe it was one of the branches that hit her as she was running through the maze. She and Rose were both battered by the trees tasked with their destruction.
Kasta held a mirror in front of Bristol, and Glennis angled a floor mirror behind her. While Madame Chastain snipped away the back of her shirt, Bristol was silent, her legs heavy and numb. She wished someone would laugh or that they would at least stop looking so solemn. My god, they had just had a battle with monsters. Of course she had cuts and bruises.
“It’s only a birthmark or a bruise,” she said again, trying to convince them, but her stomach churned.
