Chapter 4
"You're burning up," she whispered, her fingers lingering against his wrist where his pulse hammered. "Garrick, you have a fever. The poultice didn't catch the poison from the bolt."
"It's just the bog damp," he said, pulling away smoothly, though his eyes lingered on her face with that hungry, vigilant intensity. "Once we make the ridge, the wind will dry the rot out. Keep moving. We have twelve leagues before the Sunstone bluffs."
"You're lying," she said, stepping in front of him to block the narrow path. The moss squelched beneath her boots. "Let me check the stitches."
"Aveline—"
"Stand still," she ordered.
It was an instinctive snap of authority, born of sheer exhaustion. But the moment the sharp command left her lips, she saw the horrifying, mechanical click in his hazel eyes.
His jaw set. His shoulders squared. The rough, stubborn mercenary who had just been bantering with her vanished, replaced instantly by the obedient sentinel. He froze mid-stride, his chin tilting up slightly to bare his throat, his breath stalling in his chest until she gave him permission to exhale.
*Whatever you command.*
A bitter, copper taste flooded her mouth. Aveline swallowed hard, despising herself with an intensity that burned colder than the marsh water.
She reached up, her fingers trembling slightly as she unbuttoned the high collar of his leather duster. She pulled aside the coarse linen of his shirt.
The puncture beneath his collarbone was inflamed, the skin stretched tight and angry red around the black silk thread she had drawn through his flesh last night. A faint, greenish halo rimmed the wound—the telltale signature of arbalest oil, tainted to prevent clotting. But his immune system, unnaturally sustained by whatever frenzied vitality drove him, was fighting the rot like an army defending a breached gate.
"It's holding," she lied softly, adjusting the linen so the cold wind wouldn't bite into the torn muscle. "It's... holding. But you need rest. We can't keep this pace."
Garrick blinked. The strange, lifeless glaze melted away from his eyes as she touched his collar, replaced once more by an overwhelming, agonizing warmth. He lifted his hand and brushed a stray, damp tendril of dark hair from her forehead, tucking it behind her ear. His rough fingertips grazed the sensitive skin of her jawline.
Aveline’s breath hitched. A shiver rippled down her spine, not from the cold, but from the sudden, suffocating heat that bloomed between them.
"I will rest when we cross the Silverveil," he murmured, his gaze dropping to her mouth for a fleeting, reverent heartbeat before rising back to meet her eyes. "Until then, my legs carry both of us if they must. Do you trust me, Aveline?"
The question was a spear through her lungs.
*Do you trust me?*
*I made you,* she thought, the words screaming behind her clamped teeth. *I carved out your skull and poured devotion into the empty marrow. How can I trust a sword I sharpened with my own madness?*
"I trust you," she whispered, the lie tasting like crushed glass.
A faint, rare smile curved the corner of his chiseled mouth—a boyish, crooked thing that looked entirely out of place on a man whose hands had ended dozens of lives. "Then keep walking, little bird. The fog is rising."
***
They made camp when the twilight turned the mist from dull pewter to the color of bruised plums.
Garrick found a shallow recess beneath the overhang of an ancient, collapsed dolmen—two massive slabs of granite leaning together like praying hands, their surfaces bearded with pale lichen. It was dry enough, sheltered from the biting north wind that swept down from the jagged peaks flanking the mire.
He worked with quiet, methodical efficiency. While Aveline sat huddled on an oilskin tarp, nursing her aching shins, Garrick gathered dry pine needles and dead, resinous ironwood roots from the underside of the hollow. He struck sparks from flint and steel into a bird's nest of dried moss, shielding the newborn flame with his broad palms until a small, smoke-free fire danced between two flat stones.
The heat was instantaneous, small and sweet.
Aveline leaned toward it, extending her blue-tipped fingers over the amber glow.
Garrick unslung his travel pack, extracted their iron pot, and melted clean snow he had scooped from a high rock crevice on their ascent. He tossed in a handful of parched oats, two dried plums, and strips of smoked venison, letting it simmer into a thick, savory porridge.
It was a mundane, domestic routine. Over the past three months, they had performed it hundreds of times in caves, abandoned haylofts, and cellar ruins. Yet tonight, the intimacy felt razor-sharp. Every clink of the iron spoon against the pot, every soft breath he drew in the quiet shelter, felt magnified in the stillness of the bog.
"Eat," Garrick said, ladling the hot porridge into a shallow wooden bowl and pressing it into her hands. "You took barely three mouthfuls at noon."
"You need it more than I do," she argued, trying to pass the bowl back. "Your body is burning fuel just to seal that shoulder."
Garrick didn't take the bowl. Instead, he knelt down on the damp earth before her, his large frame fitting neatly between her drawn-up knees. He took the wooden spoon from her fingers, dipped it into the steaming mash, blew on it until the vapor parted, and lifted it to her lips.
"Garrick, I'm not a child," she protested, leaning back, her cheeks flushing hot.
"You're shivering," he said softly, his amber eyes fixed on hers with that devastating, quiet stubbornness. "And you spent half your strength today guiding my blind side. Eat, Aveline. Please."
The *please* was what broke her. The butcher of the borderlands, a man whispered of in garrison taverns as an unfeeling demon who took contracts on dukes and deserters alike, was kneeling in the mud, begging her to swallow a spoonful of oats.
She parted her lips and took the food.
It was warm, salty, and tasted faintly of woodsmoke.
A flicker of deep, genuine satisfaction passed over Garrick’s features. He fed her two more spoonfuls with that terrifyingly patient gentleness before handing the bowl back into her grasp. "Finish the rest. I’ll brew the willow-bark tea for the fever."
Aveline ate slowly, watching him as he tended the small tin kettle.
In the firelight, the hard angles of his face softened. The harsh stubble along his jaw was gilded with amber; the sharp, predatory curve of his nose and the deep scar that bisected his left eyebrow looked less like the marks of a killer and more like the weathered grain of ancient timber.
He had removed his heavy coat. His linen shirt hung loose over his chest, the top laces undone, revealing the thick bandage across his shoulder and the dark hair curling at the hollow of his throat.
She remembered the first time she had seen him.
It had been four months ago, in the courtyard of the sanctum at Oakhaven. The smell of burning books and roasting human fat had filled the air. He had stood amidst the flaming ruins of her sisters’ cloisters, his twin swords dripping black arterial filth, wearing the black-and-silver insignia of an Imperial contractor. He had looked at her not as a woman, not even as an enemy, but as a harvest—a terrified, cornered fugitive whose mind-magic fetched fifty gold sovereigns from the Inquisitor’s bounty cart.
