Seraphine's POV
The boy was still breathing.
She kept her hand on his back and counted each breath, one by one. In. Out. In. Out. Slow and steady now, not the wet rattle sound from before. The fever was subsiding. She could feel it leaving him as the warmth leaves a stone at sunset—slowly, then all at once."He's going to be alright," she said to the mother.
The woman, Maren, cried so hard she couldn't talk. She only took Seraphine's hand and held it in hers. She had a firm hand. The grip of a person who had been hanging on for a very long time with nothing to hang on to.
Seraphine came to a halt.
She said nothing that was comforting. She had no words for this. In her life she had never been anyone someone clutched at in desperation. Decoration she had been. She'd been furniture. She had been the princess that nobody ever looked at.
This was different.
It seemed too real.
---
And then Maren led her inside. The room was small and warm and smelled of wood smoke, and something herby she couldn't place. A bowl of thin soup appeared in front of her without any ceremony. No one told her to sit up straighter. No one minded which fork she used. Maren just put the bowl down and said "Eat" like you say to a person, not a princess.
Seraphine was eating.
That first bite, she didn't realize how hungry she was. Then she remembered she hadn't had a real meal since yesterday morning. Even before the throne-room. From before her life was halved.
She kept eating and tried not to think of that
The pendant was warm against her breast. It was still beating, soft and slow, like a sleeping heartbeat. With two fingers she touched it through the clothes. It pulsed. That wasn't strange to her anymore. She wasn't sure what that meant for her first day in the Wastes.
She listened to Thornwall retiring for the night. Voices dying to silence. A door shutting somewhere. A child cried, a short cry, then silence. little noises. Normal noises. The kind she had never heard from inside the palace, because the walls were too thick and she was too far from where the real people lived.
And then, in the silence between sounds, she heard footsteps outside the fence stop.
She became still.
Kael.
She knew it was him, didn't know how. The footsteps had the same careful, deliberate weight she had followed through the dark trees. They'd pulled up just outside the Thornwall fence line. Not going anywhere. Not going in. Just stop it.
Why are you still out there?
She didn't say it out loud. Instead she pressed her fingers harder against the pendant and tried to understand why knowing that he hadn't left yet was doing strange things to her breathing.
She said nothing in reply. She put the question away with all the other things she was saving for later, when she had room to be properly afraid of things.
---
Maren showed her where she would sleep, a cot in a back room with a folded blanket. Seraphine opened her mother's pendant just a little, just enough for that green scent to come through, and sat on the edge of the cot. She did not come in. For a moment she let the smell of growing things fill the small room.
I'm still here, she told the thing. Her mom. Whatever version of her mother that garden held. I'm still around.
The pendant pulsed, once, warm and certain, and she closed it again.
She belittled herself. She thought she would not sleep.
"She was asleep.
---
She woke up and the door opened.
Not the front door! The door to the back room. The one that led straight to where she was sleeping.
Seraphine sat up abruptly, her heart racing, her hand already on the pendant. The room was without light. The only light was the gap under the door and the faint silver glow her own hands were giving off without her permission. That new mana thing, leaking out when she was startled. She flattened her palms against the blanket to cover it.
Someone came in.
Not Maren. (2) Too high. Too large in the shoulders. One of Kael's scouts – she recognized the gray and black uniform even in the dark. The one who had bent the longest and lowest outside the gate. His head was bowed. He was not looking at her.
Four steps carried him across the room; he put something on the little table beside her cot and turned to go, making no sound."Wait," Seraphine said.
He paused. Did not look back."What is that?
Stop. Pause.'From the border post,' he said. His voice was low and hoarse, as if he had not spoken much. Provisions.From Kael?
The scout said not a word. Which was its own sort of reply.
He went.
Seraphine stared at the bundle on the table for a long moment. Then she went to open it up.
Jerky. A complete skin. It was a piece of dark cloth, folded, heavy and thick, the kind that kept real cold out. She grabbed the cloth. It was hot. Not the after warmth of something stored close to fire.
Hot body.
Like someone had worn it very recently and took it off specifically to send it here.
She sat with it for a long time in the dark.
Kael waited outside the Thornwall fence until he was certain she was in and safe. Then he sent his scout in with food and water and his own cloak.
And he had not left a note. He didn't ask for anything. He hadn't told her while he was doing it. He had just done it, quietly, in the dark, making believe to everyone, perhaps himself also, that he wasn't doing it at all.
Seraphine held the soft cloth in her hands.
You are going to be a problem she thought toward wherever he was right now. You know that much.
She threw the cloak over her shoulders and went back to lying down.
She was almost asleep again when she felt it. The pendant, throbbing hard. One time. Two times. Not the soft sleep rhythm of before. Severe. Critical. Like a sort of warning.
And beneath the pulse, something else.
A noise.
Low and deep, from somewhere far below the floor. Under the earth. Like something very big, very old, very awake had caught sight of her.
And was getting closer.