Страница 57 из 90
CHAPTER NINETEEN I CAN’T SWIM
We left the i
But no matter how hard I squinted, I could not see Aisling.
“There’s a spot at the base of that.” Rory pointed a finger up at the nearest looming peak. “Hot springs. Hot enough to ease some of the ache your muscles are undoubtedly feeling after three days of hauling ass.”
I stopped mid-step. “My muscles are fine.”
“Mine aren’t.” Rory chuckled. “It’s grueling work, getting you into fighting shape.” He turned. Noted my stillness. “That’s a bad joke, Diviner. You’re ready for tomorrow.”
“That’s not why—” My cheeks burned. “Don’t laugh.”
The echoes of his chuckle still lingered in the air. “I’ve never laughed in my life.”
The breeze picked up, reaching its fingers into my clothes, goading a confession. “I can’t swim.”
He surprised me with the gift of silence. And it was a gift, because I didn’t want to say out loud that it would have been as arbitrary as everything else that happened at Aisling Cathedral, teaching a girl intended to drown how to swim.
Perhaps he already understood that, and the silence was for both of us to put that ugly truth somewhere private.
All Rory did, in his usual half-hearted way, was shrug. “That’s no trouble.”
I expected the hot springs to smell of rotting flowers. They didn’t. They smelled of earth. Hidden in the shadow of the mountains, steam rising off them like tired old ghosts, sat a cluster of pools.
Rory led me to the largest. I was about to ask him if he’d come here many times before when he reached down, gripped the hem of his tunic.
Yanked it over his head.
My gaze followed where muscles cusped his spine, then moved to the two small dimples just above the rim of his pants. I hadn’t seen him bare like that since his first night at Aisling. Back when I thought him the foulest knight in all of Traum.
And maybe he still was, because Rory was currently flinging off his boots and reaching for the leather clasp around his pants. Tugging it—
“What the hell are you doing?”
He peered over his shoulder. Whatever he saw on my face, the panic, the heat, made him smile. “Feel free to avert your virtuous eyes.”
His pants hit the ground.
Water splashed, steam billowed, and then all I could see of Rory was his head, his neck, the lines of his clavicle, peeking out of the hot spring.
He stretched his arms over his head and let out a moan that made me bite down. “Good for what ails you.”
He fixed me in his gaze. Twirled his hands and bowed exaggeratedly. “Wouldst the lady join me?”
“Why are you so a
“Why are you afraid to get in? I am standing in the deepest point—no swimming required.” His eyes flittered over my nightshirt. “If it’s about protecting my i
“How mortifying for you.”
He slapped a hand over his eyes and turned around, proffering me privacy and another view of his sculpted back. “Never said that.”
I thought of bold Four. How, if she were here, she’d already be naked, and the other Diviners would inevitably follow, Two grumbling, Three and Five half-timid, half-excited, and One sighing as she held her arm out to me. “Come on,” she’d say. “Someone has to mind them.”
Loneliness touched everything. And the aching beauty of the peaks, the pools, the incomparable night sky, made it so much worse.
I put a hand to my heart—to the five invisible cracks that lived there—and began to unbutton my shirt. It fell to the ground, pooling around my bare feet. Next off were my undergarments, and then I was exhaling shakily, crossing my arms over my breasts, thighs pressing together—naked under the silver moon.
Rory kept his back to me, shoulders tightening.
The pool was warm, as if it had its own feverish heart, working faster than mine. I waded into the ripples until I wore the water like a new dress. “You can turn around now.”
He waited a breath. When Rory faced me, the derision I’d come to know him by was absent, the lines of his brow smoothed, eyelids almost heavy. “You’re nervous.”
I flicked water in his face and rolled my shoulders and damn it, he was right. The water was good for what ailed me, a balm over aching muscles. I rubbed my neck—let my head fall back.
“Where are you sore?” Rory lifted an accusatory finger out of the water. “Don’t bother denying it. How’s the wrist?”
I could toss the Artful Brigand’s coin with both hands, but never perfectly with my left. So I’d spent the last three days using my right, resulting in an ache in the joint that never seemed to quiet. “It’s fine.”
He gave me a champion sneer, and I laughed. “It aches. A little.”
“Not half as much as that confession, I’ll wager.” He drifted closer, closer, until he was an arm’s length away. “May I?”
Everything was languid. Slow. As if night itself had dipped its long finger in the pool and stirred the water backward. I held out my arm and Rory took my wrist with such startling care I exhaled sharply. His gaze rose. And it was impossible to tell with eyes already so dark, but his pupils seemed to widen over me.
Then his fingers were moving, pressing, intricate and purposeful over the soreness of my wrist. I let out a heavy noise and Rory nodded, like he understood the language of pain and reprieve. “Is this all right?”
Just a whisper. “Yes.”
Lines drew between his eyes. Rory took to my muscles with honed precision, firm fingers, insistent but never prodding, like it was important to him—a craft to do well. Just like when he’d measured me for armor, I studied him. Ran my gaze down his face, neck, chest.
I wondered if his ribs were still bruised. “What about you?” I reached out. Drew a finger up his side. “Are you still in pain?”
He shivered. “Near you? Always.”
“Your ribs, you idiot. From getting caught stealing Aisling’s spring water.”
“Hmmm—that. It still aches. A little.”
I frowned, thinking of him in pain. Of him, thieving as a boy. We’d both been foundling children, both taken under the wings of Omens—the abbess, and the Artful Brigand. But where the abbess had put me in gossamer and made me exceptional, Rory had endured the opposite. And it seemed so impossible he should have come to know Benji’s grandfather, met Maude, become a knight—and that I had purposely chosen the short straw that day. Lingered along the Aisling wall. Looked down, seen him.
I was losing my faith in everything. But the two of us meeting… it felt almost divine.
“What was it like?” I asked. “Killing the Artful Brigand?”
“Years in the making—and over in a moment.” His fingers moved up to my forearm. Again he asked. “May I?”
He waited at the gate of every place he touched until I granted him entry. And as Rory soothed the muscles he’d help make sore, I wondered if I should tell him I did not always think him so unknightly. That his unwavering belief in me during our training had not gone u
Errant knight Rodrick Myndacious, prideful, disdainful, godless, believed in me.
The charcoal around his eyes had been rubbed away, his black hair dropping trails of water down his clavicle, his chest. “How are your feet?” he asked. “Can’t be easy, wearing those fine boots day in, day out.”
“You touch my feet, you die.”
A wicked smile unraveled over his mouth. Rory snatched a hand under the water. I drew back, kicking to the surface, splashing him. He laughed. When I aimed another kick he caught my ankle, pulled—
I slipped.
I spread my arms, but the water was without pity, giving me nothing to cling to. I fell backward.
And suddenly it was not a hot spring I was falling into, but the spring at Aisling Cathedral. Pressed down by the abbess. Opening my mouth, taking putrid water into my lungs, waiting for pain, for dreams, for stone objects and the terrifying presence of the Omens—
A hand found the back of my neck.
I was thrust out of the water. “I’ve got you. Breathe, Diviner.”
I hauled in air. When I opened my eyes, I expected to see the rose window high in Aisling’s cloister. But all I saw was the moon, hovering in its dark heaven. The moon—and Rory.
“I didn’t think.” He pushed my hair out of my face, careful of my shroud, and kept his hand at the nape of my neck as my feet found the rocks at the bottom of the pool.
I coughed. “It’s fine—”
“It’s not lost on me how terrible I’ve been. Growing up under the Artful Brigand—” He said it in a gasping rush, like it was he who’d been underwater. “I’m discourteous and utterly poisoned by contempt. I know that.” His throat hitched. “And I don’t know how to behave around you. You make me so fucking nervous. But letting you fall underwater when all you ever did at Aisling was drown, I—”
“Myndacious.” I reached up. Put a hand over his mouth. “It was an accident.”
He nodded too fast and wouldn’t look at me.
My hand slid to his cheek. “Rory.”
Silver moonlight painted his hair, his nose, the lines of his brow, and when Rory glanced down, I saw a misery in his eyes. I’m sorry, he mouthed.
And just like that, another crack fissured in my heart.
“We should go back,” he said after a drawn silence. “You need your rest for tomorrow.”
“Not yet. Can you—” I didn’t want it to end like that, him riddled with guilt, me thinking of drowning. “My right shoulder,” I managed. “It’s a little sore.”
His focus drifted down my neck. Slowly, he reached for my shoulder.
I relaxed into his touch and let my head fall back. I looked up at the sky, the thousands of stars stitched upon a vast purple tapestry, reveling in the sensation of being held up in water and not pressed down.
“Your hair is pretty,” Rory murmured. “Like moonlight. And your skin is so soft. But beneath…” He kneaded my muscle. “If I were to bite down, I’d break my teeth on you.”
“If you were to bite down,” I said to the sky, “your bottom teeth would leave a crooked mark, unique as your fingerprint.”