Ami stared back, then dropped her gaze to my arm. “What does that mean for her?” Then she jumped up. “If she’s anything like you after a healing session, she’s going to be dead on her feet.”
She flew out the door and I followed—more slowly, but far faster than I’d have guessed I’d be capable of. I didn’t have to chase her far. Ami stood in the hall, then glanced back over her shoulder with a smile. The torchlight danced through her tumbling curls and her eyes danced with amusement and love.
My heart turned over, and I had to catch my breath at the emotion she stirred in me.
Holding my injured arm tight against my chest, I eased up behind her to find Stella, still naked, curled up in a ball in the middle of the hallway, little fingers tucked firmly in her mouth, fast asleep.
“We’ll have to watch her,” I murmured with a sigh. “She’ll want to heal anyone she perceives as hurting. It won’t be good for her growth if she drains herself too much or too often.”
Ami crouched and gathered her daughter up, pressing a kiss to the girl’s brow. “Not just anyone,” she said, then fastened her gaze on me. “She loves you. We all do, you know.”
Why that sounded like an accusation, I didn’t know.
“Since you’re up and so spry,” she continued, “you can join me for supper. Half an hour in the main hall.”
“I—”
“Your queen commands you,” Ami cut me off in an arch tone. “And take a bath. Nilly is right about that. You stink.”
11
Though I minded the high-handedness of Ami’s command, it did feel good to bathe. Skunk hauled in water for me and I used the queen’s own brass tub to scrub more than four days of fever stink and old blood off of me. Ami’s bed was a mess, now that I had my head again enough to notice, so I wryly suggested that Skunk might get some of the maids up to change the sheets and freshen the chambers while I was out.
I’d fouled her bed long enough. Which very well might have been Ami’s intent in prying me out of her chambers to go down and eat in the first place.
Skunk helped me dress in some loose fitting pants and shirt in Avonlidgh purple, which made me think they’d been Hugh’s. But my own clothing consisted mainly of fighting leathers and a couple more formal uniforms Ami had arranged for me, so I wouldn’t shame her. Those were in a nondescript soft black. Dressing me in Avonlidgh colors would be as problematic as me wearing Tala bloodred. And of course, I still had the white robes of my order, folded at the very bottom of my trunk.
So many allegiances, none of them exactly my own. But that had ever been my life. Part-blood, never more than half in any world, never fully belonging to anything. Except in prison, ironically enough. There I fit right in, along with every other mostly savage man incarcerated with me.
I didn’t object to the clothes, though I was taller than Hugh had been, so the cuffs came up a bit short on me. Stuffed into my worn indoor boots of folded Tala leather, the pants didn’t look so bad, and with my arm in the sling Skunk helped me fashion, I ended up rolling the shirtsleeves up anyway.
The good thing about having a man like Skunk assist—he didn’t blink when I asked for my short blade. He helped me cinch the belt over my shirt so I could reach the blade easily with my good hand. Finally I didn’t feel naked.
I’d rather have my sword, but I wouldn’t be able to draw it in my current state. For the first time since I got a good look at the injury, though, I felt optimistic that I might be able to use that arm again—with Stella’s healing help. Hopefully what she’d instinctively done already would make all the difference. I wouldn’t call on her again. She was far too young to drain herself so. Over time, she’d learn to pace herself, and to build in time for the deep sleep needed for recovery from healing another. Right now, though, she needed her energy to grow into an adult, not to help others.
Spoiling her won’t help her character any. I should know.
Had Ami been like Stella at that age? I didn’t think so. Ami had been motherless, raised by her much older sisters, and—with her celebrated beauty apparent even at birth, so the stories went—a petted darling of the court. She didn’t have Stella’s inherent Tala wildness or the compassion of being an empath. But behind that bright and laughing fa?ade, Ami was sensitive in ways most people didn’t perceive.
I contemplated that as I walked down to the main hall, wending my way through Windroven’s twisting stone corridors and down steps with gentle divots at the center, engraved by generations of footsteps. People had lived here at least four centuries, so perhaps Ami was right, the ever-present rumbling of the volcano might mean nothing.
But then again, those had been centuries when magic had been confined behind the barrier around Annfwn. Not eddying and surging as it was these days, waking all sorts of monsters. Like those wolf creatures, wherever they’d been conjured or created from. And very likely, given what had happened at Nahanau, a dragon sleeping in the depths below us.
What staff remained in the castle had been busy, apparently, for the graceful old hallways were draped with new-looking silk moonflower garlands, dangling with crystals carved to look like snowflakes. No doubt those were the duchess’s contribution. White candles burned in antique sconces tarnished black with age and set in niches that seemed to have been designed for exactly that purpose. Those might be as old as the walls they decorated. There was a comfort in that, the continuity of it. Something, I reflected, that had never been a part of my life.
Perhaps that’s what Ami had connected to at Windroven. In many ways, she had little more history than I did. Daughter of an upstart conqueror who built his castle on the bones of another, and daughter, too, of a queen who had abandoned her people to live in a foreign land.
Endings and new beginnings were part of the celebration of the Feast of Moranu. In my youth, we all helped clean our small cottage from top to bottom. The scent of soap and vinegar unexpectedly came back to me, a background for the spiced bread my mother baked and the hot wax of candles my parents lit at sundown. Then we wrote or drew images of what we wanted to leave behind with the old year, things we felt bad about or wrongs done us that we needed to let go of.