Cristina came out of Emma’s bedroom looking somber.
Mark caught a glimpse of the room before the door closed behind her: He saw Emma’s still form, looking small beneath a pile of heavy covers, and Julian sitting on the bed beside her. His brother’s head was bent, his dark hair falling to cover his face.
Mark had never seen him so miserable.
“Is she all right?” he asked Cristina. They were alone in the corridor. Most of the kids were still asleep.
Mark didn’t want to remember his brother’s face when Julian had woken up near the quickbeam and seen Mark kneeling over Emma’s body, her stele in his hand, drawing healing runes on her lacerated skin with the shaking, unpracticed hand of someone long unused to the language of angels.
He didn’t want to remember the way Julian had looked when they’d come inside, Mark carrying Cortana and Julian with Emma in his arms, her blood all over his shirt, her hair matted with it. He didn’t want to remember the way Emma had screamed when the whip came down, and the way she’d stopped screaming when she collapsed.
He didn’t want to remember Kieran’s face as Mark and Julian had raced back toward the Institute. Kieran had tried to stop Mark, had put his hand on his arm. His face had been bleached and pleading, his hair a riot of black and despairing blue.
Mark had shaken off his grip. “Touch me again with your hand and you will see it parted from your wrist forever,” he had snarled, and Gwyn had pulled Kieran away from him, speaking to him in a voice that was equal parts sternness and regret.
“Let him be, Kieran,” he said. “Enough has been done here this day.”
They’d carried Emma into her bedroom, and Julian had helped lay her down on the bed while Mark had gone to get Cristina.
Cristina hadn’t screamed when he’d awoken her, or even when she’d seen Emma in her torn and blood-soaked clothes. She had gone to work helping them: She’d put Emma into clean, dry clothes, had retrieved bandages for Jules, had washed the blood from Emma’s hair.
“She will be all right,” Cristina said now. “She will heal.”
Mark didn’t want to remember the way Emma’s skin had opened as the whip had come down, or the sound the whip made. The smell of blood mixing with the salt of the ocean air.
“Mark.” Cristina touched his face. He turned his cheek into her palm, involuntarily. She smelled like coffee and bandages. He wondered if Julian had told her everything—of Kieran’s suspicions of her, of Mark’s inability to protect his brother or Emma.
Her skin was soft against his; her eyes, upturned, were wide and dark. Mark thought of Kieran’s eyes, like fragments of the glass inside a kaleidoscope, shattered and polychromatic. Cristina’s were steady. Singular.
She brought her hand down the side of his jaw, her expression thoughtful. Mark felt as if his whole body were tightening into a knot.
“Mark?” It was Julian’s voice, low, from the other side of the door.
“You should go in to your brother.” Cristina lowered her hand, brushing his shoulder once, reassuringly. “This is not your fault,” she said. “It is not. You understand?”
Mark nodded, unable to speak.
“I will wake the children and tell them,” she said, and set off down the hall, her stride as purposeful as if she were in gear, though she was wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms.
Mark took a deep breath and pushed open the door to Emma’s bedroom.
Emma lay unmoving, her pale hair spread out over the pillow, her chest rising and falling with steady breaths. They had used sleep runes on her, as well as runes to kill pain, stop blood loss, and heal.
Julian was still sitting beside her. Her hand was limp on the blanket; Julian had moved his own hand close to hers, their fingers interlocking but not touching. His head was turned away from Mark’s; Mark could only see the hunched set of his shoulders, the way the vulnerable curve of the nape of his neck looked like the curve of Emma’s back as the whip came down.
He seemed very young.
“I tried,” Mark said. “I tried to take the lashes. Gwyn wouldn’t allow it.”
“I know. I saw you try,” Julian said in a flat voice. “But Emma’s killed faeries. You haven’t. They wouldn’t have wanted to whip you, once they had the chance to whip her. It didn’t matter what you did.”
Mark cursed himself silently. He had no idea what the human words were with which he could comfort his brother.
“If she died,” Julian went on in the same flat voice, “I would want to die. I know that’s not healthy. But it’s the truth.”
“She won’t die,” Mark said. “She’s going to be fine. She just needs to recover. I have seen what men—what people—look like when they’re going to die. There is a look that comes over them. This is not it.”