“I don’t have to read this out loud,” Roarke says, his voice a gentle rumble under my back.
“Yeah, you do. I want to know all about Vexy. From the first time she picked her nose to the reason she has a scar near her big toe.”
“What?” I ask, trying to lift my foot high enough to see past where Seth is using my middle as a pillow. A millow? “I don’t have a scar on my foot.”
He reaches out, grips my foot, and lifts it awkwardly into the air.
“Right there,” he says, pointing to my instep.
“I don’t know how I did that.”
“I bet you Eydis does,” he says letting go of my foot.
My heel slams down onto the timber, making me moan from the vibrating pain.
“She wasn’t watching her every move. This is more scientific,” Roarke says, ignoring me. As he talks, he flicks back and forth through the pages. “Almost scientific. For a Potion Master, I would have expected consistency. She has dates, rough guesses at growth rate and calculations compared to Silvari maturity rates –”
“Just read it,” Seth mumbles, opening his mouth wide – like he’s waiting for something.
For what?
Oh, chocolate. I snap off another chunk each, letting mine slowly melt on my tongue as Roarke begins to read.
Each word he says is a dance of sound that lightly steps into my mind, taps out a memory, then leaves an echo of tingles down my spine. And he does all of this so smoothly that soon, I don’t even notice the words. It all becomes a painting on the inside of my closed eyelids.
Something about a well-girthed woman… Cook.
Something about the barn fire that left Alfie orphaned and took the skin so badly from one hand that I had to hold him still while Cook sawed off three of his fingers.
Something about the Soot Day feasts that we held late every year – because Lord Martin always made the five day trip to the celebrations in Hirana as an honorable guest. So we’d unearth buried caches of liquor that had been waiting for years, depending on how well we remembered when to dig up which hole. We never had much to feast on, but we’d share the liquor, sitting in a circle, sipping from jugs and passing them on, singing and laughing. We danced around the fire until our legs couldn’t hold us up. The stars were bright, the world around us black. And life was better than good for that one night. Then we would fall asleep right there out in the open. With Lord Martin gone, it was like nothing could harm us.
We could always see the green mist shrouding the forest, not that we were close enough to smell it, but we could see it. We had no idea what was inside the forest.
Roarke turns the page, and the swish of paper against his fingers cuts into the bare second of silence.
“A black eye takes the child ten days to heal. A split lip three. More confirmation of her mortality ~ Eydis.”
“The knife wound took a week to heal,” Seth adds, his voice a deeper note through the room.
“You’re not getting a pen,” I tell Roarke before he can even think about getting up and taking notes. “Ever. No making notes about me. None of you, not about how I heal or anything else. Got it?”
And just to be sure they’re listening I add a Killian-like rumble to the end of my sentence. No words, just a rumble. I live trapped in a chuckin’ magical bubble, that's as close to a fish in a bowl as I ever want to be. They’re not recording any of this – not if they know what's good for them.
“Okay,” he whispers, stroking his fingers through my hair until I’ve stopped growling. Then he keeps reading.
The winter when it hardly snowed, and the fields turned to ice perfect for sliding and skating on. The spring when the sky lit up with shooting stars almost every night. Eydis watched from afar and noted my reaction. Watched me grow. Made calculated guesses at my height and weight.
And never once came to save me.
I know that’s stupid of me to think – I never met the woman, and I never expected her help. But she was watching.
And that twists me up inside.
“Vexy,” Seth says, his hand lacing up through his own hair and slipping underneath my fingers.
“I thought she was falling asleep,” Roarke says.
“No, she’s gone all tense and rigid.”
“There’s only two more pages,” Roarke says, then his voice lowers. “Can I read the last pages?”
I nod, letting Seth pull my hand free from my death grip on his hair and settling it underneath his chin.
“I feel like time is running out, but the girl shows no affinity with any magic, either mortal or Saber. If she touches flames, she burns. If she goes under the water, she drowns. We’ve tested her for every –”
“Wait, what?” I interrupt.
“I feel like time is running out –” Roarke begins to repeat, but I cut him off again.
“How old is this entry?” I ask.
“What does she mean tested?” Seth asks louder.
“No, what does she mean by we?” I demand.
Yep, this conversation has reached the point of demanding.
Roarke scans the Silvari scribbles before nodding. “It does say we, but it doesn’t mention who.”
“How old is it?” I repeat.
Roarke flicks back a page, then two, before answering. “This entry is from last month. Before that the previous entry is from three months ago.”
“Dustin,” I practically spit.
“Dustin?” both of them repeat. And neither of them sound delighted.
“Who’s Dustin?” Roarke asks.
“The water stores, the wash house, and the fires used to clean clothes are all on the western side of the Manor. Eydis can’t have seen me burn myself early in the summer, and she couldn’t have seen Martin hold me in the trough until Dustin made a scene about a snake.”
“Eydis had a Saber at the Manor?” Roarke asks, each word slowed by the racing
