All's Fair in Revenge

Chapter 39: To Make a King

I sat in a pit. Snakes encircled me, wound me like twin or rope or vines. Thicker, stronger ones squeezed my throat like a noose. I screamed until each vocal cord popped like an ember.

"You're safe, Hana," hummed a smokey voice, softer than ash. Warmth enveloped me. It rocked me gently back and forth easing me into consciousness. "It's only a dream."

Awareness cresting, I felt the stickiness of sweat and tears soaking me through. Curled into Thorne, I quaked worse than dandelion grasped in a teetering toddlers chubby grasp. Thorne hummed a song into my hair, his arms fastened around me, keeping me from falling off Sleipnir. His voice, the peacefulness, the safety, all of it threatened to pacify me. I released his gauzy shirt gathered between my fingers and pushed him away.

"Stop it," I said, leaning as far away from his as possible. "Stop being so fucking nice to me." My calf caught on the saddle as I tried slipping off with Sleipnir still moving.

"Where are you going?"

The antivenin had done its job. The burning pain and inconsolable headache retreated. Dizziness flittered off to terrorize someone else. And while I'd technically recovered, my body felt off; like my soul was stuffed inside a too small parcel with parts of me squishing from its seams.

Thorne grabbed my hips and righted me. "Hana, you're going to hurt yourself." He tugged Sleipnir's reins, but the horse had already begun to stop on his own, as if he'd sensed it.

I smacked Thorne away. "Don't touch me!"

His hands immediately released before I found purchase on the horn. I screamed, tumbling into a heap and my knee scraping the ground. It bled in tiny, dotted pinpricks of varying sizes, a constellation of blood. But then, it didn't stop bleeding.

I felt the prickle of Thorne's gaze boring down at me from atop Sleipnir. I covered the spotty wound with my dirty palm and met his eyes. "You're not healing," he said, and it sounded not like an allegation but a plea.

I shook my head. "I'm not."

An hour after my tussle with the ground, my wound finally scabbed over. I poked it, the soreness spreading out over my skin like a ripple in the water.

"You shouldn't touch it," said Thorne. "Do they not teach you about infections in healer school?" He handed me a cup. "Again, bland, but hot."

Thorne had a fire blazing and a pot of water heating within minutes of my injury. He insisted on cleaning the cut first and then used the remainder for our tea. Twenty minutes after that, two skewered and skinned squirrels spun on handmade spit.

I took it from him with both hands, careful not to spill. The hot, damp cloth Thorne ran over my scrape had been enough to make me bite into my cheek. "Does it always hurt this long after the initial cut?"

"You've really never experienced a common scrape, have you?"

"Not since I was five or six. Long enough ago that I don't remember." I sipped the watery tea, the heat burning my tongue. It left a rough, somewhat scraped, feeling behind. Not a single spark of golden energy flickered. "Something's wrong with me."

"Yes, much. To which wrong are you referring?"

I whipped a glare at him. "The obvious one."

Thorne reached for my hands. He flipped them over and examined the blue stain around each cuticle. "Are we continuing to operate under the 'lightning hit the dome' lie?"