Thief With No Shadow (39 page)

He reached the door finally, clutching at the frame and hauling himself inside. The colt needed water, needed some of Gaudon’s hay, but first...

“Liana.” His voice cracked and broke. Something in his chest did too.

He heard light footsteps in the corridor, running, and Liana was standing in the doorway,
standing
,and then she was in his arms and he was crying. He who never cried, cried.

It was a dream. It couldn’t be real.

Bastian held her tightly, his injured leg forgotten. “You’re all right. You’re all right.”

Liana said nothing. She clutched him, trembling and alive and uninjured.

Everything was all right. Nothing mattered, nothing except Liana, and she was all right. Bastian stroked her hair. “The psaaron didn’t...it didn’t...”

Liana pulled away. She looked up at him. Distress twisted her face. “It took Hantje.”

“What?”

“Hantje made it punish him instead. He said he was a thief and he’s
not
, he’s never stolen anything!” She was crying, as fiercely as she’d cried when she was a child, gulping and choking. Bastian gathered her in his arms again. “It hurt him. He was bleeding so much.”

He held her tightly and pressed his face into her hair.
Thank you, Hantje.

He’d underestimated the wraith, both the wraiths, had underestimated their courage and their honor.

Bastian closed his eyes.
I make too many mistakes.

Endal was at his side, yelping in pleasure at his return, pressing against his thigh, telling him that he’d run as fast as he could but the sea monster had gone, that he’d stayed with Liana as he’d asked and kept her safe.

Bastian opened his eyes. The necklace lay on the kitchen table, a coil of blue-green stones, abandoned. He experienced a moment of blankness, a moment when disbelief stopped the beating of his heart.

The curse was unbroken.

There’d been no point. The running, the mud and the rain, the blood. He hadn’t saved Liana, hadn’t saved Vere. And Melke was gone.

Hantje hadn’t left Liana. He’d saved her.

“Will he live?” His voice was rough.

She didn’t answer, just wept.

Bastian held her from him and shook her. “Liana, tell me. Will he live?”

He’d never seen such brightness in her eyes before, such grief. “Where’s Melke?” she asked.

Bastian closed his eyes in shame. “The salamanders have her.”

“Is she dead?”

Probably.
“I don’t know.”

She pulled away from him.

He opened his eyes and reached for her. “Liana.”

But she was walking across the kitchen, down the corridor.

Bastian followed, staggering, limping, leaning against the wall. “Liana.”

She stood in the doorway to the sickroom, her back to him.

“Liana.”

He saw what she saw: the wraith, Hantje, lying in the bed asleep. A sheet was pulled up to his chin. There were bloodstains on the white linen and blood at his mouth, where his lower lip was bitten through. His thin face was slack with exhaustion, pale and tear-stained.

“He’s alive,” Liana whispered. “But if Melke dies, he’ll... He’ll do what father did.”

Bastian understood what she saying. The guilt would be too much, the grief. Hantje would kill himself.

“I’ll go for her,” he said roughly. “If she’s alive, I’ll bring her back.”

Liana turned her head to him. Her eyes were bright with tears. “Now?”

He gestured to his knee, bound with strips of cloth torn from his shirt. The trouser leg was stiff with dried blood. “First you must heal me. And the horse.”

Liana uttered a choked cry. “Bastian, I didn’t see!”

“No matter.”

Hantje mattered. And Melke. He’d made the wrong decision at the salamanders’ den. He had to correct it.

I
T WAS NEARLY
dusk when Bastian left the farm. Endal stayed behind, guarding Liana, guarding the necklace.

He let the colt set the pace. He wouldn’t make the mistake of rushing again, of injuring himself or the horse.

Too many mistakes.

None of this would have happened if he’d found his courage earlier, if he’d accepted the salamanders’ offer and bartered his body for the necklace.

He rode across Arnaul’s bridge, above roaring dark water, and turned east, towards Thierry, towards the salamanders’ den. There was no rain, just mud, and no clouds to conceal the stars. The moon was his friend tonight, cold and bright. It illuminated the way, showing each dip in the road, each hollow and puddle and rut. He didn’t pull his collar high at his throat or avert his eyes.

Moon shadows and moonlight, moon time, time for wraiths. But wraiths had more courage than he did and they had honor, deep honor.

The night blurred into long miles and weariness and mud. Then came dawn, gray through the trees. He saw the salamanders’ valley in the pale light of the newly-risen sun.

Bastian slid from the saddle. He lurched and almost fell, grabbing hold of the colt’s mane. His body trembled with fatigue and his mind flinched from thought of what came next. Salamanders couldn’t change their gender at will, like a psaaron. The adult was female, would never be male, could never rape. Even so, he couldn’t think directly of what he had to do, of what it would entail. He shrank from it, feared it.

Water first. And he must find where Melke had hidden the horse she’d hired in Thierry. “Come, boy.” He clicked his tongue and the colt came willingly, flecked with mud and sweat.

Water to drink, then he’d wash the dirt from his body and do what he had to do. Hantje had shown him how, just as he’d shown him what courage was.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

L
IANA WOKE WITH
a start, slumped in the chair. Hantje was sobbing in his sleep.

“Hush,” she said, blinking back dark dreams. She leaned forward to touch his cheek. “Hush. It’s all right.” It was a lie, but the words quieted him. The soft sobbing stopped.

Dawn was faint behind the curtains. The candles had burned down to mere stubs, refusing to go out, stubborn. The bloodstained sheet had slipped from Hantje’s shoulders, baring torn flesh. Liana laid her fingers lightly on the wounds and felt the heat, the swelling.

She had slept too long.

She didn’t need the salve to heal him, but Hantje protested less if she used it. He didn’t struggle up from sleep and try to push her hand away. It was as if the scent of herbs made it all right for her to touch his body.

Liana healed his lower lip first, gently, smoothing on the ointment, taking the pain away and easing the swelling, knitting his flesh. She healed his shoulders next, coaxing the savage puncture wounds closed and shooing away infection. She willed him well, wishing for smooth, cool skin beneath her fingers, for flesh unswollen and untorn.

She felt his pain, a stinging prickle beneath her skin, and she felt more than that, she felt
him
, a sense of who he was that swelled inside her. Hantje.

The tiny rips where the psaaron’s scales had torn his skin were closed, half-healed. They needed only the lightest touch. But where the psaaron had raped him...

Hantje whimpered in pain, trying to twist away from her fingers. Distress contorted his face. His eyelids almost opened. “Shhh,” Liana whispered. “Sleep.” She pressed her lips to his cheek and said it in her mind:
Shhh, sleep.

Where he’d been raped the healing was the hardest. Blood still trickled sluggishly. She touched him lightly, taking his pain, willing him to heal.
Let flesh knit and become whole. Let blood stop oozing. Let infection become nothing. Let him be well.

The magic that was rooted deep inside her flowed from her fingertips. It soaked into Hantje as rain soaked into soil and he healed, as slowly as the blossoming of a flower.

When she had nothing left to give, Liana drew the sheet over Hantje and sat back in the chair, clutching at the seat. The room was dark, lit only by sunlight swelling behind the closed curtains.

She stumbled as she stood, almost tipping the chair over. Her hands shook as she washed them in the basin, as she drew open the sun-warmed curtains. Light fell into the room, sudden and bright.

Liana stood, swaying. She wanted to lie down on the floor and sleep, here, where the carpet was so thin she could see the floorboards beneath.

Blood stained the carpet, splashes that looked like red petals scattered on the floor.

Hantje’s blood.

He lay in the bed facing her, curled up on his side, deeply asleep. His eyelashes were dark shadows against his cheeks and his lower lip was swollen, red.

She knew who he was, knew him as well as he knew himself, knew his regrets and his deepest fears, knew his most precious dreams.

She should climb the stairs to her bedroom and lie in her own bed, but that would mean leaving Hantje.

He stirred as the mattress sank beneath her weight, muttered as she crawled to lie behind him, clumsy with fatigue, above the sheet, not touching him. It was all right to lie like this and not touch, to sleep.

Liana closed her eyes. Exhaustion pressed her into the mattress. Her limbs were heavy, leaden.

Soft sobs tugged her back from the edge of sleep.

“Shhh.” She struggled to open her eyes.

Hantje wept, dreaming.

She laid her hand on his arm, but still he sobbed.

“Hush,” Liana whispered. “Sleep.” She moved closer to his warmth, making the mattress dip and creak, and put an arm around Hantje, holding him. “Shhh.”

Her hand lay over his heart. She felt his heartbeat through the sheet and she felt him, Hantje, his honesty and his courage, the gentleness that he hid inside himself. She knew him. Knew that he shied away from anger and that he liked to laugh, knew the streak of mischief that twisted inside him, and knew that he was drowning in despair and that he didn’t want to wake up, ever.

She felt his emotions for her, sweet and deep and confused, and she felt his fear of the dark, sharp, and his fear of being alone. She held his heartbeat in the palm of her hand and knew him, knew that he was a man who didn’t like to shout, a man who hid his fears behind jokes and smiles, who was proud but not vain, not arrogant. Honorable. Despairing. A man who hated himself.

Hantje slept. His heart beat slowly and steadily beneath her hand. She no longer heard his sobs but she knew that in his dreams he wept.

“Don’t cry,” Liana whispered. “Hush.” She pressed a kiss to the nape of his neck. There was tangled hair beneath her lips, and warm skin, and in her nostrils the smell of herbs and blood and the lingering stink of the psaaron. And beneath those, faintly, Hantje’s scent, male and subtle.

Liana closed her eyes. “Sleep, Hantje. Sleep.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

B
ASTIAN BEAT HIS
fist on the thick door. The metal rang dully.