AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Osric mustered a weak laugh. “My blood isn’t burning you, is it?”
“It is very . . . warm,” Hali conceded. “But I can manage. It’s you I’m worried about.”
“Please. I’m fine,” Osric said, though he wasn’t certain he was being truthful. But he couldn’t let her see how much he was hurting, how close he’d come to . . .
He pushed the thought from his mind and forced a smile as he opened his eyes. Hali was staring at him, her lower lip caught between her teeth. She was trying to be strong, he knew, but there were tears brimming in her eyes, and it made his chest ache.
“I’m all right,” he said, reaching up to take her hand. “Thanks to you.”
Hali inhaled, and she looked away, her face flushing. “I—It was nothing. I just did what anyone would do.”
Osric doubted that very much. In his experience, most people would have run screaming at the first sight of the masks, the weapons, the raw hatred in their attackers’ eyes. But Hali . . . Hali had stood her ground, and fought, and if it hadn’t been for her, he hated to think what might have happened.
“You were very brave,” he said, and he meant it with all his heart.
Hali’s cheeks turned an even darker shade of red, and she busied herself with tending to his wounds. “So. Um. About the attack.”
“Yes,” Osric said. “It seems you were right.”
“I was?” Hali’s hands stilled, the cloth dropping into her lap. “Oh. Oh, my stars, I was, wasn’t I? I mean, not that I wanted to be right, of course, but . . .”
Osric smiled in spite of himself, and he reached up to take the cloth from her. He needed to do something, he realized, to help her focus, to keep her hands from trembling. “You had your suspicions about the Obsidian Circle. It seems this attack confirms them.”
Hali nodded, her eyes never leaving his. “But I still don’t understand. Why would they be after the grimoire? The one I bought at the auction?”
“You tell me. You said yourself it didn’t hold anything particularly interesting in its spells, but it’s clearly important to them, or at very least, they must think it is.”
“The code,” Hali muttered under her breath, then straightened up. “Sorry. It’s just—the way it’s marked up, every fifth letter. It feels like it’s a code, but for what, I can’t possibly imagine. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Not like the code we found in the book.”
She traced a finger over the dried blood on his cheek, and Osric sucked in sharply.
“I’m sorry,” Hali said. “I know it’s probably painful, but I need to clean it so it doesn’t get infected.”
Osric managed a nod, and braced himself for the sting as she pressed the damp cloth to his skin.
He bit back a curse, the muscles in his jaw working overtime to keep the pain from showing on his face. He’d endured far worse in his training with the Forge, but he didn’t want to worry Hali. She was already upset, and he was determined to get them through this night with as little fuss as possible.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Hali asked. “I mean, I know you Emberforged are supposed to have a higher pain tolerance, but that doesn’t mean you should have to suffer in silence.”
Osric shrugged, the movement awkward with one arm out of commission. “I suppose it’s all relative. I’ve had my share of injuries over the years, but nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“Nothing you couldn’t handle?” Hali repeated, her eyes wide. “What kind of injuries are we talking about here? I mean, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I am rather good at keeping secrets, if I do say so myself.”
Osric hesitated. He’d never been one to talk about himself, his past. The life he’d led before he came to the city, before he met Hali, it was a closed book, the pages sealed shut with his blood and his tears. But there was something about the earnest look on her face, the genuine concern in her eyes, that made him want to open that book, just a crack.
“During my apprenticeship, there were . . . accidents,” he said carefully. “Mistakes I made, when I was learning to control my powers. I burned myself, badly, more than once.”
“Oh, you poor prince,” Hali said, voice wavering. “That sounds awful.”
“It was a long time ago,” Osric said quickly. “I was . . . young, still learning. But it’s true, what you said. We Emberforged, we’re not invincible. We feel pain. We bleed.”
Hali nodded, and her hand found his, the one that wasn’t wrapped around his other arm. She laced her fingers through his, and for a moment, he forgot the pain, the weariness that was threatening to drag him down. For a moment, all he could think about was the warmth of her skin, the softness of her touch.
“What was it like? Your apprenticeship, I mean. Learning to control your powers.” Hali’s voice was a hushed whisper, as if she feared breaking the spell. “I can’t even begin to imagine.”
Osric hesitated. There were some things he could never tell her, not if he wanted to keep her safe. But there were other things, harmless things, that he could share. And he wanted to share them, he realized, with a sudden, startling clarity. He wanted her to know him, all of him, even the parts that were scarred and broken.
“It was . . . difficult,” he said at last. “Lonely, at times. I was the youngest in my cohort, and the only one of my kind. The others, they . . . didn’t always understand me. My powers, they were volatile, to say the least.”
