Page 32 of The Crown’s Temptation

Tamal.

She reaches up and kisses him and he kisses her back and when she pulls away she is still smiling.

"I must get back to the ship," she says. "Or Eravic will be cross."

"Stay," he says.

"I cannot." She stands and straightens her dress. "You know I cannot."

He catches her hand. Holds it. "I am doing what is necessary," he says quietly. "To get the key."

She looks at him.

"I know you are," she says. She squeezes his hand once. "I know."

She turns toward the door. I press myself against the corridor wall. She passes within inches of me and does not see me and her footsteps fade down the corridor and are gone.

Tamal stays on the edge of the bed.

He puts his head in his hands.

I stare at him. I think about what he just said. I think about Maridale laughing on that bed and about Eravic's ship and about the woman who brought me fresh linens and sat with me in the dark and told me I could trust her being here in Yorali looking rosy-cheeked and kissing the prince of Yorali. I feel sick because the pieces will not form into anything I can hold.

From down the corridor, Nox has gone silent.

That is somehow worse than the screaming.

I push off the wall and run back toward the door.

Marrow

TEORIN

Darkway Palace, Morrath

He had the procedure done in her room.

The healer had suggested his own chambers twice. He had not responded either time and eventually she had stopped suggesting it and prepared him where he was.

It was not painless. Bone marrow extraction from a living feeder was not a procedure with a comfortable version, the needle long enough to reach the center of things, the draw slow, the body's resistance real even in someone with his healing capacity. He lay beside Asharin and looked at the ceiling and did not make noise about it because there was no one in the room worth making noise for.

Feeder marrow was not infant blood. It would not give her what infant feeder blood would--strength and the ability to leave Morrath. But it was richer than what ran through veins, older in the way that marrow was older than blood, and it was what he had. The healer administered it carefully, watching Asharin's color, watching her chest, watching for any response.

There was none. Not yet.

He could not move his legs properly when it was done. That was expected. He lay where he was.

He thought about the last time he had been beside her like this. After her brother and his friends had tried to kill her. He had sworn to himself that no harm would ever come to her again. And yet, here she was.

He hated himself for that, though he hated Colsar more.

He slept for two days.

When he woke he could not walk. That passed by the third day. By the fourth he could sit up and by the fifth he was watching her eyelashes again because that was what he had been doing and he saw no reason to stop.

On the fifth evening they moved.

Just slightly. The faintest twitch, the kind that could have been involuntary and probably was. He did not call for the healer. He sat forward and watched and said nothing.