Page 142 of Bone Year

“Rose.”

“It’s fine.”

“How long?”

I shift my weight off it, and the relief is embarrassing. “Maybe an hour. It’s the cold making it worse. It’s not that bad.”

“Sit down.”

“Draven—”

“Sit down or I am going to make you sit down, and you will not enjoy how I do it.”

I roll my eyes.

There’s a fallen log by the path, mostly clear of snow, and I drop onto it with as much dignity as I can manage, which is none. He turns and crosses to me in three long strides, and he’s already crouching in front of me by the time I’ve gotten my pant leg up over my boot.

He doesn’t speak as he unwraps the binding. The swelling has come back. My ankle has gone the color it was yesterday before he wrapped it, dusky and angry where the bone meets the joint, and he runs a thumb along it with that same careful efficiency he had when he wrapped it.

I look at the trees instead of at him.

“You should have said something an hour ago.”

“It wasn’t bad an hour ago.”

“You were limping forty minutes ago.”

“You were watching me limp for forty minutes. Do you have vampire eyes in the back of your head now?”

“I was listening to you limp.” He glances up at me, unamused. “Your stride changed. I am not deaf.”

I can feel my face getting warm and tell myself it’s the wind.

He finishes rewrapping, sits back on his heels, and looks up at the sky for the first time since we left the chapel. I follow his gaze. The clouds I noticed before we left have thickened and turned ominous. The light has gone flat in a way I don’t like, and the wind has picked up enough that the tops of the pines are bending in long, slow arcs.

“What is that?” I ask.

“That’s a storm.”

“How bad?”

“Bad.”

He looks back at me, serious in a way that has nothing to do with my ankle.

“How bad, Draven?”

“Storms in the Frostlands build out at the edge of the ice fields and then they come down all at once. We have an hour, maybe less. I’ve been watching it since we left the village, and it’s moving faster than I thought it would.” He looks at my ankle. “You’re not going to make it back to Ashwell tonight.”

“I can make it.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Alucard—”

“Rose, I’m not asking. We are not making it back tonight. You are not going to limp through a Frostlands blizzard on a sprain that has already gone bad once today, and I’m not going to carry you for six hours through a whiteout to prove a point.”

I open my mouth then close it. He’s right.