Page 54 of Keldori By Daybreak

“I think I can try something.”

“Blue—”

I prodded at the tether between us, wrenching my mind open to his, and Ciarán’s thoughts and feelings washed over me in a tangle of fear, apprehension, gratitude, curiosity, confusion, and—

Pain.

I gritted my teeth against the cutting agony that seared into my side.

“Wren!” Ciarán tried to sit up, and the pain cut deeper.

“Don’t!” I pushed him back, taking a moment to lean over him and catch my breath with my eyes screwed shut. “You have very good pain tolerance.”

“You can feel it?” he asked.

I nodded, my eyes still closed. Each rake of the rotsbane’s claws on Ciarán’s side burned as if they were my own injury, and as painful as it was, it told me what I needed to know.

Where Ciarán’s ribs were fractured. Where the claws had cut the deepest.

I straightened up and held my hands against his bloodied mess of flesh. The coagulated blood festering on Ciarán’s side warmed the palms of my hands, and when I pressed into the sticky wounds, I felt the imprint of my hands against my own side.

“If you make a flail grow inside me—” he warned.

“Don’t tempt me.”

But this was different than forming a weapon. This was more like a puzzle that needed to be solved.

Magick heated my veins, and I took one last steadying inhale before imagining something like embroidery working its way through the gashes.

The pain was sharper than it had been when Sorcha had tended to my injuries, and Ciarán tried to flinch away from my touch, but I held him steady and did my best to ignore the pain in my side that mirrored his.

It wasn’t sinew and flesh that I was weaving into his wounds, but an acellular matrix like Sorcha had described. It would work like a surgeon’s sutures, allowing Ciarán to heal around the patchwork, before dissolving into his soft tissue. It would work this way because I decided it would, and as far as I could tell, that was how the magick of Skalterra worked at its core.

Sheer, stubborn willpower.

I glided my hands up Ciarán’s side as I worked my way to his chest, feeling for his broken ribs. They were hard to find when so many of my own ribs were still fractured, and the pain of those injuries intermixed with the pain of Ciarán’s.

But Ciarán’s pain was ebbing, and I let it slide away so I could rely instead on the bruises that painted his chest to guide my magick. The scars of the last injury of his I’d tended to still stuck out against his pale complexion, and I could feel where they made his skin dip and wrinkle.

Ciarán shuddered, but the muscles in his face relaxed. His dark lashes fluttered open.

“Thank you, Wren.” His fingers wrapped around my hand where it pressed against his chest. “For this and for getting us out of the Second Sentinel.”

“You’re fine. I wouldn’t be much of a Saergrim if I let my Grimguard die on me.” I snorted.

“And I wouldn’t be much of a Grimguard if I let a rotsbane devour my Saergrim,” he chuckled weakly.

“Then thank Skal we both take our titles so seriously.”

“I already told you, we don’t say ‘thank Skal’.” His eyes rolled to the side, towards the onchú. “Is it still there?”

The onchú hadn’t moved, but it cocked its fox-like head at me.

“Yeah,” I whispered. “Is this normal onchú behavior?”

“Don’t know. Never seen one in person before.” He shuddered under my hands, and I drew them away.

“Sorry.”