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"He was right to."

"You can help him?"

"Move, and I'll tell you after I've looked."

Rhysandir is stretched across the wide bed, and everything about him… His skin, always the deep brown of river stone, has gone ashen at the temples. Sweat sheets him despite the cold room. His right hand is fisted in the coverlet, and dark veins spread from beneath his tunic in a branching stain that climbs toward his heart. He is trying to breathe evenly. I can see the effort it costs, the way each inhale is measured out like coin he cannot spare.

"Get out," he says.

"No."

"Fiona." My name grinds out of him. "This is not⁠—"

"Briar, hot water. As hot as the kitchen fire will give you, and quickly." I am already unbuckling my satchel, spilling pouches across the coverlet, sorting by touch. "Joran, help me get his tunic open. He can be furious about it once he's breathing."

Joran hesitates, his loyalty a wall between my order and his lord's glare.

"He'll be angrier if you let him die from pride," I say.

That decides him. Between us we peel the sweat-soaked cloth away, and I get my first clear look at the scar. It is a puckered knot of ruined flesh, and the black is crawling out of it in slow pulses, keeping time with something that is not his heartbeat. When I lay two fingers beside it, the cold that rolls off the wound is obscene. It has no business existing in a living body.

"How long has it been like this?"

"An hour." His jaw is locked. "Longer. I pushed the spar."

"You pushed the spar," I repeat. "With this inside you. Are all dark elf lords this determined to be idiots, or is it a talent particular to you?"

A sound scrapes out of him that might, in a better hour, have been a laugh. "Particular to me."

"Wonderful."

I grind fylvek, rirzed, and one of the bitter roots from my satchel together while Briar hauls in the steaming basin, then work the herbs into a poultice hot enough to make my own fingers sting. When I lean over him, his eyes track me with a fixed, furious intensity, and I understand suddenly that being watched is not the same as being seen, and that he is doing the second thing, the thing he does to maps and enemies and ledgers, only now it is aimed at me.

"This will hurt before it helps," I warn.

"Do it."

I press the poultice to the corrupted flesh.

He does not cry out. His whole body goes rigid, a bowstring drawn past its limit, and his breath leaves him in a long hiss through his teeth. I hold the poultice down with the flat of my hand and count, the same count I have used on frightened children and burned laborers and once on a man whose leg I could not save. His heartbeat hammers up through my palm. Beneath it, slowly, the black cold begins to loosen its grip.

"Joran," I say without looking up, "you can wait outside. Take Briar. She should be resting, not fetching water at a run."

Joran looks to Rhysandir. Whatever passes between them, the captain nods once and steers Briar toward the door. It shuts, and the chamber narrows to the two of us and the small fierce work of my hands.

The tension bleeds out of him by degrees. The veins retreat toward the scar, thinning from black to grey to the faint blue of an old bruise. His breathing evens into something I trust. I keep the poultice warm, trading it for a fresh one when the first goes cold, and neither of us speaks, and the silence is not empty. It is full of everything we are both refusing to say.

"You should not have stayed," he tells me at last. His voice has come back to him, low and rough. "When I ordered you gone."

"I've been ignoring the orders of frightened men my whole life. You're not special."

"I was not frightened."

"You were terrified." I meet his gaze so he knows I am not guessing. "Not of dying. You've made your peace with that, I think. You were frightened I would see this." My fingers hover over the scar without touching it. "That I'd know your magic can't fix it. That there's a door in you that chaos can't open."

He is quiet, and it is not the quiet of a man deciding how to argue. It is the quiet of a man who has been read down to the spine and does not know what to do with it.

"How do you do that," he says. It is not quite a question.