It would shred her heart more quickly than a pack of revenants.
Determination hardened his expression again. Catching her wrist, he took back the coin and started for the inn. “I will pay her myself, then.”
She stared at his retreating back. Her face seemed hot and numb all at once, as if repeatedly slapped. He’d been devastated when he’d thought she’d been poisoned at the river. And yet . . . this.
Maybe he would truly do it, maybe he wouldn’t. It mattered not. She’d told him this would hurt her and he intended to carry on anyway.
She’d been wrong about him. So wrong. Swallowing hard, she said after him, “If you give her that coin, you will not touch me again.”
For an instant, his step faltered. His fists clenched. But he continued on.
And she had not expected agony like this. Never had she imagined Kavik would slip a blade between her ribs and leave her bleeding. Throat burning, she blindly turned toward the packs, vision wavering with hot tears.
Vela. I need your strength now. Help me, please.
But the pain did not ease.
HIS legs barely seemed able to carry the crushing weight in his chest. It was done. She would not touch him. He would never touch her again. Even if she continued her quest and followed him until the end of his days, he would stand firm.
Except he could barely stand now. The heat from the ovens in the inn’s brewing chambers seemed like a demon’s breath on his face. As soon as he moved out of sight of the stables, he leaned back against the support of the walls.
“Kavik? Are you unwell?”
Selaq, with a blue cloth covering her yellow hair and a wooden tub propped on her hip. Her appearance made the coin in his hand seemed heavier than any boulder. He would never give it to the innkeeper. Mala never needed to know.
Whatever her injuries, they couldn’t be deep. Her pride had been damaged. Not her heart. She hadn’t known him well enough or long enough to feel more.
Except that she felt everything deeply. He’d never seen anyone possess such ferocity and passion. Who was so quick to grin—or to make him laugh.
His throat a knot, he said, “I would ask for your help.”
Eyes widening, Selaq stared at him. “You would ask? Has the sun risen in the west? Or has the truly impossible happened, and Barin is dead?”
Kavik could never joke about Barin’s death. “I need you to let Mala believe I have paid you to come to my bed tonight.”
“Oh, no.” She hefted the tub up onto a table. “She’ll kill me.”
“No. It would not be you that she hurt.” And Kavik would take any punishment she gave him. Had already given him. You will not touch me again. “She would never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it.”
“You don’t deserve a collar.”
The coin seemed to burn in his palm. “She has vowed never to put one on me.”
And she wouldn’t. Kavik knew she wouldn’t. She’d felt deeply then, too, when he’d told her of his father. Of his moon night and what Barin and his soldiers had done.
Selaq scoffed and lifted a ball of brown dough from the tub. “Even if Vela demands it?”
“She believes the goddess wouldn’t ask it of her.” The image of cold silver eyes flashed through his memory. “I do not believe the same.”
“Do you think she would defy the goddess? Abandon her quest?”
“She will have to.” Because Kavik would never give in. “Or never complete it.”
Her brow furrowed. “You say that very easily. When I heard of the taming, I wished her no success. But I would still never wish what would come upon her if she abandoned it.”
“She will be marked. But she has no vanity. And she wears other scars.” Almost as many as Kavik did.
Selaq’s kneading hands stilled, and she stared at him. “Kavik, you fool. You utter fool.”
Tension gripped his chest. A stubborn fool. “Why?”
“A quest is a promise made to Vela. Do you think she accepts a broken vow lightly? Mala will be forsaken. Shunned. Never allowed to return home. Never allowed to stay in any one place because anyone who offers her shelter or aid will risk Vela’s wrath. Any village she enters, they will drive her away with dogs and stones. You think Barin plagues you? It is nothing to what the goddess will do to her.”
Ice splintered through his veins. And he had shoved her away? Sworn never to give in? He would crawl into the citadel with a bit between his teeth if it pleased Vela.
And beg Mala to forgive him.
His legs found their strength again but as soon as they carried him into the stable yard, a vise seized his heart. Mala was sorting through the packs, adding items to the pouches on Shim’s saddle, her head bowed and her movements slow. Leaving.
Her head shot up when the stallion gave his nicker of warning. She wiped her cheeks.
The tightness in Kavik’s throat became a burning knot. “Mala—”
“You can keep the black gelding and the other two horses. They will only slow me down.” Without looking at him, she opened a jute sack and began dividing the contents. “They will be compensation for your assistance in searching for the demon tusker.”
“Don’t, Mala. Please.” Voice broken, he reached for her.
She whirled on him, her hand flying to her sword. Her blade pressed against his throat.
Kavik stilled. It was not the weapon that stopped him. Her dark eyes swam with tears, but the expression in them was a spear through his chest. Not just pain. Devastation that matched his own.
“You have no permission to touch me now,” she said through gritted teeth.
With desperate hope, he opened his hand. Though it had weighed so much moments before, the gold in his palm seemed like nothing now. A boy’s trinket. Yet he had risked her life and her quest with this worthless thing. “I would not have given it to her,” he rasped. “I never would have.”
“That matters?” Her hollow laugh told him it mattered not at all. Tears slipped over her cheeks. “I thought I finally knew what Vela wanted. I wouldn’t call Shim tamed, because he is free. But others would call him that, simply because I ride him. Even you said he was.”
Kavik had. And he would still say it. But he couldn’t speak past the pain in his throat.
Her fingers trembled as she continued. “I began to believe that was what Vela meant. Not a collar, but trust. Shim and I ride together. One day, though, I know we will part ways. He will return to his herd. But I thought . . . I thought if that was what it meant to tame you, then we might have so much longer.”
If that was taming, then Kavik would give anything to be tamed. “We will.”
“No.” Her simple response shattered his hope. On a sobbing breath, her hand dropped to her side, her blade falling away from his throat. “When I first began to ride him, he would throw me. He never meant to hurt me—he was just unused to the weight on his back. Sometimes I surprised him, or treated him like any other horse, and he needed to remind me that he was free, not just another animal to be tamed. But never did he turn on me. He never bit at me. He never kicked at me. He did hurt me, but he never meant to.”
And she had warned Kavik that he was hurting her. No wound from a blade could have matched the agony of the emptiness spreading through him now.
“He was never deliberately cruel,” she continued softly. “If he had been, I would have left him behind—because how could I have trusted him at my side if he might turn and kick me in the chest? So it is not that you might have touched another woman, because I knew you might try to throw me. I knew you didn’t want to soften toward me. But you meant to hurt me tonight.”
No. He hadn’t known it truly would. But it mattered not, because she’d warned him—and he’d been so determined to stand firm that he hadn’t listened. Hadn’t seen.