“I do. I’ll arrive at dawn, so we have enough time to figure it out. The lesson begins at nine.”

To ride—even if he could not walk, riding … “Please do not give me this hope and let it crumble,” he said hoarsely.

Yrene set the satchel and vial down on the low-lying table before the sofa and motioned him to move closer. “Good healers don’t do such things, Lord Westfall.”

He hadn’t bothered with a jacket today, and had left his belt in the bedroom. Sliding his sweat-soaked shirt over his head, he made quick work of unbuttoning the tops of his pants. “It’s Chaol,” he said after a moment. “My name—it’s Chaol. Not Lord Westfall.” He grunted as he hoisted himself from the chair onto the sofa. “Lord Westfall is my father.”

“Well, you’re a lord, too.”

“Just Chaol.”

“Lord Chaol.”

He shot her a look as he positioned his legs. She did not reach to help, to adjust. “Here I was, thinking you still resented me.”

“If you help my girls tomorrow, I’ll reconsider.”

From the gleam in those golden eyes, he very much doubted that, but a half smile tugged on his mouth. “Another massage today?” Please, he nearly added. His muscles already ached from his exercising, and moving so much between bed and sofa and chair and bath—

“No.” Yrene gestured for him to lie facedown on the sofa. “I’m going to begin today.”

“You found information on it?”

“No,” she repeated, tugging off his pants with that cool, swift efficiency. “But after last night … I do not want to delay.”

“I will—I can …” He ground his teeth. “We’ll find a way to protect you while you research.” He hated the words, felt them curl like rancid milk on his tongue, along his throat.

“I think they know that,” she said quietly, and dabbed spots of oil along his spine. “I’m not sure if it’s the information, though. That they want to keep me from finding.”

His gut tightened, even as she ran soothing hands down his back. They lingered near that splotch at its apex. “What do you think they want, then?”

He already suspected, but he wanted to hear her say it—wanted to know if she thought the same, understood the risks as much as he did.

“I wonder,” she said at last, “if it was not just what I was researching, but also that I’m healing you.”

He craned his head to look at her as the words settled between them. She only stared at that mark on his spine, her tired face drawn. He doubted she’d slept. “If you’re too tired—”

“I am not.”

He clenched his jaw. “You can nap here. I’ll look after you.” Useless as it would be. “Then work on me later—”

“I will work on you now. I am not going to let them scare me away.”

Her voice did not tremble or waver.

She added, more quietly but no less fiercely, “I once lived in fear of other people. I let other people walk all over me just because I was too afraid of the consequences for refusing. I did not know how to refuse.” Her hand pushed down on his spine in a silent order to rest his head again. “The day I reached these shores, I cast aside that girl. And I will be damned if I let her reemerge. Or let someone tell me what to do with my life, my choices again.”

The hair on his arms rose at the simmering wrath in her voice. A woman made of steel and crackling embers. Heat indeed flared beneath her palm as she slid it up the column of his spine, toward that splotch of white.

“Let’s see if it enjoys being pushed around for a change,” she breathed.

Yrene laid her hand directly atop the scar. Chaol opened his mouth to speak—

But a scream came out instead.

12

Burning, razor-sharp pain sliced down his back in brutal claws.

Chaol arched, bellowing in agony.

Yrene’s hand was instantly gone, and a crashing sounded.

Chaol panted, gasping, as he pushed up onto his elbows to find Yrene sitting on the low-lying table, her vial of oil overturned and leaking across the wood. She gaped at his back, at where her hand had been.

He had no words—none beyond the echoing pain.

Yrene lifted her hands before her face as if she had never seen them before.

She turned them this way and that.

“It doesn’t just dislike my magic,” she breathed.

His arms buckled, so he lay down again on the cushions, holding her stare as Yrene declared, “It hates my magic.”

“You said it was an echo—not connected to the injury.”

“Maybe I was wrong.”

“Rowan healed me with none of those problems.”

Her brows knotted at the name, and he silently cursed himself for revealing that piece of his history in this palace of ears and mouths. “Were you conscious?”

He considered. “No. I was—nearly dead.”

She noticed the spilled oil then and cursed softly—mildly, compared to some other filthy mouths he’d had the distinct pleasure of being around.

Yrene lunged for her satchel, but he moved faster, grabbing his sweat-damp shirt from where he’d laid it on the sofa arm and chucking it over the spreading puddle before it could drip onto the surely priceless rug.

Yrene studied the shirt, then his outstretched arm, now nearly across her lap. “Either your lack of consciousness during that initial healing kept you from feeling this sort of pain, or perhaps whatever this is had not … settled.”

His throat clogged. “You think I’m possessed?” By that thing that had dwelled inside the king, that had done such unspeakable things—

“No. But pain can feel alive. Maybe this is no different. And maybe it does not want to let go.”

“Is my spine even injured?” He barely managed to ask the question.

“It is,” she said, and some part of his chest caved in. “I sensed the broken bits—the tangled and severed nerves. But to heal those things, to get them communicating with your brain again … I need to get past that echo. Or beat it into submission enough to have space to work on you.” Her lips pressed into a grim line. “This shadow, this thing that haunts you—your body. It will fight me every step of the way, fight to convince you to tell me to stop. Through pain.” Her eyes were clear—stark. “Do you understand what I am telling you?”