THE RIVAL WHO WANTS HIS ATTENTION

Chapter 17

I never answered Lyra. I said I was tired, tucked the blanket around her splinted leg, and left before she could ask again.

By morning I almost believed I'd made it up. Almost. I hadn't slept. Somewhere before dawn I'd heard boots in the corridor and a door shut hard, and nobody would tell me where Valen had been.

Then the hunt list went up on the hall door, and I stood in front of it for a full minute reading the same line.

Lady Sylvie Vane. Skinning tent. Beside the cook's boys.

Nobody had asked me. The elders' wives rode at the front, and the junior guards behind them. I was supposed to stand in a muddy tent all day with a knife and a bucket and smell like a dead deer.

There was a small blue stamp at the bottom, and I knew whose it was. Kaelen had been seen last night with his arm around Seraphina's waist, laughing like it was the funniest thing he'd ever done. She hadn't laughed back. But she hadn't moved his arm either.

Okay. So that was the game.

I tore the paper off the door, folded it into my pocket, and went to find a horse.

---

The stable boy said every horse was taken. I said I'd walk. He looked at my face, went into the back stall, and led out a bony gray mare with a bad temper.

By the time the hunting party reached the ridge, I was riding at the back, behind the baggage cart, with Kaelen twenty horses ahead pretending I didn't exist. Seraphina rode next to him in a green riding coat, sitting very straight. Once she glanced back at me, over her shoulder, and it wasn't a mean look. It was closer to a warning. Valen was at the front. I could see only his shoulders.

I'd learned one thing since I woke up in this body. If you refuse to leave, people can't make you.

The horns blew at the bottom of the valley. The dogs went mad. Somebody shot, somebody shouted, and a huge stag with a ten-point rack crashed out of the bracken, took an arrow in the haunch, and vanished into the trees.

“After it!”

Twenty riders thundered off in one direction. The stag, I noticed, went the other way.

I turned my horse. Nobody noticed. That suited me fine.

---

Blood on a fern. A bent branch. A hoofprint, deep and sliding, dug into the mud at the edge of a bank.

I wasn't tracking it with my eyes. I realized that about ten minutes in. My nose was doing it, with a sharp copper smell cutting through the pine, and my wolf was walking right behind my ribs, pushing me left whenever I wanted to go right.

Left, she said. Wet.

“I know,” I muttered. “I'm doing it.”

The ground got steep. I left the horse at a thornbush and went on foot, through brambles that grabbed my skirt and tore it to the knee. A rock turned under my boot. I slid, caught a root, and cut my palm open on something sharp. I didn't stop. The smell was stronger now.

I found him in a little hollow beside a stream. The stag was down on his side, ribs heaving, one back leg tucked under him with the arrow still stuck deep. His eye rolled up at me.

“Hey,” I whispered. “Hey. I know.”

I crouched. I put my bloody hand on his neck and held it there until the shaking slowed. He was so big. His breath was hot and wet on my wrist.

A twig cracked behind me.

I didn't turn. I already knew that cedar smell.

“You found him,” said Valen.

“Somebody had to.”

He walked down the bank and crouched on the other side of the stag. He had a knife in his hand, and it was the quickest, kindest thing I'd seen anyone do all week. When it was over, he stayed there with his palm flat on the stag's shoulder, and neither of us said anything.

My hand was throbbing. I wiped it on my skirt and made it worse.

“Show me.”

“It's nothing.”

“Sylvie.”

He took my wrist anyway. He turned my palm up and looked at the cut, and his thumb pressed just beside it, very lightly. A rush of heat went up my arm that had nothing to do with the cut. My wolf made a sound in my head I'm not repeating.

Valen dipped a cloth in the stream and wrapped my hand.

“The skinning tent was a joke,” he said, not looking up. “I didn't know about the list until this morning.”

“Kaelen knew.”

“Kaelen will be spoken to.”

“Don't. I don't want you fighting my battles.”

“It's not a battle. It's a rule.” He tied the knot and gave it one small tug, like he wanted to be sure it would hold. “So. Why do you keep doing it?”

“Doing what?”

“Finding ways to make me look at you.”

I almost laughed. I did laugh, actually, and it came out as a croak.

“You think I'm doing this for you?”

“Last night you ran out of my hall. Yesterday you stood in front of a pack of elders in a stained cloak. Today you chased a wounded stag into a ravine in a torn dress.” His eyes finally came up. They were golden at the edges. “Every time I turn around, you're in the middle of something.”

“I'm trying to survive, Valen.”

“That isn't an answer.”

“It's the only one I have. I don't care if you notice me. I don't care about your cloak or your altar or your flame. I want to be alive in a month. That's all.”

He looked at me for a long time.

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“I don't believe you.”

“I don't care what you believe.”

“Neither does my wolf.” His mouth moved, not quite a smile. “He doesn't believe you either.”

Behind my breastbone, mine kicked at my ribs, agreeing.

He didn't let go of my hand. Neither of us mentioned it.

The stream ran over the stones. A bird landed on the stag's antler, thought better of it, and left. The wet wool of my skirt was freezing on my legs, and I couldn't feel it.

He reached out. I should have moved. I knew I should. But his hand came up slowly, as if he thought I might bite, and his palm settled on my cheek, warm and calloused, with the smell of blood and cedar.

I leaned into it.

I actually leaned. God help me.

Then the hairs rose on my neck.

Somebody was watching.

I turned my head, just enough, and saw him through the trees on the ridge above the stream. A dark horse, a rider standing up in the stirrups. Kaelen.

He wasn't smiling. He wasn't angry either. His face had gone completely empty, the way a knife looks before you pick it up.

Behind him, another rider leaned in and whispered. My new ears caught every word, and I wish they hadn't.

“Not the tent anymore,” Kaelen said. “Send for the wolfsbane.”