Page 24 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

13

SABINE

The mountain path blurs beneath my boots.

I don't remember leaving the caves. One moment I was in the dark, staring at the stone ceiling above our chamber, and now I'm here—halfway down the mountain, supply sack over my shoulder, fog swallowing my ankles like the earth is trying to reclaim me. The valley materializes slowly below through the gray morning, smoke rising from chimneys, the faint bleat of livestock, the ordinary pulse of a world that used to be mine.

I watch it like a stranger watches a painting.

Focus, I tell myself. Bread. Salted meat. Candles if Corren has extras.

But my body won't cooperate. My body is still up there, in that chamber, beneath eight hundred pounds of obsidian-gray gargoyle. Still feeling the precise weight of him settling between my thighs like he was carved specifically for that space.

My skin still remembers the temperature of him—not human warm, but deeper than that, volcanic, a heat that had no business living inside stone. I had made sounds I don't recognize as mine. I had arched into him when every rational instinct told me to push back.

The worst part isn't what we did.

The worst part is that I wanted it. Desperately. Completely. Without a single moment of hesitation once we crossed that threshold—and I can't determine whether that want belongs to me or to whatever ancient magic stitched itself into my blood the moment I smeared it across his face.

Father Corren's temporary sanctuary is a low-ceilinged storage room tucked behind the old miller's building, the mill itself having survived the fire that gutted half the eastern cottages. He's made it almost habitable—salvaged blankets, two oil lamps, a crate serving as a table. It smells like cedar shavings and old incense.

Leif is sitting on the floor beside a bedroll, sharpening a short blade Corren must have given him. He looks up when I push the door open, and for one suspended second, I see relief flood his face—then something more complicated moves in behind it.

"You're alive," he says.

"Obviously."

He stands. He's taller than I remember, or maybe I stopped looking at him properly. "Sabine?—"

"I'm fine." I set the supply sack down and turn to Corren, who watches me from his chair with those tired, knowing eyes. "I didn't know he was staying here."

"He had nowhere else." Corren gestures to the second crate. "Sit down, child."

I don't sit. I look at my brother—at the familiar slope of his shoulders, the nervous way he rolls the blade's handle between his palms—and I wait for the feeling to arrive. The one that used to be automatic. The fierce, bone-deep protectiveness I built my entire existence around after our parents died.

It's there. Somewhere.

But it comes to me like sound travels through deep water. Muffled. Late.

"Sabine." Leif's voice drops. "Where are you? You're looking at me like you don't?—"

"I'm looking right at you," I say, too fast.

Corren waits.

I sit down.

"I don't know what's happening to me," I say finally, and my voice sounds mechanical even to my own ears. "I think about my life before the cave and it feels—it feels like something I read about once. Like it happened to someone with my name."

I press my fingers against my sternum like I could locate whatever is shifting inside. "The morning I fell into that cavern. The moment my blood hit his face. It's like everything before that is just fog and everything after is—" I stop.

"Is real," Father Corren finishes quietly.

I nod once.

Leif is very still. When I finally look at him, his eyes are bright in the way they get when he's trying not to cry and furious at himself for it.

"I'm right here," he says.