Page 37 of Stolen Threadwitch Bride
“You’re very… symmetrical,” I muttered as I went to the table and the notebook where I’d recorded his measurements.
He looked over his shoulder. “Isn’t everyone?”
“No.” I added to the list. “Most people have slight differences on left and right. A quarter of an inch here, an eighth there. But you’re identical on both sides. Perfect.”
He turned and I could practicallyfeelthe smugness rolling off him.
Oh, gods, why had I said that?
“You think I’m perfect?” Sharp teeth glinted in a self-satisfied grin.
“No. I said yourmeasurementsare perfectly symmetrical. No one is perfect. If anything, it’s a freakish defect.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Jaw clenched, I climbed the steps and measured the length of his arm, trying to ignore the fact that smug smile remained as he observed.
“What’s that?” He frowned, gaze below my jaw.
I froze. My braid had fallen over my shoulder, exposing the left side of my neck and the silver tracery of scars from the creeping death. An unsightly reminder of my human frailty.
Swallowing, I went to pull my braid back in place, but he caught my wrist.
“No,” he murmured, voice softer than I’d ever heard it as he released me. “They’re scars, aren’t they? What happened?”
Maybe it was just as well if we both remembered what I was and the vast gulf between us. It might stop him flirting and me swooning like a ridiculous girl every time we touched.
“Four years ago, there was a plague. Everyone called it the creeping death, because it spread slowly up the body.”
My throat blocked the words for what it had looked like, how it had felt. Black, blistered flesh. Burning like hot coals had been shoved under my skin. The infection had left me thrashing at the faces that appeared in the walls, the gnashing teeth at the top of every bowl and cup. Then it had knocked me out, imprisoning me in feverish nightmares for days.
Closing my eyes, I shook my head. “No one survived once it reached your face.” Like Mama and Papa. They’d caught it first and when I’d woken, they were gone—my world with them. “My parents…”
For long seconds, he was silent. “I’m sorry you suffered and lost your family.” His brows creased together as his gaze swept down the side of my neck.
I let him look, let him see how close the jagged lines came to my face. “Humans are so delicate.” I gave a bitter smile as I repeated his words from our journey.
“No. That’s not right.” His fingertip landed just below my ear, right where the highest scar reached.
My breath stilled.
He traced the twisting line down, across my hammering pulse to my collarbone where the scars disappeared below the neckline of my dress.
I did not pull away. No one had touched my scars before, but he did it as though they weren’t a grotesque reminder of a dark time of terror and death. In Briarbridge, everyone who’d caught the disease and survived hid theirs. There was always this fear in the air, like maybe the disease lived on in our flesh, only dormant for now.
“You have endured”—he stroked that point on my collarbone, and I shivered—“like the Dusk Court’s Great Yew.”
I tilted my head in question. Speaking might break this spell that had him so quiet and earnest. It might make him stop touching me, and I was a fool, but I liked this business of being touched.
Smiling, his gaze lingered on my throat. “At the palace grow two trees, a yew and an oak, that represent… a lot of things. Centuries ago, the yew was struck by lightning and cleaved in two. The Dawn Court could barely contain their glee, so my parents told me. And yet it survived and both halves grew andthrived. It bears the scars of that day but still dwarfs the Dawn Court’s oak.”
The Dawn Court and the Dusk Court—I didn’t understand how that worked. Two courts in one palace. A king and a queen who ruled the same land but weren’t married… It was confusing.
But I understood how he saw the yew tree, what he thought of its scars… and perhaps of mine. He made them sound like a sign of strength rather than weakness.
“You, Ariadne, bear the marks of our sacred tree. Your scars are like roots and branches—things of growth and life and sustenance.” His fingers slid to the back of my neck, and he rubbed the pad of his thumb over the silvery lines.
Shivers raced through me, not only from his touch, but… those words. They stung my eyes, and I had to swallow before I could look up from his chest.
