The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 29

Aurelia's POV

There were stairs. I had my face in his neck for all of them.

His skin was cooler than mine. I had found that out on the landing. I kept finding it out again, as though each time it were the first.

Every few steps my lips ended up closer to him than it had been.

He smelled of cold air, of linen, of something underneath both that was only him. I got as much of it as I could and it was not enough.

Nothing was enough.

Everything I got made the wanting bigger instead of smaller, which is not how anything is supposed to work.

He was talking. I felt it before I heard it, low, coming through his ribs into my shoulder, so that every word was in my body before it was in my ear.

I did not understand one of them.

A door. His shoulder against it. Then heat off a fire somewhere on my left and the room was turning as he turned.

He put me down on a bed.

I did not let go.

I was holding onto his shirt at the shoulder and my hand would not open. He said something.

He put his hand over mine and worked my fingers loose one at a time.

Every one of them going was a small unbearable thing.

When the last one came away, I made a noise I would rather not have made.

He straightened up and went away from me. The whole length of my body reported it.

He crossed a room. That was all he did. Six steps at the very most, to open a window.

I lay there in the wreck of my own body and wanted to ask him to come back so badly that I had to put my teeth together to keep it in.

The window went up.

The cold came across the bed. It went over my arms, over my throat, down inside the neck of my dress.

Every place it touched came up as though it had been struck.

My skin did not know what to do with it.

I turned my face into the pillow. The pillow had gone warm under me. Everything warm was unbearable. Everything cold was unbearable in a different way. There was nothing in that room that was either.

Then he was back.

The edge of the bed went down under his weight and my whole body went toward it before I had anything to say about that at all.

"Miss Vale."

His hand came onto my forehead.

It was cool. It was dry. It was heavy. I turned my face up into it.

I did that. There was nothing wrong with my arms by then. I could have kept still. I turned my cheek into his palm the way a cat does, and he did not take his hand away.

"Can you hear me?"

I could hear him.

He had a thumb somewhere near my temple. I could feel the ridge of a callus on it. He was asking me something else now, something with my name in it, and I lost the end of the question somewhere in the middle of the sound of his voice.

He took his hand back.

He put two fingers against the side of my throat instead, under the line of my jaw, and held them there.

I have been touched by a great many people in my life and none of them have ever been anything.

My mother's hands doing up a collar. A woman in the market taking my wrist to look at a bruise.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

That man put two fingers on my neck to count my pulse. I heard myself breathe out. I could not get the breath back in properly afterward.

He counted. It went on a long time. It went on for years.

"Too fast," he said, to nobody.

Then he was gone again. Water ran somewhere. I lay there with the place his fingers had been going cold, and put my own hand up over it, which did nothing.

He came back with a glass and put his hand behind my head. His fingers went up into my hair to hold me.

I felt that at the base of my skull.

I felt it in the backs of my knees.

If you had asked me at that moment to explain how the two were connected, I would have told you it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Small mouthfuls."

I drank greedily. I could not help it. Some of it went down my chin and my neck.

He took the glass away before I had finished. I made a sound at him about that. My breathing did not settle at all.

"Slowly."

He gave it back. I did it wrong again.

He put the glass down. Then he wet a cloth in the basin, wrung it out, and started at my forehead.

Across my temple. My cheek. Under my jaw. Down the front of my throat.

A sound escaped my throat. I whined. I didn't know I could do that.

He stopped.

"Does that hurt?"

I could not answer him. Whatever my mouth was doing at that moment, it was not answering.

He waited.

Then he went on, slower.

It was worse. I lay there and let him do it. I did not tell him to stop.

He put the cloth down. He held one of my hands and told me to squeeze. I squeezed. He seemed to want that, so I kept doing it after he had let go.

"Do you know where you are?"

No.

"Do you know what day it is?"

I did not know what a day was.

He brought a candle over, held it up, told me to look at him.

I looked at him.

He had not shaved since the morning. There was a mark high on his jaw that had not been there at dinner. His collar was undone and the skin under it was the same color as his face, which for some reason struck me at the time as the single most important fact I had ever been given.

He moved the candle. I did not follow it. I was watching his neck.

He noticed.

I know he noticed. He stopped moving the candle. Everything in his face went carefully still, and he looked at me for a moment longer than a man looks at a patient.

I did not look away.

He gave me the chance to look away and I did not take it. I lay in that bed with my hair stuck to my face and my dress wrecked. I looked at his neck on purpose. I let him see me do it.

He blew the candle out and put it down.

"Where," I said.

It came out cracked. It was the first thing I had said since the garden.

"My chambers."

"Why?"

He did not answer.

Time came apart for a while after that.

He was near the bed.

He was at the basin.

He was near the bed again.

Twice I got back into myself and found him doing something to my hands. Once he had his fingers on my wrist again. Every time, it started up in me from the beginning, as though the last one had not happened.

"The physician," I said.

"No."

"Why?"

"Because by the time the physician understood what had happened, half the palace would know."

"Know what?"

He did not say it.

"Think," I said. "They would think..."

"Exactly what you think they would."

I put my arm over my eyes. It did not make it dark enough.

"Nobody knows you are here," he said.

"Here?"

"My chambers."

"Why would anyone?"

"Exactly."

I got that eventually. It took me longer than it should have. It arrived all at once. I was surprised to find that I was not frightened of it, which meant that some part of me was still not working.

Then I found the rest of it.

"Julian knows."

Something went across his face and was gone.

"Yes."

"He was there."

"Yes."

"Outside."

"Yes."

I had the wall. I had the cold. I had his hands. I had my hands. None of it in any order.

"He didn't-"

"I am not asking you to defend him," Cassian said.

It came up again then. It had never gone anywhere. It came up the way water comes up a well when the bucket goes in, all at once, over everything. I turned onto my side toward him.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his forearms on his knees.

I got my hand out and put it on his arm, above the wrist, where the sleeve was pushed back.

He went absolutely still.

I did not know what I was going to do with it. I could say I was steadying myself. It would not be true.

I had my hand on a man's bare arm.

I was thinking about the width of his shoulders.

I was thinking about how his neck had smelled on the stairs.

I was thinking about it in his own bed, with the trails of his brother still on me.

He took my hand off his arm.

He did it slowly. He put it down on the blanket. He did not let go of it straight away, and I felt that too.

"I need to go."

"No."

I got both hands under me and pushed.

He was there before I was halfway up, one arm behind my back and one hand flat on my shoulder, putting me down again with about as much difficulty as you would have folding a shirt.

"Where," he said.

"Back."

"Back where?"

I did not have an answer.

He kept his hand where it was until he was sure I was going to stay down. Then he took it off, and I felt the whole shape of it go.

"You are not going anywhere tonight."

I looked up at him properly for the first time since he had put me on that bed.

"You don't get to decide that."