Saving the Immortal

Chapter Fourteen: The Line Between

A guard found Ruselon in the midst of council business, breathless from having run the length of the palace to deliver his message, and I am told — for I did not witness this part myself, still lost in darkness as I was — that Ruselon did not wait to hear the whole of it before abandoning the room entirely.

He reached our quarters within minutes.

I remember little of that arrival, having only just been settled upon our bed by Bess and another maid, a white cloth wrapped about my head where the fall had opened a wound at my temple, blood still faintly visible along its edges despite their efforts to clean it. My arm had been bound as well, though improperly — the physician had not yet arrived — and every shallow breath still cost me more than it ought to have.

I remember him kneeling beside the bed.

I remember his hand, careful and hesitant in a manner I had not yet witnessed from him, reaching to touch my injured arm, and the whimper that escaped me despite every effort to hold it back, the pain sharper than I had any composure left to disguise.

Something changed in him then.

I did not see it fully, my own vision still swimming with pain and the lingering fog of my earlier fall, but I felt it — a shift in the air itself, a stillness that carried something far more dangerous beneath its surface than any stillness I had witnessed from him before. When I managed to focus my eyes upon his face, I found an expression I had not yet seen there.

Not the careful composure of the court.

Not the hollow, practiced smile.

Something raw and furious, his jaw set, his eyes — that particular shade of blue I had admired only the previous morning — gone suddenly cold in a manner that made the small hairs along my arms rise, even injured and exhausted as I was.

"Who did this," he said, his voice low, terribly quiet.

"The horse," I managed. "Marrow gave me the horse—"

He was gone before I finished the sentence.

I do not know precisely what drove me from that bed, weak and aching as I was, save some instinct that told me plainly he needed stopping before whatever fury had taken hold of him carried him somewhere he could not return from cleanly.

I followed as swiftly as my body would permit, Bess's protests trailing uselessly behind me, and found him in the courtyard, Marrow already caught fast within his grip.

He had turned his brother about with one hand, the other fisted in the front of Marrow's shirt, and a low growl escaped him — something that did not belong to any human throat, something that carried, beneath its fury, the plain evidence of exactly what lineage he had spent his entire life trying to prove himself above.

"Ruselon," Caspian said, voice tight with fear now rather than any cruelty. "Ruselon, think. If you harm him, Father will—"

"I do not care what Father will do," Ruselon said, his voice terrible in its calm. "He nearly killed her."

"It was an accident," Marrow gasped, though I could see, even from where I stood, the particular fear in his eyes that suggested he understood plainly how thin that claim sounded against everything Ruselon likely already knew.

"Ruselon, please," Fennick said, his own composure entirely abandoned now. "Please, brother, do not do this—"

"Ruselon."

My own voice, weaker than I would have liked, but carrying regardless across the courtyard's sudden silence.

He turned his head slightly, enough that I could see his eyes had not yet lost their terrible coldness, though something within them shifted the moment they found me.

"Let him go," I said, crossing the remaining distance as steadily as my injuries permitted. "Please. Not for his sake. For yours."

"Ivy—"

"I am asking you," I said, my voice gaining a little strength now that I stood close enough to see the full weight of what raged behind his expression. "Please. Do not become what your father has always told you that you are. Not for him. He is not worth what it would cost you."

For a long, terrible moment, he did not move.

Then, slowly, his grip loosened.

Marrow stumbled backward, gasping, his brothers pulling him further away with a haste that betrayed exactly how close they had all believed the moment had come to something none of them could undo.

Ruselon's shoulders sagged.

The fury drained from his eyes, leaving behind something exhausted, something almost ashamed, and he turned fully toward me at last, his hands trembling slightly now with the aftermath of whatever he had only barely managed to hold back.

"You should not be standing," he said quietly, crossing to me immediately, his voice rough with concern now rather than fury.

"I am well enough," I said, though the world had begun to tilt slightly at the edges of my vision once more.

He caught me before I could sway further, lifting me carefully into his arms with a gentleness that felt entirely at odds with the violence I had just witnessed him restrain.

"Thank you," he said quietly, carrying me back toward our quarters, "for stopping me."

"Thank you," I said, my head resting against his shoulder now, exhaustion finally claiming what fear had not, "for listening."

He said nothing further, but I felt the particular care with which he carried me the rest of the way, and understood, somewhere in the fog still claiming my thoughts, that whatever this was building between us had shifted, in that courtyard, into something neither of us could easily name.