Black Blood

"Don't," the man says. His voice is low and rough and perfectly clear. "Whoever you are. Walk away."

You don't walk away. You've been told to leave enough for one night.

You drop to your knees in the drift beside him. Up close he's even bigger than you thought, and he's not wearing a coat, just a black sweater soaked through on one side. Steam rises off him. The bolt has gone in just under the collarbone, and around it the skin is wrong: threaded with fine silver lines, like frost creeping across a window.

"Silver," you say. "If I leave it in, it keeps burning."

"If you pull it, I bleed out." He says it like a weather report. "Either way, go home."

"I don't have one." You pull off Elsbeth's shawl and fold it into a pad. "This is going to hurt."

His gold eyes narrow. In the snow-light his face is unreal: a hard jaw shadowed with stubble, black hair plastered to his forehead, a mouth bracketed by lines of pain. He's so beautiful it's almost rude, lying there bleeding like that. You have the absurd thought that the mountain has produced him just to make a point.

"What's your name," he says.

"Ava. What's yours?"

He doesn't answer. His eyes slide past you to the dark trees, searching. "There were four of them. With crossbows. They'll come back to make sure."

"Then hold still."

You wrap both hands around the bolt. It's freezing, colder than the snow, and the cold bites into your palms. He goes rigid. You pull.

It doesn't come smoothly. It drags, and he makes a sound through his teeth that you feel in your own chest, and then it's out and black blood wells up fast, far too fast, soaking the shawl in a heartbeat.

"Okay," you whisper. "Okay, okay." Pressure. Pressure is all you have. You lean your whole weight onto the wound with both hands.

And your hands begin to glow.

You think, at first, that it's your eyes. Frost, exhaustion, shock. But the light is real. It comes up out of your palms like moonlight through water, pale and silver-blue, and it spreads across his chest in a soft ring. Under it, the silver threads in his skin twist. They shrink. They pull back from your fingers like something alive retreating from fire.

The bleeding slows.

"What are you doing," he says, very quietly.

"I don't know." Your voice is shaking. "I don't know, I've never, this doesn't happen." It doesn't. You've stitched a hundred wounds in Marrowfen. Your hands have never done anything but sew.

The light pulses once, bright enough to throw shadows on the pines. Then it fades. You lift your hands, sticky and black to the wrist, and stare.

The wound is closed. Not healed, exactly: a raw pink seam where a hole was, silver lines retreating to a tangle near his heart. But closed.

His hand moves faster than you can follow. It wraps around your wrist, not hard, but completely. His palm is burning hot.

"Who sent you," he says.

"Nobody sent me. I was exiled. Tonight. I was walking."

"From where?"

"Marrowfen."

Something changes in his face. "The swamp pack." His thumb moves, just slightly, over the pulse in your wrist. Checking it, you realize. Checking whether you're alive. "You touched the silver."

"It was in your shoulder. I kind of had to."

"Are you in pain? Is it cold, in your chest? Is it spreading?" Each question comes faster than the last.

"No. I'm freezing, but that's the weather."

He stares at you like you've spoken another language. Then his head turns toward the road and his whole body goes still in a way that makes the hair on your arms stand up.

Engines. Headlights sweep through the pines, and three black SUVs with chains on their tires come grinding up the pass. Doors slam. Men pour out, and they're not men like Marrowfen men; they're taller, broader, moving with a speed that's almost silent in the snow. Two of them have rifles. One of them is already running toward you.

He lets go of your wrist. "Stay behind me."

"You can't even stand."

He stands. It's horrifying to watch, because you saw the hole in him three minutes ago, but he gets his feet under him and rises to his full height, and he's well over six and a half feet, and he puts himself between you and the trees where the crossbows were. Not between you and his own soldiers. Between you and the dark.

The first soldier skids to a stop. He's in his late thirties, shaved head, a face that's been hit a lot and a jaw like a cinder block, and he looks at the black snow and the blood on your hands and the bolt lying beside you, and his face goes gray.

"Majesty."

You look up at the man in front of you.

"Bohdan," he says. "Four crossbows. Northwest. Silver bolts."

"I have people on it." Bohdan's eyes come to you, and his hand drops to the gun at his hip. "Who is she."

"Don't," the man says, and it isn't loud, but Bohdan's hand freezes. "She pulled it out."

"She what?"

"She pulled it out and closed it." He turns, slowly, and looks down at you on your knees in the snow. The headlights are behind him, so he's mostly a silhouette with gold eyes, and his voice is quieter than it has been all night. "My name is Kasimir Draghan."

The name lands somewhere deep, somewhere that grew up on stories. Every child in the lowlands knows that name. The Lycan King of the Silverpine. The one who sits on an iron throne because he can't bear to touch silver. The one the pack mothers use to scare their sons into coming home before dark.

"You're the king," you say stupidly.

"I am."

You remember the other stories too. The ones told in low voices at the Hall fire, after the cups have gone round twice. The cursed king. The silver in his blood. Every healer they bring him, he buries.

He crouches in front of you, slowly, carefully, so his face is level with yours. Up close you can see the silver lines still pulsing faintly under the skin at the base of his throat. You can see that his hands are shaking.

"Listen to me," he says. "Three years ago I was cursed. Five healers have put their hands on this silver. Five. Every one of them is buried in my garden."

The snow falls between you, soft and endless.

"So tell me, Ava from Marrowfen," says the Lycan King. "Why are you still breathing?"