Tower of Dawn (Throne of Glass #6) - Sarah J. Maas Page 0,40

strange mark just beneath his nape. At that first prominent knob of his spine.

Even now, the invisible power that swirled along her palms seemed to recoil into her.

“What manner of magic gave that to you?”

“Does it matter?”

Yrene hovered her hand over it, but did not let her magic brush it. She ground her teeth. “It would help me to know what havoc it might have wreaked upon your nerves and bones.”

He didn’t answer. Typical Adarlanian bullishness.

Yrene pushed, “Was it fire—”

“Not fire.”

A magic-given injury. It had to have happened … Midsummer, he’d said. The day rumors claimed that magic had returned to the northern continent. That it had been freed by Aelin Galathynius.

“Were you fighting against the magic-wielders who returned that day?”

“I was not.” Clipped, sharp words.

And she looked into his eyes—his hard stare. Really looked.

Whatever had occurred, it had been horrible. Enough to leave such shadows and reticence.

She had healed people who’d endured horrors. Who could not reply to the questions she asked. And he might have served that butcher, but … Yrene tried not to grimace as she realized what lay ahead, what Hafiza had likely guessed at before assigning her to him: healers often did not just repair wounds, but also the trauma that went along with them. Not through magic, but … talking. Walking alongside the patient as they traveled those hard, dark paths.

And to do so with him … Yrene shoved the thought aside. Later. She’d think of it later.

Closing her eyes, Yrene unspooled her magic into a gentle, probing thread, and laid a palm on that splattered star atop his spine.

The cold slammed into her, spikes of it firing through her blood and bones.

Yrene reeled back as if she’d been given a physical blow.

Cold and dark and anger and agony—

She clenched her jaw, fighting past this echo in the bone, sending that thread-thin probe of power a little farther into the dark.

The pain would have been unbearable when it hit him.

Yrene pushed back against the cold—the cold and the lack and the oily, unworldly wrongness of it.

No magic of this world, some part of her whispered. Nothing that was natural or good. Nothing she knew, nothing she had ever dealt with.

Her magic screamed to draw back that probe, move away—

“Yrene.” His words were far away while the wind and blackness and emptiness of it roared around her—

And then that echo of nothingness … it seemed to awaken.

Cold filled her, burned along her limbs, creeping wider, encircling.

Yrene flung out her magic in a blind flare, the light pure as sea-foam.

The blackness retreated, a spider scuttling into a shadowed corner. Just enough—just enough that she yanked back her hand, yanked back herself, and found Chaol gaping at her.

Her hands trembled as she gazed down at them. As she gazed at that splotch of paleness on his tan skin. That presence … She coiled her magic deep within herself, willing it to warm her own bones and blood, to steady herself. Even as she steadied it, too—some internal, invisible hand stroking her power, soothing it.

Yrene rasped, “Tell me what that is.” For she had seen or felt or learned nothing like that.

“Is it inside me?” That was fear—genuine fear in his eyes.

Oh, he knew. Knew what manner of power had dealt this wound, what might be lurking within it. Knew enough about it to be afraid. If such a power existed in Adarlan …

Yrene swallowed. “I think … I think it’s only—only the echo of something bigger. Like a tattoo or a brand. It is not living, and yet …” She flexed her fingers. If a mere probing of the darkness with her magic had triggered such a response, then a full-on onslaught … “Tell me what that is. If I am going to be dealing with … with that, I need to know. Everything you can tell me.”

“I can’t.”

Yrene opened her mouth. But the lord flicked his gaze toward the open door. Her warning to him silently echoed. “Then we shall try to work around it,” she declared. “Sit up. I want to inspect your neck.”

He obeyed, and she observed him while his heavily muscled abdomen eased him upright, then he carefully swung his feet and legs to the floor. Good. That he had not just this much mobility, but the steady, calm patience to work with his body … Good.

Yrene kept that to herself while she strode on still-wobbly knees to the desk where she’d left the vials of amber fluid—massage oils pressed from rosemary and