sighed. “I do know it. I do. I thought I’d come closer the first few times than I have. If I keep missing by so wide a mark, I’ll need to send for the ingredients again.”
“So we start fresh.” He walked to her, kissed her. “Good day to you, Branna.”
She let out a half laugh. “And good day to you, Finbar.” Smiling, she picked up her knife. “And so . . .”
She expected him to roll up his sleeve, but he pulled off his sweater.
“Take it from the mark,” he told her. “As you did for the poison for Cabhan. From the mark, Branna, as you should have done the first time with this.”
“I should have, it’s true. It hurts you, it burns you, when I take blood from there.”
“Because the purpose is the enemy of the mark. Take it from there, Branna. Then I want a damn biscuit.”
“You can have half a dozen.”
She stepped to him with the ritual knife and the cup.
“Don’t block it.” He drew her eyes to him. “The pain may be part of it. We’ll let it come, and let it go.”
“All right.”
She was quick—quick was best—and scored across the pentagram with the tip of her blade. She caught the blood in the cup—felt the pain though he made no sound, no movement.
“That’s enough,” she murmured, and set the knife aside to pick up the cloth she had ready, pressed it to the wound.
Then, putting the cup by the jars, turned back to him to gently heal the shallow wound.
Before he knew what she was about—perhaps before she did—Branna pressed a kiss to the mark.
“Don’t.” Stunned, appalled to the marrow, he jerked back. “I don’t know how it might harm you, what it might do.”
“It will do nothing to me, as you did nothing to earn it. I spent years trying to blame you for it, and should have blamed Sorcha—or more, her grief. She harmed you—she broke our most sacred oath, and harmed you, and many before you. Innocents. I’d take it from you if I could.”
“You can’t. Do you think I haven’t tried?” He yanked on his sweater again. “Witchcraft, priests, wise women, holy men, magicks black and white. Nothing touches it. I’ve been to every corner of the world where there was so much of a whisper of a rumor the curse could be broken.”
His rambles, she realized. This was their basis. “You never said—”
“What could I say?” he countered. “This visible symbol of what runs inside me can’t be changed, it can’t be removed by any means I’ve tried. No spell, no ritual can break the curse she cast with her dying breaths. It can’t be burned off, cut off or out of me. Considered lopping my arm off, but feared it would just sear in on another part of me.”
“You— Good God, Fin.”
He hadn’t meant to say so much, but couldn’t take back the words. “Well, I was more than a bit drunk at the time, fortunately, as cursed is cursed, two-armed or one, despite what seemed desperately heroic at two and twenty, when shattered on the best part of a bottle of Jameson.”
“You won’t harm yourself,” she said, shaken to the core. “You won’t think of it.”
“No point in it, as I’ve been told time and again when all attempts failed. The curse of a dying witch—and one who’d sacrificed herself for her children, to protect them from the darkest of purposes?—it’s powerful.”
“When this is done, I would help you find a way—all of us—”
“It’s for me, if there is a way, and I won’t ever stop looking, as because of this you can’t give me tomorrows. I can’t ask for them or give them to you. We could never have children.” He nodded. “I see you know that, too. Neither of us would bring a child into the world knowing he would carry this burden.”
“No.” Despair, and brutal acceptance, twisted her heart. “And when this is done . . . you’ll go again.”
“When this is done, could either of us be together as we are, knowing we’d never have the life we once imagined? Knowing this”—he touched his shoulder—“stands between us even after Cabhan’s end? As long as I wear it, he doesn’t truly end, and Sorcha’s curse goes on, in me. So I’ll never stop looking for a way.”
“So her curse comes back threefold. You, me, and the life we might have had.”
“We have today. It’s more than I believed I’d have with you again.”