A muscle beat in his jaw, but he braced one hand on the couch, another on the edge of the chair, and lifted himself.

The strength in the movement alone was worthy of some admiration.

So easily, the muscles in his arms and back and chest hoisted him upward and over. As if he’d been doing it his entire life.

“You’ve kept up your exercising since … how long has it been since the injury?”

“It happened on Midsummer.” His voice was flat—hollow as he lifted his legs up onto the couch with him, grunting at the weight. “And yes. I was not idle before it happened, and I don’t see the point of being so now.”

This man was stone—rock. The injury had cracked him a bit, but not sundered him. She wondered if he knew it.

“Good,” she simply said. “Exercising—both your upper body and your legs—will be a vital part of this.”

He peered at his legs as those faint spasms rocked them. “Exercising my legs?”

“I will explain in a moment,” she said, motioning him to turn over.

He obeyed with another reproachful glare, but set himself facedown.

Yrene took a few breaths to survey the length of him. He was large enough that he nearly took up the entire couch. Well over six feet. If he stood again, he’d tower over her.

She strode to his feet and tugged his pants down in short, perfunctory bursts. His undershorts hid enough, though she could certainly see the shape of his firm backside through the thin material. But his thighs … She’d felt the muscle still in them yesterday, but studying them now …

They were starting to atrophy. They already lacked the healthy vitality of the rest of him, the rippling muscle beneath that tan skin seeming looser—thinner.

She laid a hand on the back of one thigh, feeling the muscle beneath the crisp hairs.

Her magic seeped from her skin into his, searching and sweeping through blood and bone.

Yes—the disuse was beginning to wear on him.

Yrene withdrew her hand and found him watching, hand angled on the throw pillow he’d dragged beneath his chin. “They’re breaking down, aren’t they?”

She kept her face set in a mask of stone. “Atrophied limbs may regain their full strength. But yes. We shall have to focus on ways to keep them as strong as we can, to exercise them throughout this process, so that when you stand”—she made sure he heard the slight emphasis on when—“you will have as much support as possible in your legs.”

“So it will not just be healing, but training as well.”

“You said you liked to be kept active. There are many exercises we can do with a spinal injury that will get blood and strength flowing to your legs, which will aid in the healing process. I will oversee you.”

She avoided the alternative words—help you.

Lord Chaol Westfall was not a man who desired help from people. From anyone.

She took a few steps up the length of his body, to peer at his spine. At that pale, 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 lavender from estates just beyond Antica’s walls, and eucalyptus from the far south.

She selected the eucalyptus, the crisp, smothering scent coiling around her as she pried off the stopper from the vial and took up a place beside him on the couch. Soothing, that scent. For both of them.

Seated together on that couch, he indeed towered over her—the muscled mass of him enough to make her understand why he’d been so adept at his position. Being perched beside him was different, somehow, than standing above him, touching him. Sitting beside a Lord of Adarlan …

Yrene didn’t let the thought settle as she pooled a small amount of the oil into her palm and rubbed her hands together to warm it. He inhaled deeply, as if taking the scent into his lungs, and Yrene didn’t bother to speak as she laid her hands upon his nape.