Nor Iron Bars A Cage by Kaje Harper Read Free Book Online

slowly for my arm.
    I came out of my distraction before he touched me though. “Just give me a bandage.”
    He handed it over, careful not to brush my fingers with his own.
    Well, I had practice at bandaging too. I wiped my wrist clean, knowing he was looking at it as I did so, and resisting the impulse to hide from his gaze. The original damage was less visible in the lamplight, but the low angle somehow brought out the lines of scars that overlay the first, parallel ridge after ridge, and small nicks, old and new, marking my bad nights. I hadn’t realized there were so many. I covered them in stained but washed cotton, and pulled my sleeve down over it all.
    Tobin said, “If you weren’t going to kill yourself, what were you doing?”
    “It’s a distraction.”
    “Cutting yourself?”
    “Sometimes.” I had the impulse to see if he could understand this. “Or just knowing that I could. Knowing that I can make that choice, can lay the blade on skin, or push in just a little and draw blood, or go deeper and no one can stop me.”
    “I stopped you tonight.”
    “You grabbed me. That’s not the same thing.”
    He shook his head. “I don’t understand. I want to though. I want to help.”
    “I thought you wanted to take me back to your king.” I stood and turned my back on him.
    “Watch where you walk,” he said quickly. “There’s glass on the floor and you’re barefoot.”
    I had to laugh. It came out surprisingly real, and after a moment he chuckled too.
    “Well, you can clean it up then,” I told him. “You have boots on, and anyway it’s your mess.”
    I went to my chair, managing to avoid cutting myself, and sat down with my feet on the seat while he worked. He picked up the big shards and pieces of the frame, and then swept the small stuff into a corner with my broom. “I’ll get that swept out the door in the morning.”
    I wasn’t sure how he knew I didn’t want the door opened to the dark, but I said, “The market boy comes barefoot. You’d better get it away from the path.”
    “I can do that.” He set the broom in its place and looked at me. “I’m really sorry about your window. I thought I was saving your life.”
    He seemed so sad, I had to give him something. “Maybe you were. I’ve always known one day I might use the freedom to cut deep. This might have been the night.”
    That didn’t make him happier. “Because I came here and ruined your nice quiet life.”
    “Hardly. I mean, yes, right now I’m really not happy with you. But you saw the scars. I’ve cut myself often enough when you were hundreds of miles away. It’s not your fault.”
    “Then whose?” He grabbed the kitchen chair, swung it around, and sat on it backwards to look at me, his arms crossed on the wooden rail. “Can you tell me? Please? You said Meldov was dead, and you sounded… tortured.”
    I tried to say it wasn’t that bad, but it had been. Perhaps not torture of the body, but of the mind and soul. It had been.
    After a silence he said, “Can you tell me about the fire maybe? We knew it wasn’t an ordinary blaze when we arrived to put it out, from how long and hot it burned. And you said Meldov was caught in it. And clearly you were injured.”
    He was a soldier. He’d seen injuries. I guessed he could see that the burn on my wrist, isolated as it was, was unlikely to be from a house fire. But he waited patiently for my answer.
    “I got out,” I said hoarsely. “Ran as far as I could.” I hadn’t been certain the fire would be enough to destroy the wraith, until I felt its hold finally let go. I’d been two miles down the road by then, with no reason to go back.
    “And afterward?”
    “I hid in an old barn, for days.” I’d cowered in the hayloft, as high above the ground as I could get. The fever had come on fast, but it had taken a thirst so severe I no longer cared if I died, to drive me out of my refuge. “Eventually I made it to the hostel of the Sisters of Bian in