“I’m seeing them now for an hour or two,” said Nesryn. “Then meeting with—you know. I’ll be back this afternoon. And resume my … duties afterward.”

Careful words. Yrene didn’t blame her. Not with the weapons stacked on the desk in Nesryn’s bedroom—barely visible through the ajar door. Knives, swords, multiple bows and quivers … The captain had a small armory in her chamber.

Chaol just grunted his approval, smiling slightly as Nesryn strode for the suite doors. The captain paused in the threshold, her grin broader than any Yrene had seen before.

Hope. Full of hope.

Nesryn shut the door with a click.

Alone in the silence again, still feeling very much the intruder, Yrene crossed her arms. “Can I get you anything before we begin?”

He just wheeled forward—into his bedroom.

“I’d prefer the sitting room,” she said, snatching her supply bag from where Kadja had set it on the foyer table. And likely rifled through it.

“I’d prefer to be in bed while in agony.” He added over his broad shoulder, “And hopefully you won’t pass out on the floor this time.”

He easily moved himself from the chair onto the bed, then began unbuckling his jacket.

“Tell me,” Yrene said, lingering in the doorway. “Tell me what I did to upset you.”

He peeled off his jacket. “You mean beyond displaying me like some broken doll in front of your acolytes and having them haul me off that horse like a limp fish?”

She stiffened, pulling out the bit before dumping the supply bag on the floor. “Plenty of people help you here in the palace.”

“Not as many as you’d think.”

“The Torre is a place of learning, and people with your injury do not come often—not when we usually have to go to them. I was showing the acolytes things that might help with untold numbers of patients in the future.”

“Yes, your prized, shattered horse. Look how well broken I am to you. How docile.”

“I did not mean that, and you know it.”

He ripped off his shirt, nearly tearing it at the seams as he hauled it over his head. “Was it some sort of punishment? For serving the king? For being from Adarlan?”

“No.” That he believed she could be that cruel, that unprofessional—“It was precisely what I just said: I wanted to show them.”

“I didn’t want you to show them!”

Yrene straightened.

Chaol panted through his gritted teeth. “I didn’t want you to parade me around. To let them handle me.” His chest heaved, the lungs beneath those muscles working like bellows. “Do you have any idea what it is like? To go from that”—he waved a hand toward her, her body, her legs, her spine—“to this?”

Yrene had the sense of the ground sliding from beneath her. “I know it is hard—”

“It is. But you made it harder today. You make me sit here mostly naked in this room, and yet I have never felt more bare than I did this morning.” He blinked, as if surprised he’d vocalized it—surprised he’d admitted to it.

“I—I’m sorry.” It was all she could think to say.

His throat bobbed. “Everything I thought, everything I had planned and wanted … It’s gone. All I have left is my king, and this ridiculous, slim scrap of hope that we survive this war and I can find a way to make something of it.”

“Of what?”

“Of everything that crumbled in my hands. Everything.”

His voice broke on the word.

Her eyes stung. Shame or sorrow, Yrene didn’t know.

And she didn’t want to know—what it was, or what had happened to him. What made that pain gutter in his eyes. She knew, she knew he had to face it, had to talk about it, but …

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. She added stiffly, “I should have considered your feelings on the matter.”

He watched her for a long moment, then removed the belt from his waist. Then took off his boots. Socks.

“You can leave the pants on, if—if you want.”

He removed them. Then waited.

Still brimming with anger. Still gazing at her with such resentment in his eyes.

Yrene swallowed once. Twice. Perhaps she should have scrounged up breakfast.

But walking away, even for that … Yrene had a feeling, one she couldn’t quite place, that if she walked away from him, if he saw her back turn …

Healers and their patients required trust. A bond.

If she turned her back on him and left, she didn’t think that rift would be repaired.

So she motioned him to move to the center of the bed and turn onto his stomach while she took up a seat on the edge.

Yrene hovered a hand over his spine, the muscled groove cutting deep through it.

She hadn’t considered—his feelings. That he might have them. The things haunting him …

His breathing was shallow, quick. Then he said, “Just to be clear: is your grudge against me, or Adarlan in general?”

He stared at the distant wall, the entrance to the bathing room blocked by that carved wood screen. Yrene held her hand steady, poised over his back, even as shame sluiced through her.

No, she had not been in her best form these past few days. Not even close.

That scar atop his spine was stark in the midmorning light, the shadow of her hand upon his skin like some sister-mark.

The thing that waited within that scar … Her magic again recoiled at its proximity. She’d been too tired last night and too busy this morning to even think about facing it again. To contemplate what she might see, might battle—what he might endure, too.

But he’d been good to his word, had instructed the girls despite her foolish, callous missteps. She supposed that she could only return the favor by doing as she’d promised as well.

Yrene took a steadying breath. There was no preparing for it, she knew. There was no bracing breath steeling enough to make this any less harrowing. For either of them.

Yrene silently offered Chaol the leather bit.

He slid it through his teeth and clamped down lightly.

She stared at him, his body braced for pain, face unreadable as he angled it toward the door.

Yrene said quietly, “Soldiers from Adarlan burned my mother alive when I was eleven.”

And before Chaol could answer, she laid her hand on the mark atop his spine.