Page 20 of The Midnight Arrow

He looked to me in confirmation as he gestured. I nodded.

“Death needle. Which makes that one the shadevine hive,” Lorik continued, looking at the pitch black teardrop-shaped mass on the edge of the garden. At night, it glowed silver from within.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Wherever did you find that one?” he asked.

Shadevines were the rarest of the glowflies.

“It was easy,” I told him. “Utterly by chance, I suppose. I was out in the forest collecting lovery leaves for my candles. Before I knew it, night had fallen. But there was a cave nearby, and it was glowing silver in the dark. I saw the shadevines creeping along the rock. I knew there must be a hive inside. I went back the next day when they were asleep and started the transfer.”

“Is the cave still there?” he wondered.

“Yes, but there was only one hive in the cave. I haven’t come across another in the five years I’ve had this one.”

“Shadevine queens are immortal,” he said softly. “You’d think there would be more since that’s the case.”

There was something in the tone of his voice that had me quieting.

“Yes, but many queens were captured to try to replicate that immortality,” I said carefully.

The Rolara villagers knew I kept glowflies or at least suspected I did. The antidotes and some of my potions couldn’t be possible without them. There were others who kept glowflies. The Healers’ Guild, for instance, kept a patch of land on the northern edge of the Black Veil and tended to it in shifts based off the season. I was the only one who had shadevines, as far as I knew. But I had never been selfish. Any request from the guild for shadevine blooms, I’d honored.

“Why are you asking about the shadevine hive?”

I’d had three trespassers on my land in the ten years I’d lived in the Black Veil. All of them had come for the glowflies. Foolishly, they’d all come at night, when the glowflies were active, and they’d been stung dozens of times each, every hive swarming as if they knew they needed to protect themselves as a single unit. The village witch’s barrier spell only worked on Severs, apparently. Not thieves.

One thief haddied. I’d heard about it in the village next day. Wrathweed stings were poisonous. To be stung thrice without an antidote was certain death. Since then, not a single soul had tried to take the hives.

I didn’t know if the thieves had wanted the shadevines or if they’d wanted the hearts of the hives—where most of the magic was concentrated and were thus most valuable. Likely, they’d wanted both.

“Curiosity,” Lorik answered me.

“Many have tried to take them,” I informed him, keeping my tone level. “None have succeeded.”

“That’s apparent,” he replied. “They trust their keepers alone. You must have a pure soul, Marion.”

I cocked my head to the side. He was still radiating heat. I felt the rumble of his voice against me, the vibration of it sinking into my skin.

He was…something. Something I couldn’t see. I knew that as certainly as I knew Ishouldstay away from him.

So why was I pressing closer, pleased with his compliment? Maybe I’d been much too starved for affection and intimacy. Maybe I missed the heat and weight of a male against me. Maybe just one little taste of Lorik would be enough.

But I was a healer first and foremost. I couldn’t forget that. I needed to see him well…and then afterward?

Maybe afterward I could explore whatever this was. Maybe afterward, I could go to Grimstone’s with him and drink ale and kiss him in a back booth.

I wanted to uncover all his secrets…even if I feared what I would find.

Nine

Lorik was watching me, lounging against one of the largest river trees on my property. His broad back was to the trunk, and he had one knee brought up, his bad arm resting against it. Similar in position to how I’d found him in the Black Veil three nights ago.

“Stop,” I said, though I was trying to hide my smile as I dumped the bedding into the basin.

“Stop what?” he asked innocently. He’d chosen that tree to relax against because it was closest to the washing tub I had outside—a wide, hollowed-out tree trunk that I believed had been struck by lightning once. It was a perfect depth to let the bedding soak in.

After Lorik’s infection had passed, the sheets and the coverlet needed a desperate wash. But the afternoon was fading, the sun already beginning to lower in the sky, so I wanted to take advantage before the night chill set in.