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“You’re bleeding.”
Chaol jumps at the sound of her soft voice, at her proximity, something none of his instincts had alerted him to and she’s now standing at his side, so close he can feel her body in the space beside his now he’s aware of her.
He looks down into her dark eyes, deep and rich, steady as a forest pool with that infinite calm he’s come to know and rely upon so much, the only thing that’s kept him grounded and able to keep going on more than one occasion. But now he could have sworn a shiver of fear had marred that stillness that so few people ever saw beneath.
As though the sound of her voice has unstopped him somehow he notices the gentle drip, drip, drip of his blood on the carpet beneath his feet but can’t tell exactly where it’s coming from. For one wild moment he wonders if it can be Rowan’s blood, then remembers he had changed his tunic.
In answer to his confusion, Nesryn’s small, deft fingers reach up and lightly brush the opened wounds on his neck where the witches iron nails had cut into him, inches from tearing out his throat. His hand automatically lifts to inspect the damage too. His hand faintly brushes against hers as her fingertips linger at the wounds dug deep into his flesh.
She withdraws her hand and backs off a step, so assured that he doesn’t know if it’s a response to the fleeting contact between them or merely a coincidence but she doesn’t give him a chance to figure it out, saying, “They need to be cleaned and bound up.”
Shaking his head and taking a step back from her he mutters roughly, “It’s fine.”
“It’s not,” she challenges him flatly, her gaze hard and firm, containing a stubborn promise of a refusal to back down, whatever he says.
But he’s never been much good at backing down himself, “They have enough to deal with,” he snaps, jerking his head towards the door from the upstairs bedroom he had taken refuge in, to the lower level where the others are still gathered, dealing with the casualty of his stupidity.
“Then I’ll deal with it,” she replies steadily, her gaze never faltering or wavering from his, never showing any flicker of hesitation.
A wave of grim exhaustion sweeps through him without warning before he can muster a reply and he sinks down into the small wooden chair by the desk and buries his face in his hands. He doesn’t raise himself when he senses Nesryn’s shadow pass over him, indicating her closeness. Only when he feels her soft hand under his chin, tilting his face up to hers does he look at anything other than his trembling legs.
Her eyes, dark, fathomlessly so, contain a warm kindness that’s too easy for others to miss as she kneels down in front of him and gently cleans the cuts at his throat with an ointment that grates and stings. He finds himself unable to meet her gaze, unable to justify deserving the compassion and empathy she has for him as she quietly tends to him.
“You wanted to kill him, didn’t you?” she says quietly, so quietly that if they hadn’t been so close he would have missed it, “Dorian?”
He looks at her when she says his name and it’s not a question, not really. She knows, had known what he intended to do from the moment he had left in the middle of Oakwald forest. But he nods and something shifts and darkens in those midnight eyes he’s realised he’s been losing himself in more and more often lately, a deep vein of emotion in her he can’t pierce or comprehend.
“I wanted to help him,” Chaol continues, knowing he doesn’t have to explain himself to her, knowing she understands because she understands him, but finds himself, for the first time, driven to fill the silence that’s expanding between them, “I wanted to end it for him. I owe him that much.”
He hadn’t meant to say those last words, the words that had made his voice break, hadn’t meant to reveal that final truth but she only responds with a jerky nod as she adds more ointment to the rag she’s using to clean his neck.
“Did you ever stop,” she asks him, her voice shaking with a strain he’s never heard before, as though it’s taking all of her remarkable self control to keep herself in check in this moment, “To consider the cost of giving him that end?”
His whole body stiffens at her words and he pulls away from her, eyes wide and horrified, “I never meant for that to happen,” he breathes hoarsely, shaking his head, desperate for her to understand, to know, “I never meant for Rowan to get hurt – for anyone-“
But she cuts him off, “I’m not talking about Rowan,” she says, a hard bite in her words, “I’m talking about you,” he blinks at her, not knowing what to say but she speaks into the silence, seemingly oblivious to how her words have startled him, “You can’t tell me you thought you could kill the king’s son in front of him and then just walk away from that,” she whispers, meeting his eyes again, an inexpressibly pain hidden behind those eyes only he can read.
“No,” Chaol whispers, his eyes flashing up to briefly meet hers, not knowing what else to say, not knowing what else he can give her in this moment but truth, too shattered and broken to think of anything else, “No, I didn’t,” he hears himself admit hoarsely, the words, the deep implication behind them startling him, really striking him for the first time.
“You would have let them kill you,” she says, voice now deathly quiet, her hands having for gotten what they were supposed to be doing, gripping the little glass bottle of ointment so hard her knuckles have turned bone white and he expects it to shatter.
“For him,” he whispers faintly into the awful quiet left in the wake of her words, in the midst of which he can feel the eyes of his crouching oncoming destruction burn through him again, “For him,” he says again, so she’ll understand.
“He sacrificed himself for you,” those words, that terrible awful truth that’s been destroying him for weeks now.
Only she doesn’t damn him for it, her words aren’t a condemnation, as Aelin’s, so many weeks ago, had been. You fled, she had told him and he had and that had torn through him more than anything else, echoing in his ears today when he had made that decision to go after Dorian and make an end, clattering around in the hollow space inside him where once he had a heart, making the choice he made so easy, so blissfully easy as so little had been since he’d lost everything.
But Nesryn’s words have none of that accusation in them, the unspoken reprimand, they’re confused and incredulous and he doesn’t understand, “He ended up with that thing inside him, that Valg prince to protect you, to let you get away,” she says, shaking her head, “He sacrificed himself to save you, Chaol-“
“I know!” he bellows, unable to stand it anymore, unable to contain the endless pit of grief and guilt in him a moment longer, leaping to his feet, the chair crashing away from him, “I know and I should have stopped him,” he howls, voice cracking.
At last, after so long he shatters completely before her. The words he’s kept inside himself for so long, letting them rip and tear the shredded remnants of his soul to nothing, until there’s barely a sliver of it left within him burst from him in a furious, desperate, agonized rage, not directed at her but at himself, at the self-loathing that’s been eating away at him for weeks and weeks.
“I shouldn’t have let him; I shouldn’t have left him,” he gasps, his breathing going ragged and he hunches over the desk, bracing against it, needing it to support him, clenching his hands into fists to keep them still and on the worn wood, to stop them from raking across the desk and tearing everything from it just to try and vent some of the awful feeling that’s coursing through his body that he doesn’t want anymore, that he can’t deal with anymore.
The weight of the loss not just his but the world’s in the absence of that bright prince and all his promise finally becomes too much for him and he crumbles beneath it. Gone. Lost. Worse than dead. For him. For nothing.
Chaol can’t help the tears that fall as his entire body convulses and he chokes out again, barely audible through his sobs, “I left him. I left him. I left him.”
A soft, warm hand rests gently on his back and the instinct he expects to grip him; telling him to throw her off, to pull away from her touch, her consolation, her help, to push her away as he’s done over and over and over again, distancing himself from anyone else who he might get hurt, who might help him, who might provide solace he doesn’t deserve, doesn’t come this time.
Instead he sinks to his knees, unable to contend with the unbearable pressure of the grief that’s bearing down upon him. She crouches down beside him, giving him a moment, then, “What would have happened,” she asks, voice low and carefully controlled,” If you had stayed?”
“I would have died by his side as I was meant to,” he rasps out, “As I swore to. Protecting him. I might have been able to buy him some time, to let him get away-“
“No,” she says, so firmly that he looks up at her through streaming eyes, “You know that’s not what would have happened,” she breathes, “You would have died and he would still have been enslaved by that collar and he would have had no-one left to fight for him,” she says, tightly gripping his shoulder, anchoring him to her.
“I thought I could help him,” Chaol whispers, “I thought I could save him. I thought I could bring him back, re-pay the debt, save him the way he saved me but I can’t,” his voice breaks on the last word and he has a vague awareness of her moving in closer and reaching for his hand, squeezing it, trying to offer him whatever comfort she can, “He’s gone,” he breathes and the word sticks in his throat, unwilling to leave him, even now, “Gone and there’s no getting him back. Gone and it’s my fault,”
“It’s not. He made his choice,” Nesryn murmurs quietly, “And his choice was to save you. He sacrificed his life for yours; you shouldn’t throw it away for nothing.”
“I wanted to free him; to do the only thing left to me to do for him,” he breathes, looking up at her, searching her eyes, for what he doesn’t even know.
“If you want to do something for him then live,” she tells him, her voice gentle but becoming stronger as she goes on, “If he had wanted you dead he would never have stood between you and his father. He would have let you die in that throne room if that’s what he wanted for you,” leaning forwards she gently cups his cheek in her hand, “Fight. Live. Do that for him. Fight for him. Live for him. Make a difference and change this world for the better for him,” she says, a fierceness blazing in her eyes he’s only ever seen flickers and smouldering embers of before, “But don’t just die for him,” she continues, her voice dropping and her tone softening as she takes his hand in hers again, “Because that’s not what he wanted.”
“Thank you,” he whispers to her, gently squeezing her hand, hoping to convey the gratitude for her words through that gesture and perhaps she understands because he gently squeezes back.
He hesitates for a fraction of a second before some reckless, impulsive part of him; the same part that had coaxed him into her bed last summer, pushes him forwards and before he’s fully aware of what he’s doing, his arms are around her and he’s pulling her in against him in a close embrace. She grips the back of his tunic a little too tightly as she lets him fold her into his arms and press her against his body, both of them shaking slightly with emotions they rarely let themselves feel and words they’ll never let themselves say.
They cling to each other for a long time, both unwilling to let go, only now realising how much they had needed this. The way she tightens her hold on him, as though she can keep him safe and prevent him from ever doing anything so stupid again; in a way that tells him she’s glad he failed today because it meant he came back to her.
They only break apart when they hear Aelin calling them from downstairs, telling them that they have to go soon. Hastily stepping away from one another, both doing their best to ignore the charged atmosphere in the room around them, she quickly finishes cleaning and binding up the wounds on his neck before the two of them slip downstairs and rejoin the main group once more.