“I understand what he is saying,” I gritted out through my teeth. In a swipe of my hand, I snatched up the bone. “But I don’t understand how. What am I to do? Place it on him? Give a bit of my own flesh? Tell me and I will do it.”

There would be no words shared between us, but Roark leaned forward like he might murmur the answer, his brow a mere finger’s width from mine. I stilled when he used one knuckle to tap the place over my heart, then with the same finger, gestured at Kael.

Roark gave no further instructions. He rose and took three backward steps.

Through a blur of tears, with Kael’s wet, thick breaths filling my head, I studied the bone. Ashwood’s demands were clear enough—he believed I could find a way to make the healing bone save Kael’s life by placing it—I assumed—against him.

When the heat of my palm touched the bone, something inside me fell away. Like gates sweeping open in my mind, a strange glow bled from Kael’s shattered ribs and breastbone. Patterns of gilded stitches crossed this way and that over his battered wounds.

It took but a moment for my mind, perhaps an instinct, to note the glow revealed a possibility of how to include the new piece of bone, a way to seal the cracks and holes left behind.

I reeled over his body. “Kael, I-I know how. I see it.”

His lashes fluttered. A weak smile crossed his lips as he whispered, “Let it be. I will greet you with the gods with a…curved horn, Ly.”

“No.” Nausea tossed through my middle for what needed to be done. “Salur can wait.”

There was no time to scorch a blade in a flame. Infection we could face if he lived. He would live.

I took the knife Roark handed me, placed it at the open wound in Kael’s chest, and began slicing it wider, deeper.

Screams of our people boiled in my brain with each cut of Kael’s flesh. His eyes rolled into his head, no doubt with the pain so fierce his body was giving up.

I swallowed back the thrum of panic when he went limp.

Once the wound was wide enough for three fingers, I took up Ashwood’s strange bone and maneuvered the edge into the bloodied flesh.

But there was more.

Intricate golden patterns honeycombed across Kael’s front and Ashwood’s healing shard. Heat prickled on the ends of my fingers, a need to reach out and follow the golden threads.

Baldur let out a groan of frustration at my back. “Hasten your damn hands, woman, or—”