As she leaned against the headboard, Hal laid his head in her lap. It would never fail to astound her how he’d transformed healing from something so clinical, so practiced, to something so intimate. It hurt less to use her magic now. It was all numb, all sputtering and soft like a low-burning candle. As she bent over him, nearly touching her forehead to his, her hair came loose from its messy chignon. Behind this makeshift curtain, there was nothing and no one but Hal. Nothing but the sensation of her magic binding them up, tighter and tighter, like a row of sutures. To lose him now would rend her open.

I love you, she thought. Let nothing tear us apart again. But she couldn’t say it. Already, she wasn’t sure if she could let him go when they made it to Vesria.

When her hair fell onto his face, he tucked it behind her ear. It broke the spell, just a little, and let the world back in. By the time she finished, his face had relaxed. The pain, harbored secretly for years, finally receded. He opened his eyes, and in them was the same emotion as the first time she had dared to gaze into them. Awe.

Goddess above, would she ever get used to the way he looked at her?

“Thank you,” he said.

Her throat went dry. “It’s the very least I can do.”

The magic flickered from her hands, and when she tried to call on it again, the air was breathless and still, the dark unbroken. It did not answer her. So this was it. Her magic for his.

Wren had always known this was a possibility, but it still felt like something had been stolen. There was a void in her heart where her magic once slept. Rationally, she knew another healer could restore it. It might even come back with rest alone. But it didn’t stave off the raw panic. If it never came back, she would never plumb the depths of that emptiness. She would never be whole again.

She would be just Wren. Nothing.

But she was still here. Still alive and breathing and fighting, even when she’d been stripped of the one thing she believed defined her. It shook something loose in her. Was this what Hal felt, too, when it happened? Fear that bloomed into acceptance—into relief? She was not her magic. Her worth—her existence—was more than the sum of her talents. Being just Wren was enough.

“It’s gone,” she said exultantly.

“Gone?”

Wren tore herself away from the guilt in his eyes. “I still feel it, I think. If I really pushed, I think maybe I could still … Anyway, as long as I rest, it’ll come back. Once you’re safe, I’ll find a healer to fix it.”

“You shouldn’t have—”