Harbor (On the Wind #3)

26. Tybalt

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

TYBALT

O restes took a breath so deep that his waist expanded, and I wondered if it pulled at his stitches. “I’m Nemedan.”

Unimpressed, I arched a brow at him. “Clearly.”

Thankfully I could distract myself with the bandages while he explained. I wasn’t sure I could take any more surprises, and I certainly couldn’t trust my own eyes. After all, they seemed to say that Orestes was an eagle? Had been dropped, naked, by an eagle?

He sighed, and his waist deflated so I had to tighten the bandages around his middle. “It’s more than bird worshipping. We don’t actually worship birds. That’s just a convenient misunderstanding.”

I nodded. With the extra padding, I didn’t think his wound would bleed through any time soon, but I’d never been stabbed, so what the hell did I know?

“We are birds.”

I scoffed, nerves overtaking me as I tucked the ends of the bandage with shaking hands. “So I’m not insane.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Or hallucinating.”

“No.”

“Well, at least you aren’t brazen or stupid enough to go out into the snows completely naked. There are the feathers.”

Orestes laughed, and it was the first reasonable sound I’d ever heard. It warmed my frozen insides more effectively than the fire in the hearth.

Sheepishly, I met his eye. “So you’re a bird?”

He nodded. “Sort of. Sometimes. We can change back and forth.”

“How did you receive that gift?”

Orestes, holding himself up on one arm, shrugged. “I don’t know that we received it from anywhere. Perhaps we did, but I’m no scholar or historian to tell you how. We just are.”

Chewing my lip, I looked him over. The eagle that had swooped down on us had been enormous and loud. Still, it was hard to imagine Orestes shrinking all his bulk into a creature capable of taking flight. It’d have been easier to believe he transfigured himself into an ox.

“So these—” I reached for the feathers in his hair and smoothed a fluffy gray one between my fingers. It was so soft, and didn’t look like it belonged to an eagle like him. “—they’re real? You... grow them?”

Again, Orestes laughed. Again, it didn’t seem at my expense.

“They are real, but I don’t grow them. They’re the feathers of the ones I’ve lost.”

I snatched my hand back at once. “Gods, I’m sorry.”

He shifted a little closer to me. “You don’t need to be sorry.”

Edgy and faint, I shook my head fast. “No, you don’t understand. I?—”

Orestes’s brow furrowed.

“My father didn’t come to my mother’s funeral,” I blurted out.

He blinked at me, and my head swam with the strength of my blushing.

“It’s not done, in Urial. For a royal to—ah... We’re not meant to allow death and the king to occupy the same thought. We hold them apart. It’s... taboo.”

“So you’re not comfortable with loss?”

I snorted. “Versed in it? Sure. Comfortable? Not at all, though I’m not sure how anyone ever could be.”

Another subtle shrug from Orestes. “It helps to acknowledge it.”

I looked at my boots, caked with snow. When we’d arrived I’d been too distracted with the crisis at hand to remove them, but I undid the buttons now.

Far better work than acknowledging anything at all.

“Are all Nemedans like you? With birds, I mean.”

“Different birds, but the principle applies to all of us.”

“And Paris,” I said, “he knows about you?”

I chanced a look up at Orestes only to see his face soften. That expression was far too close to pity for my liking, so I went back to pulling my boots off.

“Paris is Nemedan.”

I started. “He’s a bird?”

“He has a bird, yes. An owl. I was there when he first transformed. Threw himself at me like a real bird of prey, that one.” He smiled distantly in a way that made my heart clench at this whole world I couldn’t even imagine. “He’s brave.”

“He’s an idealist,” I corrected.

It was the only reason I’d ever kept him in my bed for any length of time—the only reason he hadn’t seen what a waste I was and removed himself immediately.

“How did he become—” I started to ask, but I shook my head as soon as I realized what I was searching for. An escape. A way to be something other than what I was. A world of opportunity open to Paris that wasn’t for me. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

“Are you sure?”

I pressed my lips together between my teeth and nodded. “I’m tired.”

Thankfully, I didn’t have to lie about that. As was so often the case, panic gave way to a bone-deep weariness that made my whole body heavy. Someone had tried to kill me. Orestes had gotten hurt. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere with a spooked horse in the stables and nothing else to get us back, little as I thought Orestes should move until he’d recovered.

I pushed to my feet and looked down at Orestes on the fur in front of the fire. He had my coat draped across his legs, but it wasn’t enough. Might as well plant where we were, because I didn’t have it in me to drag firewood up to any of the bedrooms.

“We should stay down here. I’ll go get pillows and blankets off the bed. No reason to try and move you around too much. I’ll, uh, I’ll be right back.”

This time, even if I was escaping once again, there wasn’t far for me to go, and no chance I’d leave Orestes wounded and unattended.

I piled dusty pillows and quilts high as I could in my arms, and when I came back down, Orestes turned toward me. “Need help?”

I shook my head and eased a pillow beneath his before covering him in layers and layers of blankets. Once he was adequately cocooned, I slipped beneath the covers beside him.

“Tybalt?”

“Yes?”

“Are you all right? I can’t tell if you’re handling this incredibly well, or if you’re completely disconnecting from it?”

“I don’t know either,” I admitted.

“I’m sorry I kept you in the dark.”

Finally, I turned my head on the pillow to meet his worried gaze.

“Orestes, you just saved my life. I’m quite certain that there’s nothing you need to apologize to me for at present.”

His mouth twisted up, but really, this was—it was all none of my business.