Harbor (On the Wind #3)

31. Orestes

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

ORESTES

T ybalt was somehow the most incredible and most annoying person I had ever known in my life, at the same time. He was beautiful and clever and funny, and he hated himself so completely that it took my breath away. I had always thought I was the most skilled person I knew at that particular ability, but at least I tried to hide it.

Whenever I had told Brett or Killian anything negative about myself, they always made a point of disagreeing with me, and then trying to make it all better. It was strange and awkward, and I hated it, so I started trying not to voice sentiments about my own unworthiness.

Oddly enough, when I didn’t give the poisonous thoughts voice, I found that they came to my mind less and less often. Maybe it had just been because I’d been around people who thought I was good and valuable all the time, or maybe, voicing those awful words aloud had been just as bad for me as the belief itself.

But I remembered hating it when Killian and Brett brought attention to it, so I decided I would try a different method with Tybalt. Whenever he started to say something bad about himself, I was going to kiss him. It was a good distraction, and kept his mouth busy with more important things than insulting someone whom—I didn’t care how much he denied it—I loved.

Maybe, though... maybe he was right in a way. Maybe I loved him in a different way than Brett loved Paris. I wasn’t storming the castle to retrieve his family and insisting that he leave Urial to stay with me forever, after all. I hadn’t even considered that as an option, and even as I turned the thought over in my mind, I knew it wasn’t a real one. Tybalt couldn’t and wouldn’t leave Urial. He belonged there.

I slept fitfully, trying not to think about Tybalt living the rest of his life in a place where people dismissed him as a frippery. A decoration, to be largely ignored.

Somehow despite that, I woke the next morning feeling quite a lot better, and started to think about heading back to the castle. I’d have to wear the wrong clothes and walk the distance, since I could hardly shift and fly with stitches in my side, but I’d walked farther with more grievous injuries in the past.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hide away with Tybalt, alone together and separated from all the stress and court dramas and his asshole father. That actually sounded perfect, and I’d have stayed indefinitely if that had been a real option. But the people had to be worried about him already, didn’t they? And maybe they wouldn’t be worried about me, but it was my duty to stay at the castle until the council of chiefs in Nemeda told me otherwise, even if Albany had no interest in a real peace accord.

Most of all, I was a little bit tired of eating only oats. The food in Urial wasn’t terrible, and even the oats weren’t so bad, but eating the same thing for every single meal was boring as hell.

Tybalt smiled sleepily up at me, then blinked, frowning. Not at me, but somewhere behind me. Quick as a wink, he slipped from beneath the covers without leaving them open and letting the cold inside. The tiny movement made me realize, though, just how cold it was. Too fucking cold.

The fire had burned low overnight, banked but still warm... but the cold still seemed somehow more oppressive than it had?—

“Fuck me.”

I turned to look at Tybalt, who was staring out the window with something like resignation on his face. “Hope you’re up for some more oats for... ever. I need to go feed Biscuit, but I’ll get them cooking as soon as I get back.”

“Shouldn’t we head?—”

“Because we’re going to be here a while. We’re snowed in.”

Snowed... in? I blinked at him in confusion for a moment, then shook my head. I knew them both, yes, but those words didn’t go together. “Snowed in? Like... I don’t?—”

He let out a little laugh at that. “Snowed in. You know, the snow is too high to go back? We might be able to manage it, but with you injured and only one horse, we also might die.”

Die. Because of snow.

Fuck me.

I knew people died of exposure sometimes, but I’d never seen how much snow it took to kill a person before. With some effort, I dragged myself up from the fur. The stitches tugged, but they didn’t break, so that was something. I grabbed a blanket from the pile to wrap around myself as I headed to the door where Tybalt stood, looking out.

A shiver went through me as I stared out into the sheer blank whiteness. It was so bright it was almost blinding, crystalline and shimmery and... it was like a particularly high waterfall a few miles from the Crane palace. Stunningly beautiful, and at the same time utterly terrifying. The roar of water hitting the rocks below could be heard from over a mile away, the force of it immense. No one went anywhere near the falls themselves, unless they wanted to die.

This was like that, but it didn’t look violent and forceful. It was silent. Strangely peaceful. A much quieter death than the falls, but death nonetheless.

“And we’re... we can’t leave?” I asked, and my breath caught at that, my voice cracking just a bit.

He leaned into me, and his body was like a ball of warmth in the freezing cold. He was sweating. Bizarre. He didn’t seem off, though, his eyes as big and sparkling as ever. “Beautiful, isn’t it? But no, we definitely can’t make it through that. We’ll have to give it a few days. It’s early enough in the season that it should melt off quickly. The ground is barely cold enough for snow to stick properly, let alone stick around.”

Early enough in the season. Implying that if it were not this early, this snow might stay... how long? Weeks? Months? Forever?

No, that was silly. It couldn’t stay forever. Urial had a summer, after all. I might die otherwise.

“But the fire,” I said, turning back to it, starting to panic all over again.

“The fire will be fine,” he said, his voice surprisingly soothing. “There’s enough firewood for an entire season out there. For the whole lodge. We could keep that fire going for a year straight without running out.” He cocked his head to one side, sighing. “I’m more annoyed that we’re going to have to eat more oats.”

It was like he’d read my mind from before, but I supposed it was obvious. He, too, was used to a more diverse diet.

“Okay,” he said, shaking his head. “You go lay back down before you hurt yourself. I’ll get the fire going again, then I’ll go feed Biscuit and check on him, and then”—he sighed dramatically—“more oats.” Popping up onto his toes, he planted a kiss on my lips before heading off to the wood pile.

And he doubted he was lovable? He was so quick and clever, and automatically took extra work on himself simply because he was able to do it. He took care of others, without thought for himself. He reacted so well in a crisis, even when he didn’t know what to do.

The better question, really, was how anyone could fail to love Tybalt.