Page 236 of The Mercy of Dawn

His list of failures today was ever-growing.

He should have just carried her out here, wet clothes be damned.

Runa finished wrapping her thigh, and Cyril pulled away from her faster than Mikael thought she’d be able to. She shifted somewhat awkwardly onto her side, giving Mikael and his mother her back.

Cyril’s voice wavered as she said, “I’m tired.”

“I know you are, sweetheart.” His mother sighed. “We’re almost done, I just need to—”

“Let her sleep.” Mikael squeezed his mother’s shoulder.

He knew she meant well. She always did.

But everything was catching up with Cyril now.

Truthfully, he was shocked that she had any grasp on consciousness right now, let alone enough to be talking and moving, albeit sparingly.

The sidelong glance his mother cast him was begrudging at best, but her shoulders dropped and she stood. She pulled the covers up around Cyril, tucking her in with a sort of reverence that made Mikael have to turn away for a moment.

There was no doubt about whether she considered Cyril one of her own or not.

Runa didn’t let Mikael dwell on the aching sentimentality for long, though. She inclined her head towards the sofa by the fire and said, “Talk with me for a moment, before you join her?”

Mikael looked wistfully at the empty space in the bed beside Cyril that the fatigue and stress of the day had him desperate to crawl into. All he wanted now was to hold Cyril, if she’d let him, and feel her beating heart and breathing body against his. Have that steady reminder she was alive, and home, and at his side be what lulled him to sleep.

It would have to wait though.

He dropped onto the sofa and raked a hand through his damp hair, waiting as his mother gathered up all the supplies from the infirmary and set them off on Cyril’s desk.

“I don’t mean to corner you,” Runa said as she sat beside him, in that regal way of hers with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap, “but will you explain to me what in the hells happened today? I was given very little to go on before pandemonium broke out here.”

She deserved an explanation more than anyone else, but Mikael did not feel like putting into words the series of fucked up events that had brought them to this moment.

Thankfully with his mother, words weren’t a necessity.

Runa tipped her head as he reached for her hands.

“You’ll show me?” she asked.

Mikael nodded, pulling the warmth of her palms to his temples.

Unlike with Cyril, there was no pageantry or preamble when his mother slipped into his mind, not with how many times she had done it by this point in his life. She always said that his darkness called to hers, as scant of a thread of it as he held.

Just a sharp sting of cold up the length of his spine, and she was in.

After that, it was easy to let his memories flow.

He started with Kaia, bearing the alarming news of their missing guards.

The infuriating conversation about resources with the general and his father.

That godsforsaken dinner and the moment he fucked up in the most immeasurable way—his conversation with Cyril.

Things became decidedly less easy after that.

“Cyril is gravely wounded. She was attacked, at one of the warehouses, and—”

Mikael didn’t think his heart could pound faster than it had when Ari first uttered those words. When his avian form dropped from the sky in a flash of light, intercepting Mikael on his ride into Brynnhold, he knew it wasn’t good. But nothing could have prepared him to hear those words.