Zero Affection Behind His Vows Chapter 10

Zero Affection Behind His Vows Chapter 10 The Stand by the Lake

Pathetic. And still hate him.”

“Go back, Callum,” I said. “Don’t come looking for me again. I want to spend whatever’s left on my own, in

peace.”

He didn’t move, and it wasn’t until I turned to go that he spoke.

“What if… what if I let you go? If I set you free, could you give me one more chance?”

I stopped walking and kept my back to him. “Callum, some wounds never close. These three marks on my neck are with me for good, and so is everything else you did to me. So don’t talk to me about chances. We ran out of those a long time ago.”

I walked away without looking back to see whether he was crying or still standing there. None of it mattered

anymore.

The countdown ticked away in my head, down to 4 days, 10 hours, 33 minutes. I had four days left.

I had one last thing to finish.

The caravan reached Crescent Lake.

Verna had told me about a low stone table on the north shore, an old herbalist’s stand that had sat abandoned for years.

I cleared it out, washed the top down with lake water, and propped a flat slate up on it. At dusk, I wrote across it in charcoal, wounds dressed and no bonecoin taken, pay me with a story instead.

Nobody believed it at first.

It was a long while before a young deer beastkin with a bad hind leg got half pushed and half, dragged over by his mother.

I crouched and worked my fingers over the swelling. The bone was cracked, not broken through.

Mirren’s drawings came straight back to me, the bonebind vine, the swellroot, the thin bone splints that held it all in place, and I remembered every step of it.

I shaved two thin splints, set them on either side of the leg, and wound the vine around tight, turn after

turn.

His mother stared at me for a good while, then dug into her hide pouch to pay me in bonecoin. I put a hand over hers. “No coin. The deal was a story.”

She held her son and crouched by the stone table and talked for over two hours, right through until dark.

After that, more of them turned up around the table every day.

When there was no work, I went through Mirren’s herb book until the corners of the pages curled and I knew where every drawing sat.

The next evening, I spent an hour crouched at the table cleaning and binding the front paw of a badger beastkin who had caught it in a leg trap.

When I straightened up, somebody was standing on the far side of the table. Callum stood back where the torchlight didn’t reach, and the people around the table went quiet as a few of them recognized him.

I didn’t look at him. I kept my head down and packed away the splints and the vine.

He edged two steps closer, and when he spoke, his voice was wrecked. “Wren, you told me once that the thing you wanted most was to be a healer, somebody who could save people. You were crouched in Mirrens shed drying herbs with dirt all over your hands, and when you looked up and said it, your eyes were lit up.

My hands stopped moving, because all of that was years behind me.

I had said back then that once I had all of Mirren’s skill, I’d open a healing stand in the Dustmarket and treat anybody who came, and he had made a sound of agreement beside me and said he would build the shelter

for it.

“That was a long time ago.” I coiled the used vine into a bundle and set it on the edge of the table. “Callum, that shelter never got built. You told me healing was dangerous and you wouldn’t let me keep going.”

He stood in the firelight without moving, and his lips worked several times before anything came out. “It never got built… you could build it now.”

I didn’t answer. A torch by the table popped and threw sparks out into the dark.

I looked down and closed the herb book, and my voice came out level. “Go home, Callum.”

He stood there a long time, then backed up two steps into the dark and said nothing more.

The sprites weighed in.

“He’s crying.”

“He finally knows what it feels like.”

“Still not enough.”

“I want him regretting this for the rest of his life.”

I didn’t look back.

Behind my eyes, the numbers kept sliding down to 2 days, 9 hours, 0 minutes.

I sat down on the ground with my back against the stone table.

A voice came out of the crowd, neither loud nor soft. “Wren, are you opening tomorrow?”

I glanced up at the countdown, which showed two days left. “I am.”