Chapter Twenty
None of the lines connected. They were just randomly dispersed across the scroll. It made no sense.
“What just happened?” Ahyana asked.
Io started muttering to herself. “The savior, greatest weapon, a trial of the elements . . . that’s it!”
She rushed forward toward the scroll and Suri put her hand out, as if to stop her from getting too close, but she brushed past.
Io sucked in a deep breath and then blew as hard as she could on the scroll.
More lines appeared.
“We need the elements to unlock it!” she exclaimed.
“I have dirt!” I said. I ran into my room and opened my trunk to get my pot of Locrian soil. I brought it back into Io’s room and placed a handful of it on the scroll.
But nothing happened. The dirt remained on top of the scroll and no new lines appeared.
“Why wouldn’t that work?” Zalira asked.
I racked my brain until I came up with, “Maybe because this is from Locris? Lysimache cursed it, so it won’t work on the scroll.”
Suri ran out of the room, and without her saying so, I knew she was going to grab dirt from the courtyard. That would be the closest place. Io picked up the scroll and let the Locrian dirt fall to the ground before placing the papyrus back on the table.
“We need fire!” Ahyana said, rushing over to where the flint and tinder were kept. She brought them back over.
“What if the scroll catches fire and gets destroyed?” Zalira asked. That was a valid point.
“We have to have faith,” Io said. She took the flint and tinder and went over to the fireplace and sparked an ember onto a long piece of bark, which immediately caught fire. Io brought it back over to the scroll, laying the bark on top of it.
Everyone held their breath and watched. The scroll sucked in the fire until it was gone. The papyrus didn’t burn.
More lines appeared.
Suri returned then with a handful of dirt and dropped it on top. The scroll accepted this dirt, and it dissolved into the papyrus.
Even more lines.
“Is that writing in the bottom left corner?” Zalira asked, getting closer. If they were words, they were unintelligible. What if they were written in a language we couldn’t read?
It was impossible to tell what the scroll was trying to convey. The lines needed to be completed. We were missing an element.
“We need aether,” Io said sadly. The fifth element. “Where are we supposed to get that?”
“I’d bet if Lia told Xander to go pull her down a star, he’d find a way to do it.” Ahyana was teasing, probably in an attempt to lighten the mood, as I was sure we’d all come to the same conclusion.
We had no access to aether. We couldn’t get our answer from the scroll.
Her words also had the unintended side effect of making me remember Xander asking, “Would you also like me to fetch the sun and put it on a chain so that you can wear it around your neck?” when we had been negotiating the terms of our marriage.
Then he’d given me a sun pendant. And I remembered the way he had caressed me with that necklace, and it put all sorts of unbidden images from that night into my mind.
I tried to shove them out. This wasn’t the time.
But now that my husband was in my head, I again started thinking about the dreams and how I might be responsible for them. Could my dreams help me find solutions? If it was the goddess’s magic, I had spoken to her in my dreams before. What if I tried to focus on getting an answer?
“Is there a substitute for aether we could use?” Zalira asked.
Io shook her head. “Not that I can think of. And it can’t be created, either. It’s an element, a base material. We have to get something that has it in order to complete the scroll.”
She sat down dejectedly in a chair, putting her head in her hands. We had been so close but it wasn’t enough.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said, leaning down to hug Io.
I hoped that was true.
It was well past midnight before Xander came to bed. He looked surprised to see me sitting up, waiting for him. My heart pounded furiously in my chest, bruising my rib cage.
“Why are you still awake?” he asked as he closed the door. He tended to do it more quietly at night.
“I was waiting for you.” Could he hear how loud my heartbeat was? Could he see my pulse throbbing in my neck? I was so nervous to talk to him.
“It’s late, wife. I want to go to sleep.”
“Please. Just a few minutes.”
He hesitated, as if making up his mind, and then he nodded. He took off the cloak he’d been wearing and let it drop to the floor. I wondered where he had gone, what he’d been doing.
But I knew now was not the time to ask.
Xander sat down on our bed, leaving a great deal of space between us, unlike earlier, when he’d sat so close that we were touching.
I wasn’t sure how to begin. Should I apologize for fleeing this morning? Explain why I had panicked? Help him to understand what I’d been thinking?
That wasn’t really what he and I did. We didn’t sit down and discuss things rationally. We threw out accusations and threats and fought.
I wanted more than that. I wanted to work with him, not against him.
“Earlier today . . .” I started and then immediately stopped, wringing my hands together. Why was I so scared? Why was this so hard?
After another few beats he spoke. “I shared what you told me about the hammer of Arion with the palace’s scholars and historians. I’m hopeful that they’ll find something.”
“Lysimache bragged about destroying books. I’m not sure they’ll come up with anything useful. Io and Suri checked your mother’s library and there wasn’t any information about it there, either.”
“Your library,” he absentmindedly corrected me while rubbing the back of his neck.
“My library,” I said, ignoring the warmth currently spreading through my chest.
More silence until he asked, “Why did you run away from me this morning?”
“Because . . . because nothing has changed.”
I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His passive expression gave nothing away. “Everything has changed. The high priestess is dead. My contract with her is null and void.”
Oh. I hadn’t considered that. He had promised to keep me a maiden, and he had promised that to Theano.
“And there are no more temple guards,” he added. It made me wonder if Ahyana had told that to Rokh, who had passed it along to Xander. “No one will bury you alive.”
Despite his calm demeanor, I heard the tone in his voice that made me think he was holding himself back. There was longing, even if it was faint.
“My vow wasn’t to the high priestess,” I reminded him. “I made my vow to the goddess. I . . . I can’t.”
A dark mischief lit up his eyes. “I promise not to tell her.”
“That’s not how this works. She will know.”
“What do you think she would do to you?”
“In order to be able to wield magic, I have to abstain from ‘pleasures of the flesh.’”
“Who told you that?”
“The life mage apprentice that I briefly held against his will. He said that in order for the magic to work, the life mages had to avoid ‘pleasures of the flesh.’” I felt foolish saying the phrase again.
“That’s a shame. Pleasures of the flesh are the best kind.”
I think he meant to tease, but it came across rough and full of desire and my body responded. My stomach went molten; my skin felt feverish, desperate for his touch; my lungs no longer functioned. I had to swallow it all down, push it aside.
When I finally got my voice working again, it was shaking. “It’s not just the magic. It’s the fact that I’m supposed to be the savior. I don’t know what I’m meant to do, but I do know that I have to remain in favor with the goddess by obeying her rules.”
“Do you really believe that you’re the savior?”
Part of me wanted to laugh. “I don’t know what to believe. Can you imagine a worse person for that position?”
“I can think of no one better,” he said quietly. Oh, that was like a direct hit to my heart. He was tugging on my emotions again and that was too dangerous. It would be easier if I kept this about our physicality.
I wished this nervousness would abate. “I know that we have always had this.”
“This?”
I gestured between us. “This physical attraction. We have always wanted each other, even when we were furious. So maybe this isn’t fair of me, but I want us to be .
. . us. The way we were in our dreams. Being able to talk and laugh.
We have been friends and I would like that again.
” We had also been doing many other pleasurable things to one another in those dreams, and I hoped he wouldn’t bring that up.
This seemed foolish. I reminded myself that, just a few hours ago, I had wanted his disdain and anger because they helped to create a chasm that made things easier for me on the attraction front.
But I needed him in my life in some form. I knew we were meant to work together. There was a reason he’d been in my dreams for so long.
A reason why when I first met him, it was like remembering someone I had forgotten.
“I told you,” he said, and his heated voice skated over my skin. “Whatever you want, you have only to ask and I will do it.”
All the air in the room left and I couldn’t breathe. When he’d said that before, we’d been mostly naked and he had been using his mouth to do the most—
He suddenly stood and went into the washroom.
I decided to take this opportunity to teach my body how to move oxygen in and out of my lungs again, and to calm myself down. I couldn’t ask him to be my friend and then immediately turn around and pounce on him.
When he came back out, my heart lifted at seeing him. He walked over to the bed, looking down at me. He reached for a pillow and a blanket and put them on the floor.
A sick taste filled my mouth as I watched him settle in. My racing heartbeat was no longer from desire but from fear. He had told me once that he would never sleep on the floor. That if I wanted to be away from him, I was welcome to do so—but he never would.
Now he was.
I should let this happen. Get distance. Let the divide between us grow wider.
But I didn’t want to keep being caught in the same endless cycle.
“Are you angry with me?” I asked.
He was in the midst of arranging the blanket over him when he stopped to look at me. “I’m not trying to punish you, wife. I’m . . . doing what I promised Io. Protecting you. Even from me.”
I didn’t want that. I wanted to be close to him. Even if that wasn’t fair to either one of us.
“I trust you,” I said softly. I knew that he could control himself. Much better than I could.
He made a sound at the back of his throat and then lay down. “I think it’s better if we stay apart.”
My legs were trembling, but I managed to scoot to the edge and walk over to him. I knelt down. “I don’t. I want to be with you.”
It was one of the most honest and scary things I’d ever said to him, and I felt completely exposed. Vulnerable. Like I had crawled out on the highest limb of a tree and walked to the edge.
Would he pull me to him or let me fall? I waited. He could turn on his side and ignore me and I would leave him alone. Or if he told me to go, I would.
“Please,” I said.
He held his arms out and reached for me. I cuddled up next to him while he put the blanket over both of us. The floor was cold and hard but I didn’t care. I wanted to be close to him.
No, it wasn’t just want. I needed it. At some point I had started to need him, and while the thought terrified me, this time it wasn’t enough to make me leave his arms.