17. Innocence Don’t Make You Feel That Way
LUCIAN
The Eunoia govern one of the most dangerous powers of all—human emotions. With one touch, the most powerful of them can dictate how you feel, and with it what you do. Refrain from skin-to-skin contact with all Eunoia to keep your best health.
– A GUIDE TO SURVIVING IN VIRIDIS
Wendy’s left for the night, and I sit at the table across from the couch Desdemona sleeps on. Her dreams continue to stray into nightmares.
Each time they do, I reach out and try to guide her into something peaceful.
They always go back to the bad.
Lusia’s fast. Within days of determining Desdemona was the orphia she was looking for, she enacted the taking of a life and the losing of one.
I close my eyes and I see the unnamed prisoner.
Desdemona closes hers and she sees her own version of that man.
A gift for both of us.
Desdemona cries out in her sleep again, and I put her dreaming self with her mother on a sunny day, in the grass. Then I detach from her subconscious.
Dreamcatching for Desdemona isn’t a bad job. I’d rather be awake than in a dream of my own. Lately, they’ve all been about the dead man’s life.
I’m worried about what will happen on account of the poison that Wendy couldn’t identify. The skin around and inside Desdemona’s wound was badly burnt, even her hand was. I gave Wendy the knife Desdemona stabbed the man with—the one she said was used against her—but it didn’t burn his skin, and Wendy said there were no traces of poison.
It’s only a few minutes later that she whimpers again. I’ve never had so many difficulties with dictating dreams before.
I sit next to the couch and I try again, this time she shouts.
She’s… killing someone. She’s crying out.
“Marquees?” I shake her gently. She cries again. “Marquees.” I feel like we’re by the lunar lake again and I’m begging her to stay with me.
She screams.
“Desdemona, wake up!”
Her eyes flash open and on me, the brown glowing orange, and I choke while my insides burn red.
“Hey,” I choke and put a hand to my burning throat. “It’s me.” I fall to the ground, choking on every intake of breath. “Des?—”
Not only might she be my undoing, but now the death of me as well.
“Aibek?” she whispers. My organs stop burning. Actively, that is. I am still very much overheating.
I’ve never heard of a Fire Folk burning someone internally.
She crawls from the couch, holding onto her shoulder when she stumbles toward me. “Did I hurt you?” Her eyebrows crinkle together while her eyes dart across my face. There’s a vulnerability within them I’ve never seen.
I think of her dreams, the way the murder is haunting her. “No, darling. I’m perfectly alright.”
My heart is still beating vigorously from the burning.
Desdemona nods and pulls the blanket Wendy brought her from the couch, wrapping it around her shoulders. She sits next to me, jaw chattering, though she’s certainly not cold, and weakly says, “How did you know I’d be out there?”
“I had a vision,” I answer, trying not to sound out of breath. “Though I didn’t know you’d be wounded.”
“So you’re one of those kinds of Lucents?” she asks without looking at me.
“I suppose, assuming I know what you mean by those kinds.”
Desdemona is quiet for a while, still shivering, strangely. I put an arm around her, and she rests her head on my shoulder as though we’ve done this a million times before. As if we’ve perfected this dance.
As if she can be anything more to me than what she’s become.
“How powerful are your visions?”
Few people know of my visions. Every Lucent has the propensity for them, and most Lucents fall short with our magic; shadows, subconscious manipulation, all of it. It’s said to be the most difficult magic of all five of the orphic species.
Which also means that it’s the most powerful, some say.
“They’re never wrong. Occasionally a detail is omitted, such as your injury.”
“Oh,” she says. “Okay.”
She snuggles up closer to me, telling me to hold her tighter. I listen. I even dare to bring my hand to her hair, stroking my fingers through the short, soft strands.
“Can you tell me a story?” Desdemona whispers, her words breaking with the hoarse tone.
“What kind?”
“One of your own. What was it like to grow up in a castle?”
I look at my hands, still covered in her blood. “Lonely,” I tell her. With my free hand, I spin the little silver wolf in my pocket. “Have you met Azaire?”
“I think so.”
“When he moved in, it was less so.” Desdemona’s hair falls over her closed eyes, and I tuck it behind her ear.
Alright, a story.
“When we were nine, we decided to sneak away for a night. We walked far out into a neighboring village and found this pub. Barley’s. There was some sort of ceremony, a wedding, I believe. Lots of Lucents at the bar drinking and hollering.
“We sat with them, shouted and acted in the ways we never could in the kingdom. The man next to us was a bit droozed. He kept ordering shots and handing them to us. Naturally, we didn’t know what it was, yet, also naturally, we drank them all. Azaire and I got so messed up that at the end of the night, when Barley found us, he gave us the key to an extra room and told us to sleep it off. After that, we went back as often as we could. Barley became more of an uncle to me than my blood relatives.”
That was always Azaire’s and my secret. No one knows of all the nights we’ve spent at Barley’s, from nine to now.
“Hm,” she mumbles.
Desdemona’s eyes are closed, and her mouth is ajar. “Would you like to go to the couch?”
She groans a little and opens her eyes slightly. They have a sleepy look to them that tells me she’s not fully here. “No,” she whispers and pushes her head further up my shoulder.
There’s something about Desdemona when she’s unguarded. Her eyes soften and her lips curve down. Her entire face becomes easier to see. To behold.
It irks and intrigues me that she is… allowing me to regard her in such vulnerable moments as this night has held. I don’t want to do wrong by her.
I will only do wrong by her.
As I’ve thought of before—and swore I would not do—I count her freckles. I brush her cheek with my thumb, her nose.
To touch her, to have her, would be a gift from the universe—but the gods have never been all that generous with me. They prefer my abuse to my award. My torture to my treasure.
I’m not sure what my penance is for, but it’s always been rather obvious that I am paying one.
Not being able to have her, not being able to allow her to have me, will be the greatest punishment yet.
* * *
Wendy comes to the room in the late morning. She walks to us and squats down, pushing apart Desdemona’s ripped, bloody shirt to look at the wound. I can’t tell if it’s wet from healing balms or pus.
“Has she been out the entire night?” Wendy asks.
“No. She was awake for a moment.”
Wendy cleans the wound. The skin is bubbled up and blistered, red and orange and a little black around the gash.
Wendy frowns, taking off her glove. Small wisps of green light move from her finger and into Desdemona. “You should get her to the couch. She needs the rest.” Wendy makes it to the door.
I look at Desdemona’s palm, burnt to a crisp.
“Wait,” I say. “Do you have any new theories on what the poison might be?”
“It’s not natural,” Wendy says. She would know, the Eunoia of Visnatus study all of Elysia’s plant life.
“Can you make a remedy?”
“She hasn’t run a fever and I don’t feel any poison in her blood. The only symptoms are around the stab wound.” Wendy reaches for the door, and I’m about to ask what that means when she turns. She sounds exasperated as she says, “Look, all I can feel is her pain and your worry, and it’s too much for me. I’ll be back to check on her.”
“Before you leave, are you done with the knife?”
“Yeah.” She sighs. “There’s nothing.”
“Can I hold onto it?”
Wendy scrunches her eyes and looks next to me, at Desdemona’s sleeping body. Then she reaches into her bag. Her voice is shaken when she says “Sure” and hands it to me.
It’s as I expected. It feels like holding power at its source.
It feels like holding Desdemona.
“Thanks.”
“Sure.”
Then she makes it out of the room.
I hold the red knife in my hands as curiosity consumes me. Then, holding the knife by the blade, I touch the hilt to Desdemona’s forearm. The skin sizzles, burns, and she wakes up with a jump.
I slide the knife into my pocket.
“How long have I been out?” she asks breathlessly, looking around the room.
“Only the night.”
“Class has started?” She stands too quickly and leans on the wall for support, blinking sleep from her eyes. Her other hand clutches her shoulder. I come behind her and hold her up by the waist.
“Yes,” I say, almost as if it’s a question.
“Why didn’t you go?” Her head turns toward mine.
“It’s no big deal.”
“No, it is!” she whispers, pulling out from my hold and turning to face me, still clutching to the wall. “You said the body will resurface, and what if they find out he died a day before we both skipped? And what if they go to Wendy and she tells them she healed me and they put it together and they find out I killed him.”
The they she’s talking about are my parents. It makes sense for her to be this worried if Lusia was right about her being septic.
But I won’t let them have her. I won’t allow it.
I take off my jacket and put it on her shoulders. “Wear this when you go back to your suite.” She looks down at her bloody and ripped shirt, then covers it with the jacket. “Take a shower and burn your clothes. If anything happens, I’ll take care of it.”
She looks up at me and, her tone cold and harsh, asks, “Why would you do that?”
I step into the space between us, my hand inching toward her cheek, and when my touch finally reaches her, her breath catches.
Tucking her hair behind her ear, I say, “That’s why.”
Desdemona doesn’t move, though her voice has thawed. “Because you want to play with my hair?”
“No.” I smile, dropping my hand and stepping back, scared at the truth of the next words and what they mean. “For the same reason your breath catches when I touch you.”
Desdemona looks at me like she’s scared I will look away. I believe I’m looking at her the same.
“Is that what you tell all the pretty girls?”
“Oh no,” I say. “If that were the case you wouldn’t have made the list.”
“Right.” She looks down at her feet, clenching and unclenching her left hand almost imperceptibly.
“You’re not pretty?—”
“Yes, thank you, Aibek,” she cuts me off, losing her balance. She sinks against the wall and I step toward her again, lifting her.
When she won’t meet my gaze I gently pick up her chin. I’m prepared for her to fight me but there’s not an ounce of pushback. “You’re haunting,” I tell her. “It’s been mere weeks that I’ve known you… And it’s been weeks that you’ve been on my mind. Like a spell.”
There it is, the second of something in her eyes that I long for. A softness, a sheepishness. A look that belongs to her face but not to her spirit.
“Maybe it is a spell,” she says, the corners of her lips lifting. “Maybe I’ve been playing you the whole time, putting myself in the favor of the prince.”
“You wouldn’t have to play me to do that.” I smile back at her. “You’ve already won.”
“Well then Prince, that sounds an awful lot like being your downfall.”
She stands a little steadier on her feet while my own falter.
“You could be any man’s downfall,” I whisper. “I might call it a privilege to be one of them.”
I died for her. She is my downfall.
She leans into me, taking my wrist and moving it away from her chin as if it’s an act of defiance and not what I expected her to do from the beginning. “I’ll add you to my hit list.”
“So long as I’m your last.” Again, her eyebrows shrink down, my wrist still in her hand. She watches me for a while and I’m thoroughly pleased with the image of her stunned. “You’re well worth the wait.”
Her eyebrows rise, her eyes harden, and she smiles. “That’s what they all say.” Then she stumbles toward the door saying “Thanks for the jacket,” as if a jacket is far more than cloth.