Chapter 4
Leon
Idrift in nothingness, unable to see, or touch, or hear. I have no past or future, only this moment, stretching on forever. I exist. I know that much, but without any form or substance to hang that existence onto, I’m not certain of anything else.
A nagging feeling tells me it wasn’t always this way. I have been put here, taken far away from everything I know and love.
That certainty fills me with deep sadness, but without any senses, the pain isn’t physical, just an emotion surrounding me.
At some point—though I don’t know when, because there is no time in this place—it occurs to me that I could try to find my way back to wherever I came from. I want to reunite with what I’ve lost. It must be worth seeking for me to feel such a powerful longing for it even here.
But how can I find my way back when there’s no trail to follow, no hint of how to get from here to there? When there’s nothing but my own strange existence to hold onto?
Except…there is something there. Something attached to me.
I can feel where I end and the something else begins.
It’s…warm. I don’t know how that can be in this place of nothingness, but it is.
Warm and bright and orange, like sunshine on your back when the leaves shift in the trees, letting the light through.
The image is so clear, so foreign in this place, it’s like a beacon.
It’s showing me the way home.
Then words appear in my awareness, rising up out of nowhere:
Come back, Leon. Come to me.
I leap upon them, grasping tight, and let all of it—the words, my feelings, the strange familiar piece of me that is not me—act as a guide.
The nothingness starts to pull apart, and everything else rushes in.
A million sensations crowd into me. The brush of fabric against my skin, the sharp, clean scent of mint in my nose, the sound of breath reverberating in my ear.
I gasp in air myself, filling lungs as I remember how to breathe, how to inhabit a body I’d stepped out of and have now come back to.
“He moved!” The voice rings in my ears, the thrill of it making me pull my eyes open. Moving feels strange and unfamiliar, but I push past all of that and lift my neck to see a pair of hazel eyes.
They’re beautiful, burning with the same brilliant light I found in whatever void I’ve come back from. And they’re filled with tears.
“Leon,” Ana breathes, throwing her arms around me.
I lift my arms to hug her back, pulling her tighter to me as she buries her face in my neck. Her tears dampen my tunic; her body shakes in my arms.
“Shhh,” I soothe. “It’s okay.” She’s here and in my arms, so the words are true—even if the world is still only starting to take shape around me.
I slowly recognize the sanctuary. We’re in the chamber they used to keep Fairon.
He’s standing by the door now, a strange look of awe and uncertainty on his face.
There are others—my soldiers, Mal, Lafia, and Tira.
I blink at the small crowd of faces, trying to make sense of things.
The last time I saw most of them was across a bloody battlefield under a Trovian sky.
The scythe. I remember it cutting into me—and then I was gone, taken to that other place. Until…
I reach out across the mooring, touching Ana’s mind with mine. Something is different. It’s like the link between us has been shortened; we’re not just connected but sealed together entirely until I’m not sure where she ends and I begin.
I want to stop and bask in the warmth of Ana’s soul, to appreciate its welcoming light, but something is wrong. When I look around the room, there’s fear as well as joy.
“What happened?” I ask, leaning back so I can lift Ana’s face and look into her eyes.
“We brought you back,” she sniffs. “Your soul was lost, but we found it.”
So that’s what the scythe cut from me. But a lost soul is no small thing to command. Undoing that magic must’ve come at a price. From the strained silence in the room and the way some of them won’t meet my eye, I know my guess is right.
“My love,” I ask gently, dread creeping into my chest. “What did you do?”
Morgana
Leon’s room inside the palace looks the same as when we left Filusia a few months ago, and yet so much has changed. I can’t take my eyes off Leon or stop touching him. My hands grip his arm as we’re shown into the room. I need to make sure he’s still here, that he doesn’t disappear on me again.
It means I also keep reaching out across the mooring, checking he’s on the other side. I don’t have to reach far. Part of my soul is now lodged within his, and I can feel it, the way he’s wrapped inextricably around me. There’s no separation between us now.
I try not to think about the other side of the situation. The dark absence in my soul where a piece has been carved away. That doesn’t matter now. It’s all worth it since it brought Leon back.
Leon looks down at me when we’re alone, his gray eyes sweeping over my face with expectation. I can’t hide from that questioning look much longer. Fairon saved us from immediate explanations in the sanctuary, saying we should all prioritize getting a proper rest in the palace.
But we’re here now, and Leon won’t wait any longer.
“Are you ready to tell me what’s going on yet?” he asks, crossing his arms.
I bite my lip, wondering how upset he’ll be. It’s not that I’m afraid of his anger, but I don’t want him to be unhappy with me, not when we’re finally together again.
“One thing first,” I say, turning so that I stand opposite him, toe-to-toe. “Kiss me,” I speak into his mind, across the connection, and his eyebrows rise. He responds out loud, a sign of his wariness, I think.
“I’m always happy to do that, Ana, but can I ask why?”
“Because when I tell you what we did, you might not feel like kissing me for a while, and I deserve at least one after what you’ve put me through.”
Concern flickers in his eyes, but I feel his guilt flare through the mooring. That, at least, might work in my favor.
He takes my face in his hands and molds his mouth to mine. His lips are warm and persistent, his tongue softly caressing. I sigh into him, letting my eyes slide shut for a blissful minute before he pulls away, his forehead coming to rest against mine.
“Was that good enough to earn me the truth?” he asks, his voice low and rough.
I open my eyes. “I’ll always tell you the truth. We promised, remember?”
He nods, the movement brushing his jaw against my chin. I want to stay close to him, touching like this, but I know it’s time to explain, and I need a clearer head for that than I’ll ever have while I’m in his arms.
“We needed to find a way to bring your soul back,” I say, easing myself away from him. “Lafia and Mal guessed we could use the mooring, as long as I could locate you first. I needed to send a part of myself out to you.”
I feel the concern turn to cold fear inside him. “What part?” he asks.
“A piece of my soul,” I say, so quietly it’s almost a whisper.
His fear hardens into ice, and his hands grip my shoulders.
“You used up a piece of your soul?”
“I didn’t use it up,” I insist. “I sent it to you. I…I don’t know exactly how it worked, but I put it inside you, or you absorbed it, or something. Mal and Lafia think it means we’re probably…connected, now.”
I drop my gaze, wondering how to phrase the next bit.
“We were connected before. Pretty powerfully,” Leon says. “So what’s changed? Ana—look at me. What in the gloam do they think this means?”
“They think that our lifelines are probably intertwined now. As in…when you die, I will too.”
He drops his hands from me so abruptly I flinch, then stalks across the other side of the room, gripping the windowsill so hard it splinters beneath his fingers.
“So you’ve essentially had us sign a death pact,” he growls. “If one of us goes, both of us do.”
“Well…not exactly,” I say slowly. “Because obviously I can’t survive if part of my soul dies, but yours…”
He spins around as he realizes what I’m saying. “But mine is still intact?”
I nod. “They just cut your soul loose with the scythe, they didn’t damage it.”
“So if you die, I won’t?!” His voice reaches a crescendo on the last few syllables. The windowsill is essentially pulp now.
“What was I supposed to do, Leon? We didn’t have another plan, and your body wasn’t going to survive that long without you in it.”
“So you just went with the first crazy scheme they gave you, cooked up by a mad dryad and a teenage girl?”
I feel defensive for Mal and Lafia’s sakes. If their plan was crazy, it was the kind of madness geniuses come up with—desperate geniuses.
“None of the actual healers offered any solutions other than watching your body wither and die and leaving your soul to wander for eternity,” I say, throwing my hands wide. “And it worked, didn’t it?”
He shakes his head, eyes burning with frustration. “Did it ever occur to you how unfair this is? That I might not want to live in a world without you in it?”
The words are so close to those I spoke in the sanctuary I almost laugh.
“Me either,” I say defiantly. “That’s why I was going to do anything to get you back. And if the shoe was on the other foot, you can’t lie and tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.”
He doesn’t reply, but we both know I’m right.
“You were gone—you weren’t here.” My voice catches at the memory, and I wipe at my eyes, pushing away the sting of tears. “You said you’d always find me, but you didn’t—you couldn’t. So you can’t blame me for taking matters into my own hands.”
“I don’t blame you, my love,” he says, his voice softening. He leaves the window and comes to me again, taking me in his arms. “I’m just…”
He can’t finish his sentence out loud, but I feel the rest of it through the mooring.
He’s afraid—locked into the same fear I experienced when I had to consider a world without him.
He’s already had to face that idea once, when I was taken by the Temple; I suppose it makes sense this would bring it up for him again.