CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN #2
I really was pathetic, wasn’t I?
“If it makes you feel any better,” Vayen began, tossing the rope onto the empty chair beside us, “the rootbound sigil hasn’t been lifted. Even if I wasn’t capable of disarming you, you still couldn’t leave this room without me.”
I looked at the doorway, and just as my eyes met the rootbound symbol and its eerie glow, Vayen made her move.
I could not fathom the delicate yet iron-clad way she gripped my forearm with one hand while grabbing my waist with the other.
Before I could comprehend her movements, she had lifted my arm above my head and twirled me, as though we were dancing, and pulled my back flush against her.
It was then she restrained my other arm, holding both before me in a relentless grip that forced them to cross over one another.
All of this happened in the blink of an eye, and I swallowed my surprise in favor of a composed, dignified disposition.
I stood there, pressed up against the warmth that was Vayen, her breath skirting down my neck, the scent of citrus peel clouding my faculties with memories of home, and my body existing in direct opposition to my mind.
Why was I not thrashing? What in the depths was wrong with me?
“Your hair is wavy when it’s wet,” she hummed.
I wasn’t quite sure what to say in response. Her near-reverent tone cast the observation in a light I had little interest in entertaining, though the pooling tickle her deep voice summoned in my lower stomach had other ideas.
“Yes,” I forced out, my gaze flitting to the dagger I still held. The remnants of Vayen’s blood colored the blade’s edge, and I loathed the pang that sent to my heart.
“Drop the dagger,” she commanded, and my hand released its grip without hesitation. When the metal clattered to the ground, Vayen loosed her hold on me, but not before mumbling, “Good girl,” into my ear.
I all but flew across the room, the comparative chill of our chambers descending in her warmth’s absence.
Stars above, she was a hearth in her own right, and it made the lack of her so poignant it was damn near uncomfortable.
I faced the window, unable to so much as look at her in the wake of my failure, and our bodies pressed up against one another, and…
“Good girl.”
My heart tripped over itself, but it was a disparate pace to the anticipation I’d wallowed in prior to her arrival, which only upset me further. Not one minuscule part of my body had the right to respond to her with anything other than undiluted hostility. Damnable, treacherous, wretched—
I whirled around when rustling sounded behind me, eyes wide and startled.
“Easy there,” Vayen said gently as she knelt beside the oversized rucksacks by the table. “I’m just sorting our items before we head down for supper.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded, awaiting the rage that had to be simmering beneath her surface calm. I pressed a thumb into the opposite palm, watching her with the same wariness I might afford a wild animal that had wandered into my bedchamber.
Vayen scooped up my dagger and set it on the table as though it wasn’t responsible for the small cut on her neck. As though I hadn’t just used it to threaten her life. And now she was talking about sharing a meal? With me?
She rummaged through the rucksacks for a moment, summoning hefty, fur-lined cloaks; clothes and undergarments made of thick fabrics; a strange-looking compass; water gourds carved with more of those symbols; two tin pots, one small and one larger; what appeared to be a makeshift tent, though it looked quite modest in size; several tiny metallic containers also marked with symbols; and, finally, a neatly folded pair of pants that she placed on the table beside the cookie-filled linen bag.
Standing to her full height, Vayen wiped her hands on the front of her pants before regarding me with something of a quizzical expression. Her brows pulled together in the middle, and she tilted her head to the side, silver eyes flitting up and down my form. “What are you doing?”
“I’m waiting,” I said, my voice small.
“For?”
I drew in a shaky breath, wringing my hands before my dark blue dress. The bindings may have been absent my wrists, but the ghost of them existed in the sting of my skin whenever my sleeves met my welts.
“I’m waiting to see how you intend to punish me,” I said finally, elongating my neck with a raised chin so that I might meet my fate with poise. A trained habit, as a weak posture was one of Father’s preferred reasons for extending my torment.
“Punish you,” Vayen echoed, crossing her arms as she assessed me. Her narrowed gaze and the fluttering of her working jaw were unsettling. “You think that’s what I’m about to do?”
“Isn’t it?”
“No, Alyssum. I am not going to punish you.”
She may as well have been speaking a foreign tongue. I could hardly comprehend the meaning of her words, and my confusion was clearly evident, because Vayen reiterated, “I will not hurt you if I can avoid it. Not now, not ever.”
“But… but your neck…”
“Are you asking me for a punishment?”
“No!” I shouted, wilting beneath the suffocation of my shame.
It was all I could do not to cower before her and prostrate.
I felt myself unraveling beneath her gaze, the urge to devolve into my father’s fearful daughter prompting a fresh wave of shame.
How could I find the words to express what he had carved into the very heart of me?
“I don’t want you to, but I hurt you. How can you want to share a meal with me after…
” I gestured towards the door, at a loss for words.
Understanding seemed to smooth Vayen’s features, and that stony countenance returned. “Someone left quite a mark on you, didn’t they?”
In more ways than one, I wanted to say. Yet the words would not form on my tongue, even as the scars on my back unsettled beneath my dress.
How deeply had he wounded me that I couldn’t fathom Vayen’s response to my transgressions?
If anything, I had expected her capable of worse than my father.
How might an exiled fighter harm a girl who threatened their life?
I’d never done anything quite so outlandish back home, yet the punishments I’d endured…
“Alyssum,” Vayen said sharply, and my eyes snapped to her in response. “I’m proud of you.”
My lips parted and the unease in my stomach began to unravel from its tightly wound ball.
I’d never heard those words before, and for them to be spoken by her, of all people, was…
well, I wasn’t quite sure what that was, but it didn’t matter, because I couldn’t believe her utterance any more than I could think of myself as capable.
“You can’t be serious,” I managed with a scoff.
“I am.”
I searched her face for some inkling of jest, but none existed there. She was as stoic as ever. I inhaled deeply, the slight shake of my head underscoring my skepticism. “For what, exactly? For threatening to end your life, only to once again succumb to the cowardice I may as well be known for?”
“Fucking depths, woman. Have you been unable to accept a kind word since birth, or is this another one of the wounds that your poor excuse for a family left on you?”
“How dare you—”
Vayen moved before I could react, her long strides swallowing the distance between us.
I stumbled backwards, my shoulder blades meeting the glass of the window in earnest, but there was nowhere to run.
Vayen placed a hand beside my head, her body only a whisper from mine.
That starburst of green stole my focus, and she held my attention there, the breath in my lungs stilling against the serious way she stared down at me.
“You witnessed the outcome of the blood pit,” Vayen said softly, the incline of her brow severe but not unkind.
“You know enough of my capabilities to be frightened, and rightly so. What you saw… is only the smallest sliver of what I’m capable of.
You can sense there is more beneath the surface, can’t you? ”
Her words were cryptic, and yet I understood them perfectly.
I had known since the first time I laid eyes on Vayen that she was unlike any person I’d ever met.
Not just in appearance, though that was disturbingly striking in its own right, but in the very presence of her.
Another sensation I couldn’t put words to.
It was as though my body knew something my mind could not comprehend.
Staring into the swirling silvers of her eyes, I found myself only nodding in reply.
“Despite what you know of me, you found the dagger at the bottom of your bag, and you planned a trap. You, Princess Alyssum, challenged a Videa.”
“You knew,” I said the moment the thought struck me. “You knew Catrin had left the dagger for me.”
Vayen’s silence was all the answer I needed. My mind worked through the implications of her words.
“You… you wanted me to attack you?”
And then, as though she’d been privy to my thoughts, “Your mind cannot conceive of the courage it took for you to draw my blood, but your body can. It knows I am not to be taken lightly, not in any sense of the word. And you mastered that. Your mind carried you through the whirlwind of fear and anticipation you must have been drowning in, from awaiting my arrival, to parting my flesh, and even into the very moment you let your guard down by glancing at the glyph. Instinctively, you knew that the fight was lost, and so you showed me your underbelly. So to speak.”
The hand at Vayen’s side twitched, and I wondered if it was under the effort to hold it there, because I’d started to imagine what it might be like for her fingertips to trail down my jawline. My breath hitched under the sudden weight of my desire to know what that might feel like.
No, I seethed inwardly, breaking my attention from hers and turning my head to the side, away. Away from the scent of her, crowding my thoughts, and the piercing way she studied my face.
“Your senses are sharp, and you see things others miss, whether you know it or not. That is one small part of your power, Princess. It is my hope that on this… this journey, we might untangle your self-doubt from the rest of your abilities.”
“Why? Why would you, of all people, desire to excavate me from my own ruin?” I asked quietly, still avoiding her gaze.
Vayen’s hand lifted, and I fought the urge to twitch away from her.
A single finger landed beneath my chin, soft even in its firmness as she guided my face back to hers, where I could see my own icy, luminescent eyes reflected back at me.
“Because I wouldn’t be doing any of this if I didn’t believe in you, Alyssum.
Even with you being my only hope in all of Morwyn, I would not subject you to the trials if I didn’t have the utmost faith that not only are you the Vessel I seek, but that you are also an unending well of power capable of bringing every person who has ever harmed you to their knees. ”