Chapter 9 #2
When he pulls back, just barely, his lips hover above mine. “Alyssantha must still have some hold over this place,” he murmurs. “No other goddess than the one of sex could dare stir this much want.”
I let out a breath heavy with desire. “Then let her spirit watch,” I whisper, pulling him back down.
When we finally break the kiss, breathless and spent, he heads to the edge of the clearing. “I’ll take the horses to the stream to drink, then hunt us something to eat.”
He disappears with Ranger and Myst into the leafy underbrush, where a burst of iridescent dragonflies rise into the sky in his wake. They’re so beautiful they make my heart ache—but it’s also a stark reminder that we aren’t simply Basten and Sabine on the road to Duren, like before.
We’re in Volkany. A land where the plants gleam and the insects glow.
I settle near the overgrown statue of Alyssantha, arranging the kindling like Basten taught me so long ago. The wood does something to my palms, spurs a strange, feverish tickle across my skin, like it’s calling to me.
I glance in the direction where Basten disappeared. I can barely hear him and the horses at the distant stream. They won’t be back for a few minutes.
“Okay, you can do this,” I tell myself, crouching in front of the log pile. Fire, after all, is pure nature, right? And nature is my domain.
“No Woudix? No problem.” I cup my hands around the dry kindling, and after a deep inhale, slowly let my human glamour fade away like shaking off raindrops.
I think about Woudix’s words, how he pressed his hand over mine, and how my fey responded to his own.
Around me, the wind dies down, and the air grows warmer on my palms, even though the sun has sunk behind the horizon.
Something shifts inside me. It’s as though my attention moves from my head—my ever-messy swirl of human thoughts—to my chest. No, even lower. My belly. As if I’m living truly in my body now, not my mind.
When I breathe out, it’s with sparks at my fingertips.
There’s a crackle. A burn.
My eyes shoot open to stare in disbelief at the small flame flickering on the kindling, which quickly grows into a tidy fire.
I let out an excited shriek and look around at the darkening forest, wanting verification from the nearby birds and insects that I really did this—hell, from Basten, too, but he’s too far away.
I lean back, away from the heat, letting the flames paint my face orange.
Marveling at what I’ve done.
All on my own, this time. And it makes me wonder—what else can I do?
The statue of Alyssantha catches my eye, and I hold up my glowing palm in its direction. Breathe in, breathe out.
It takes a few minutes of concentration, during which my stomach grumbles distractingly with hunger. But as I continue to steady my breath, the vines tangled around the statue’s neck begin to ruffle in the breeze—except there is no wind.
Then, they curl back, rippling slowly as they draw away from the worn grooves in the stone, slink earthward until they’ve tucked themselves into a tidy wreath at the statue’s base.
“I did that,” I whisper like a girl learning to bake her first pie. “Me!”
What else, what else? My attention drags over the clearing, briefly touching on the high pine branches, a copse of bioluminescent mushroom caps glowing a dark indigo, a wasp’s nest three trees over.
The ground beneath me is awfully hard—uneven from twisted roots and bare patches of soil that will be painful to sleep on, even with the saddle blankets we packed.
I scramble to my knees, running my hands over the ground, feeling a coil of warmth build in my palms.
Help me, I speak in my godkiss voice, only this time, I talk to the entire natural world, the trees and the stones and the rain, not just any nearby animals. Sense my need. Come to my call.
Everywhere I move my hands over the earth, springy moss sprouts and fills in to make a natural mattress for Basten and me.
Soft clumps blossom for our pillows, and that’s not all—the pine branches overhead lean in, sheltering us from a few sparse raindrops dripping from an earlier storm.
A crack sounds nearby, and a small sapling falls right on my kindling pile—offering itself as wood to keep me warm.
I shiver, not from the cold.
I didn’t specifically call the pines or the sapling.
But they still answered: Sense my need.
As goosebumps crop up on my arms, the fire swells to throw out more heat, as if it, too, feels my shiver and rushes to respond to my need.
I’m so awe-struck at how new this is, how wildly different, for nature to respond to me like this, that I don’t even take note of the small, soft creature moving through the grass until out of the corner of my eye, I see the rabbit.
It’s a big one. A buck. Fur a pure white, a color that Astagnonian rabbits never turn. Here, maybe they have to adapt to the more prevalent snow. The rabbit hops forward, unafraid, nose twitching as its glossy black eyes fix on me.
Hello, friend, I say. Aren’t you a pretty thing?
I reach out to pet its white fur, wondering if it’s as soft as it looks, and there’s a moment when my hand connects and I can feel its little heart beating so, so fast.
I’ve only touched it for a second when the rabbit takes one more leap—
—into the fire.
Flames immediately catch on its fur, but it doesn’t scramble or jump away. It lies its body right on the hot coals, breathing in smoke, its eyes slowly dimming, muscles twitching until, within seconds, it stops moving.
It happens so suddenly that I shriek.
Immediately, I reach for it, trying to pull it out—but it’s too late.
Fingers singed, I scramble backward from the fire, my own heart thumping far too fast now, and stare at the little body in the coals.
And it comes to me: I asked nature to respond to my need—and I’m hungry.
“No, no,” I whisper, as I snatch up a stick and try to fish the rabbit’s body out of the flames before it chars to ash. “This isn’t what I meant! I didn’t mean for you to sacrifice yourself!”
I get the rabbit’s body close enough that I can grab a crisp paw, pull it out onto the grass. Its white fur is already burned off, its flesh smelling of Drahallen Hall’s roasting kitchen.
My eyes fill, and a tear breaks to roll down my cheek. It lands on the rabbit’s flank. And then, more tears burst free, a whole waterfall of them, and I bury my face in my hands and sob.
“Sabine?” Basten’s worried voice cuts across the clearing, as he stomps toward me with the horses in tow. He quickly loops their leads on a branch and kneels at my side. “What is it? What happened?”
It’s a while before I can even manage to point a shaky finger at the rabbit.
“You—you hunted our dinner?” he asks, confused, because I usually sing to the animals, not spear them.
My head drags back and forth, face still hidden in my palms, shame burning through me. “It came on its own, killed itself so I’d have something to eat.”
I shatter into sobs again, wishing I could burrow deep into the ground, away from all the watching little eyes of the forest.
Basten is quiet for a while. “Ah.”
He gathers me in his arms, holding me in a steady embrace, letting me sob until the worst of my sorrow has dripped into a puddle in my lap.
“We would have killed a rabbit for dinner, regardless,” he gently reminds me. “Whether with my arrow or your power, does it make a difference?”
“It isn’t that.” I wipe my damp nose. “I eat meat—I know the reality of what that means. But Basten, I was so swept up in my powers…I grew this moss bed…lit the fire…always, animals have listened to my voice in their head, but I didn’t mean to call for its death.”
He rubs my back, placing soft kisses on my temple.
I hiccup out, “This much power makes me afraid. I don’t know how the world will respond. What if I shiver in my sleep tonight and the entire forest sets itself on fire to warm me?”
“You’ll learn,” he reassures me. “You’ll find the difference between unbridled need and a controlled response. And I’ll be there to make damn sure nature listens.”
I gaze at him, feeling more hopeful.
It nearly turns my stomach to eat the rabbit that Basten finishes roasting on a spit, choking it down where it sits heavy in the pit of my stomach, but his words bring me a little comfort.
That night, we lay together on the moss bed beneath our saddle blankets. He holds me close, his forehead pressed against my own as though he knows that the only way I can fall asleep these days is to the rhythmic sound of his breathing.
Slowly, sleep comes.
I feel myself twitch, legs kicking out.
I’m dreaming of the rabbit.
It’s strange—I feel both in the dream and out of it. A part of me, twitching and turning, is vaguely aware that I’m in the clearing with a snoring Basten, our legs tangled together, as the moon rises high.
At some point, however, the dream shifts.
Now, there are many rabbits. Dozens of them, all snow-white, all full of life as they fill the clearing.
Their twitching whiskers are a reminder that when one life goes, another comes to take its place.
The old buck didn’t just die for our supper—he left behind his legacy, filled this forest with his children, and his children’s children.
In the dream, I sit up—my own ghost—and begin to walk through the forest. There, Alyssantha is more than a hunk of weather-worn stone. The statue’s flowing locks, carved of granite, now ripple with soft life, her skin warm and peachy.
She stands by her temple, its walls freshly built, laughing as she smokes a long Wicked Weed pipe. She’s speaking to a male I don’t recognize, with ruddy tan skin and flowing curls down to his shoulders, his cheeks telltale pink from too much wine, his cackling laugh too loud.
When I pass, he pauses his conversation long enough to tip his wine glass my way, and I see the flash of a golden coin glinting as a single earring in his right ear.
It’s Immortal Popelin, I realize. God of Pleasure.