Chapter 27 ILSEVEL
ILSEVEL
Over and over again I relive Diira’s collapse to the ground, the outpouring of her blood.
Cover yourself, Vellara, she sings, even as the life spools out from her body, breaking apart in bursts of light in the atmosphere over her head. Cover yourself in my blood—they will not find you then.
I throw myself at her, wrap my arms around her, trying to stop the flow of blood.
There is so much, too much. It soaks my clothes, stains my skin, matts my hair.
All around me, hobgoblins rip into Diira’s body, as though I’m not even there.
They pay me no more attention than they might a speck of dust.
And the blood will not stop flowing.
“No!” I scream.
All the power of my gods-gift channels through my expanded throat, my open jaw.
The power of the divine itself bursts from my soul, explodes in a ripple-effect through the surrounding horde of monsters, knocking them off their feet.
Are they dead? Or are they merely unconscious?
I do not know—only that the violence is broken, and a circle of dead calm surrounds me and my licorneir.
Somewhere far away the hobgoblins have found other prey to distract them, but here we are alone.
My voice, that single note of song, echoes out to heaven and is lost.
I bow over Diira. I try to sing again, trembling, desperate. I try to channel my gods-gift and stop that gush of life, force it back into her veins. But her soulfire burns lower, lower.
I will protect you, she sings as the last flames flicker out and her blood pours into my trembling hands. I will cover you, shield you . . .
“No, Diira!” I scream, weep, beg. I think if I can only figure out how to sing again, I can make it stop, make her live.
But following that burst of pain, my voice has shriveled up, clogged by tears and terror.
“No, Diira, come back! Stay with me!” There’s nothing beautiful, nothing godlike in the sounds I make.
They’re raw, ugly, ripped from the deepest parts of me. And useless. So useless.
I collapse against her, my arms wrapped around her corpse. I feel the moment when our bond breaks, when her soul is gone from me. And I know this pain will never end. Mortal beings are not meant to endure the velrhoar, not meant to survive our hearts being ripped in two.
I cannot bear to go on without her. So I live the moment again.
And again and again. I go back to that end, force myself to revisit her suffering, to experience those last moments when she and I were still connected.
Now and then my mind carries me back farther still, to the darkness in which we met and offered each other light, to the glory of our first ride.
But these images are fleeting, mere impressions, while the moments of death and flowing blood are the new, ever-present now of my reality.
A reality I cannot escape. Even if I wished to.
Some part of me is aware that I am no longer on that tortured plain.
Someone has carried me away from her, separating our physical bodies.
But my soul remains there, broken at her side.
A golden thread wrapped around my heart tugs, trying to draw me back.
But I hate it. I hate it for attempting to separate me from all that remains of Diira.
Diira needs me. Diira is suffering. Diira gave her heart to me, trusted me . . . and I let her be killed.
I cannot leave her now.
Still that golden thread pulls me back. A voice whispers through it, vibrating into my soul. “Please, my zylnala. Come back. You are still needed, you are still loved. There’s still so much to live for. Come back to me.”
I cannot fight it forever. I’m weak, exhausted, and the pull of that thread is so insistent. I feel myself rising up, out of the blood, out of the broken song-space. Back to a waking world I cannot bear to face. I scream again and—
—I come awake still screaming. Thrashing, throwing blankets off my body, my hands tearing at empty air. There’s nothing there, however. No hobgoblins. No Diira. Only darkness broken by the pale, glimmering light of a licatha lantern.
A face appears, hovering over me, illuminated in the licatha’s glow. I blink several times, trying to make sense of those features, which I feel I should know, but which seem in that moment to belong to a stranger.
“Taar?” I whisper at last.
“Ilsevel.” He leans in closer. “Do you know me?” The next moment he’s gathering me in his arms, and I want to scream again at the invasiveness of that familiarity.
But I am numb; I cannot react. Even as the velra cord wraps around us, drawing us together, I hate it, hate the power that pulled me back to him.
I don’t hate him—not quite. I’m not sure I can hate him, even if I want to. But I hate what he has done.
Why did he save me? Why did he do it? Why, when he knew I would be hearttorn?
Becoming aware of my stiffness in his arms, Taar relaxes his hold, drawing back to look into my face. His trembling hand strokes my cheek, pushing hair back from my forehead. “Do you know where you are?” he asks softly.
I frown and shake my head.
“We are in the Licornyn encampment, just outside Evisar City. You’ve been unconscious these two days and nights.”
When he speaks the words, some dim, dismal part of me recognizes that they mean . . . something. Something more than the mere length of time since Diira died and my heart broke and my world shattered beyond repair. Something else. Something that once mattered to me but no longer does.
I whisper, “Silmael.”
Taar draws a sharp breath, his eyes bright in the licatha light. “Yes,” he says, and his voice trembles with emotion. “Yes, you remember. It is silmael, the night of the new moon.”
I tilt my head to one side, shifting my gaze from his face down to my own hands.
They are still stained with silver blood.
By the looks of it someone has tried to scrub them clean, but licorneir blood is stubborn.
Good. I don’t want to be clean. I want to wear her blood if that is the only thing I have left of her.
“It’s been one month now,” Taar continues, still talking about something that doesn’t matter.
I shake my head, trying to pull my thoughts in order and make sense of his words.
“One month,” he says, “since our hands were joined, and we were bound with the velra. At the time I thought it nothing: an inconvenience to be endured. Now I know it is the truest, most holy thing in my life.” He takes hold of my bloodstained hand and presses it to his heart.
“Forgive me, my love. Forgive me for sending you away. I should not have done it. I should have attacked those Noxaurian bastards before they ever took the virulium, skewered them and left them screaming. I should have—”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Stop.”
“Ilsevel, I—”
“Stop!”
He goes silent. I shake my head and keep on shaking it, my eyes squeezed tightly shut.
That horrible broken song pounds in my head.
“Stop,” I gasp. “Stop, stop, stop talking, stop singing, stop wanting. It doesn’t matter.
Did it ever matter? No, of course not. I loved her, and she died.
She must die. She must be destroyed, decimated, because I loved her.
It’s my punishment. I should have known.
I should have left her alone, should have let you kill her long ago.
Better death by your blade than . . . than . . . Oh, Diira!”
Taar reaches to take me back in his arms. “Ilsevel,” he says, “let me hold you—”
“Don’t touch me!” I scream. My voice has never been more unmelodic, like a scrape of nails across bone.
Taar withdraws, his face a mask of agony.
I look at him through the wild strands of hair falling over my eyes.
Part of me knows I must seem like a mad creature.
Because that’s what I am. Mad, insane, my mind broken with grief, my soul mutilated.
“Hearttorn,” I whisper. Then I smile. “Torn to little ribbons of bloody flesh.”
“Ilsevel, I can help you,” Taar says softly. “I know it doesn’t seem like it now. But I will love you through this pain. I will comfort you, I will lay down my very life for—”
A high, manic laugh bursts from my lips. “Vel-sa almar. E luralma idor-hath,” I sing harshly, without melody. “Is that what you mean, Taar? My life is yours, and, should you require it, my death.”
The sorrow in his face could break any heart not already ruined. “You know I mean it, my love. With everything I am.”
“Then why didn’t you die instead? Why didn’t you die and let Diira be spared?”
I could not wound him more deeply if I plotted his pain for a thousand years.
I might as well have taken the knife from his belt and plunged it into his heart.
Part of me wishes I could. The broken song in me is too wild, too screaming, and I don’t know how to exist. I don’t know how to love him through this loss.
Wouldn’t loving him be dishonoring to Diira?
Wouldn’t it be an unforgiveable sin to let myself be comforted and strengthened by that love, when Diira’s body lies broken, out there on that lonely plain beneath a hell-rent sky?
I cannot weep. Weeping would be too great a relief. I don’t deserve it. “I want you to let me go, Taar,” I say at last in a much calmer tone.
He releases a ragged breath. “Ilsevel, please—”
“I want you to let me go,” I repeat more firmly. “Unmake the vows. Do whatever it is you’re supposed to do and break this velra. I don’t want it. I don’t want you. I don’t want your damned world and all its damnable people. I don’t want anything to do with you.”
I can’t look at him. I turn away, unwilling to see whatever his eyes might reveal. Because it doesn’t matter. His feelings, his pain, are no longer my concern.
“Maybe I loved you,” I say, and shudder. My limbs feel so weak. I long to collapse on this bed and become stone. “Maybe I loved you. I don’t know. Maybe I just needed something from you. But whatever it was we shared between us, I don’t love you now. And I don’t want to. I want to go.”
He is silent for so long, the silence hurts. But when he speaks at last and breaks that silence, I almost hate him for it. “Where will you go?”
“How is that your concern?” I turn on him sharply, lips curled in a snarl. “I am not yours anymore. Do you understand me? Let me go. Break the bond and let me go!”
Those last words emerge in a shriek of broken song, so rough, so hard, the dakath walls shake, the support beams quake, and the skin walls flail as though caught in a high gale.
Taar rises, takes several steps back, staring down at me.
The licatha no longer illuminates his face, but I feel the intensity of his gaze.
“Ilsevel,” he growls, “you break my heart.”
Why should I care? My heart is broken; his might as well be too.
And if some still, small voice deep inside me tries to tell me this is wrong—that I do not want to cause him pain, that I love him still, that he deserves more than this—it’s too weak to make any difference in the storm of dissonance in my head. I simply don’t care.
“Let me go, Taar,” I say again in a voice of stone. “I foreswear all vows I ever made to you. I will be your wife no more.”