58. Chapter 58
“ K nock knock,” Ren called into Zakhar’s cellar study, the wood groaning beneath her boots as she carefully descended the steep stairs. “I come bearing gifts.”
Dusty scrolls were stacked along every table and chair, candlelight flickering across the dark stone walls. Glass clinked softly from deeper within and the further Ren descended, the more the air temperature dropped.
Amidst shelves crowded with vials, jars brimming with powders, and bookshelves stacked of bones Ren didn’t want to know originated from, Ren caught sight of Zakhar’s thicket of gray curls.
A grunt responded to her arrival.
Ren stepped off the bottom stair. She exhaled slowly, realizing how refreshed she felt since returning to Pyraelia this morning.
During their time at the keep, there were no battles, no running, no training – just a week of stolen reprieve with Talen, Kaelin, and Lucan, drinking too much wine and spiced rum, swapping folk tales until their voices grew hoarse, and winning and losing handfuls of cards by the firelight with the fiddle music accompanying them.
But most of all, Ren spent every second with Kaelin. Even now, Ren’s fingers brushed her bottom lip at the recollection of what had happened barely an hour ago .
Kaelin had caught Ren in the hallway, fingers curling around Ren’s wrist before she could so much as breathe.
With one tug, Ren was pulled into the narrow dark of a closet, the door clicking shut behind them.
Kaelin’s wicked and daring grin flashed in the dim light before her mouth descended on Ren’s.
Kaelin kissed like she had waited too long and wasn’t willing to wait a heartbeat more.
Hunger and teeth, heat and want, Ren’s back hit the wall as Kaelin pressed close.
Ren remembered gasping, but Kaelin swallowed the sound, her lips dragging over Ren’s with intoxicating insistence before closing around her lower lip and sucking until Ren’s knees nearly buckled.
Fingers tangled in hair, nails scraping against fabric, the air in that cramped space turned molten.
When they finally broke apart, both were breathless, their hair mussed, clothes wrinkled.
Ren could barely catch her breath as Kaelin’s grin turned feral in the darkness as she sank to her knees and brought Ren well over the edge.
Ren would be amazed that no handmaidens heard their voices and fumbling from the hallway – no matter how Ren bit her lip and tried to rein in her moans, Kaelin encouraged her relentlessly not to hold back.
They stumbled back into the hallway moments later, grinning like fools who had just tasted something too forbidden to resist and knew they’d do it again, no matter the cost.
Ren’s steps slowed when she spotted Zakhar bowing over his cluttered bench, exhaustion etched deep into his posture. The sight struck her harder than she expected.
She’d been enjoying herself lately while people were still dying.
A pang of guilt twisted through her.
What right did she have to feel happy when the world was still falling apart at the seams?
She set down the box beside him. “That herb was a pain in the ass to get,” she said dryly, flipping open the lid to reveal the worn leather pouch and the bundle of herbs within. “But we whooped a ice wisp’s ass in the process. Guess that’s another first I can tick off.”
A gruff voice rasped from inside the box, rough as gravel and twice as unimpressed. “Damn right you did,” the pouch barked. “Never seen a fight that cold turn so hot so fast. You and Brightbane gave it hell, though your form could use some work, human. ”
“Still mouthy, I see,” Zakhar muttered, picking up the pouch with two fingers as if it might bite.
“Still here ,” it shot back, its drawstring twitching like a scowl. “And I don’t take orders from hermits.”
Ren huffed a laugh. “He’s been like this since we found him. I think the frost rattled his stitching.”
“Frost did nothing but toughen me up,” the pouch declared proudly. “Takes more than a little frost to get me rattled.”
Ren’s gaze shifted to look over the scarred wooden table, where Zakhar had previously been hunched over, grinding a herb into powder.
She looked over Zakhar’s features, noting the dark circles beneath his eyes had deepened into what appeared like bruises, and his pale skin was marred by smudges of unknown ingredients.
“Do you sleep?” Ren asked.
Zakhar sat the box of the herb gently onto the table and went back to grinding the herb into a powder. “Here and there.”
“When was the last time?”
Zakhar hesitated, grinding the pestle slower, as though calculating days blurred together. “Maybe the other day.”
Ren sank onto a worn stool nearby. “You’ll burn yourself out at this rate.”
“Hand me the bottle in front of you.”.
Ren passed him the empty glass, her brows drawing together as she studied him. “Are you even eating?” she pressed.
Finally, his eyes met hers, a flicker of frustration in their depths. “Stop fretting. I’m fine .”
From the table, the pouch scoffed. “Stubborn as a mule and half as aware of the time. You probably haven’t slept a full night since the last moon cycle, have you?”
Zakhar dismissed them both with a wave, returning to his work.
For a moment, the only sound was the rhythmic scrape of the pestle against the mortar, the gentle clink of glass. Then, Zakhar murmured, “The death toll’s climbing faster than we can brew the elixir. We’re losing whole villages overnight. If we stop, the Witherblight will take us all.”
“If there’s something I can do, show me. I can help.”
Zakhar snorted, not looking up from the mortar. “Sensitive information. Can’t teach you a thing without permission from the crown first.”
“Nothing like a bit of palace bureaucracy to save the world.”
Zakhar’s voice dropped further, as though speaking aloud might awaken old shadows. “I’ve been going through the old records, the fragments of the pact that held fae and dragonkind from each other’s throats. It wasn’t just a truce for peace. It was a binding. And now…”
He glanced around as if the dark might be listening. His lips pressed into a thin line.
“I think someone’s broken it.”
The weight of his words pressed down on Ren. The flickering candlelight threw her shadow long against the wall, dancing amidst the shelves of bottled secrets.
“The dragons and the fae were not always enemies,” Zakhar said.
“In the beginning, they were flame and root, destruction and rebirth. It was balance, in a way. A dance older than kingdoms. The fae feared the dragons. How could they not? Some of them razed cities to ash just for gluttony. For the glint of gold and the shimmer of power. It’s in their blood, that craving.
Yet, a dragon’s hoard isn’t just coin and gemstone – it’s anything they deem precious.
It could be a relic, a name, a secret, even a memory, if it’s cherished enough. ”
Zakhar paused, and a dry smirk tugged at his mouth. “But gods help the fool who tries to take it. There’s something ancient that awakens when a dragon’s treasure is threatened. Not rage, exactly…something deeper. Obsession dressed as wrath.”
Ren said nothing, but a flicker struck beneath her ribs, like a spark catching in a hearth long thought cold.
She thought of the ribbons she used to steal, although she never wore them, never dared, but tucked them away like tiny treasures, hidden beneath loose floorboards.
She’d told herself it was vanity or foolish sentiment.
That she was just a girl craving color in a world gone gray.
But now, the memory felt different. It felt too specific – too instinctual .
“That madness, is it always violent?”
Zakhar’s eyes flicked to her, the faintest crease forming between his brows. “Only when the treasure’s been taken or threatened.”
Suddenly, Ren wasn’t crouched in the cellar with Zakhar.
She was seven years old, barefoot on a creaking floor. Her small fingers trembling as they reached for the bottle tucked behind the broken wall panel, amber liquid sloshing inside. Her mother had passed out in the next room, slumped on a chair. Ren had just wanted to pour it out. To make it stop.
She hadn’t even touched it before her mother lunged.
The glass shattered against the floor. Hands grabbing her, shaking her so hard that her teeth rattled.
“You don’t touch what’s mine ,” her mother had hissed, eyes wide and wild. “You don’t steal from me. Ever .”
Her parents hoarded bottle after bottle.
Ren recalled tripping through the hallways once on the way to her room, glass glistening on the floor like specks of starlight.
She remembered nights where Eve would hold a flickering candle and pick out the shards of broken glass from Ren’s feet, one by one.
Eve’s fingers were always so gentle when she cradled Ren’s heel.
And still, Ren had kept the ribbons, hadn’t she? She tucked them away, and they were never worn. Looking back, it was like a dragon building a nest she’d never let anyone see.
But no, the ribbons weren’t an obsession or signs of madness.
They were something else. A tether, maybe.
Perhaps they were proof that beauty existed beyond peeling walls and broken bottles – that somewhere out there, young girls wore color in their hair and laughed without fear of glass shattering at their feet.
She’d stolen them not to possess, but to pretend, if only for a moment, that the world outside was real. That softness still existed.
A cough from Zakhar snapped Ren’s attention back to him. He coughed into his dark sleeve before straining back up and clearing his throat.
“Yes, I think someone broke it. Only that can explain why the world is so unbalanced now. Indeed,” he nodded to himself, as if having the conversation with himself.
He jumped a little when Ren spoke, as if forgetting she was there. “What happens when an ancient pact is broken?”
“Balance unravels, and something always crawls out of the void to take its place. I don’t know who broke it, but whoever did it means they’re willing to tear the world apart to see what rises from the ashes. ”
Her fingers clenched against the edge of the stool. “You think it’s connected to the Witherblight,” Ren whispered into the space between them.
“I think someone paid that price, and if that’s true…” He let out a shaky breath. “Truth most often isn’t a gift, Ren. It’s a blade. And once it’s drawn, it never goes back into the sheath.”