Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
Ivy
Rheave moves through the forest like a wolf, weaving between the trees, his eyes alert and his stance wary.
He makes a particularly stunning wolf, but anyone who misjudges him as an easy target for his beauty would be in for an immense surprise.
Despite all my practice at stealth, right now I feel like an oaf next to him. My body goes through the motions, but as if I’m slogging through water rather than air.
The weight of everything that happened yesterday is still pressing down on me.
My magic doesn’t clamor against my rejection of all the ways it’d like to “help” me. It simmers in my chest as if biding its time.
And all the while, somewhere nearby, the scourge sorcerers are rallying their troops for their assault on the royal family.
If you can just get a whiff of their magic… Julita murmurs, but she doesn’t sound all that much more hopeful than I feel.
Rheave mostly scans the forest around us, watching for any approaching threats, but here and there he shoots glances my way. He lets me walk in silence for several minutes before he breaks it, in a low tone to avoid his voice carrying.
“Stavros looked at the area where the march stopped last night. They cleared most signs of their presence, but he saw a little evidence that they headed southeast.”
Based on the angle of the rising sun, that’s the direction we’re going in now. I force myself to speak. “How far did you two travel without stumbling on them?”
He considers. “Three or four times farther than you and I have at this point. But we might have passed them without realizing it. We knew it wouldn’t be safe to leave the shelter of the forest.”
I hum in agreement. He and Stavros wouldn’t have had any way to see where the march moved to unless they got lucky enough to stumble on another scout the Order of the Wild sent beyond the concealment spell.
I should have gone with them from the start, but I was still sleeping when they left. I guess they assumed I needed it—that I had more recovering to do after yesterday.
Even while unconscious, I let them down.
The daimon-man looks at me again, with a small furrow in his brow. “Are you upset that we kissed?”
As Julita lets out a soft snort, my gaze jerks to him. “What?”
“I thought I should check,” he says. “You didn’t want to before, and then you left quickly afterward. With everything else that’s happened, I can’t tell if the way you act with me has changed.”
I suppose it’s a reasonable question, Julita says.
Is it? It seems so absurd that it takes me a moment to pull my words together. “I kissed you. It’d be pretty ridiculous for me to have a problem with it.”
Rheave lifts his shoulders in a slight shrug. “In my observations, limited as they were, humans frequently get upset about things they did themselves. Sometimes they’re happy and then upset about the exact same thing in very quick succession.”
He looks down at his chest as if peering through it to his heart. “I’m only starting to understand how that could be.”
Julita outright laughs. And that’s a very reasonable point. The daimon has gotten quite wise.
I think he’s been wise all along, just in ways the rest of us weren’t used to.
I shake my head to answer his initial question. “I’m upset, but it’s nothing to do with you or anything I did with you. My head is pretty full with all my worries about my magic.”
Rheave knits his brow. “If you don’t use it anymore, then you should be fine, shouldn’t you?”
“We don’t really know that yet. And… it’s not that simple.
” I make a face. “When I was refusing to use it before, it started eating away at me. Sulla said that if I’d kept suppressing it, my magic would have killed me.
I’m supposed to find a balance… Just little things now and then.
But I don’t know if I’ve already gone too far for that to work. ”
He lets out a dismissive sound. “You’re still all right now. A little shaken up, but you sound like yourself.”
“That might not last if I keep tapping into my magic. Especially if I can’t keep a tight rein on it when I do. It’s like… It’s probably like the hold the scourge sorcerers have on you. You don’t totally control the magic that made you, so you never know when it might fuck things up.”
Oh, Ivy. Julita stirs at the back of my skull, her tone full of compassion. I’m sure you can still find a balance. The gods have to see how hard you’ve been working to set things right.
I’m not convinced that the gods have much say in my sanity. Kosmel hasn’t offered any solutions other than sending me to Sulla.
Rheave is quiet for a moment, absorbing the comparison I made. His voice drops even lower. “That is an awful thing. I wish we could break you free from your worries the way we’ll hopefully destroy the sorcerer who can affect me.”
I let out a rough chuckle. “No chance of that. This power is all in me. I can’t get rid of it, but I want… I want to be more than my magic.”
Those words reverberate through my body. The truth of them hits me like it hadn’t quite before I said them aloud.
That’s all I’ve ever wanted, isn’t it?
But even when I roamed through Florian, dipping in and out of people’s lives as the Hand of Kosmel, the power I was refusing to use seemed to taint everything. Knowing I had to keep it secret. Knowing my entire life was forfeit the second anyone found out that one detail about me.
Rheave grabs my hand and squeezes it tight. “You are more. If you asked me all the things I admire about you, I wouldn’t even consider your magic. Do you think mostly about the scourge sorcerers when you look at me?”
After all this time, I barely associate him with the fiends who made him.
I grip his hand in return. “No. They didn’t have anything to do with the parts of you that matter.”
“And your magic is the same.”
I can’t quite accept his statement that easily, but hearing him say it so firmly takes a little edge off the ache inside me. I drag the cool winter air into my lungs, and they don’t clench up against the breath.
Rheave doesn’t push for my full agreement. He simply walks on with me, his thumb trailing across the back of my hand in a gentle, continuous caress. Showing he’s here with me without expecting anything of me.
He was once a spirit creature with hardly any understanding at all of what went on between humans, let alone their darkest fears. And after that, he acted like a pedantic jerk in the grips of the scourge sorcerers’ control.
Somehow he managed to grow so far beyond his origins that it’s hard for me to imagine him being anyone other than the fierce and caring man beside me.
As the sun rises higher and the air warms from chilly to merely cool, not the faintest tingle of outside magic grazes my skin. I keep my senses alert for any hint of it despite my inner turmoil.
Hmm, Julita mutters as we prowl onward. Where did the fiends run off to so they could lick their wounds?
Nowhere near here. We pass a spot Rheave identifies as the point where he and Stavros turned back and continue on.
With each step beyond, my spirits start to sink.
The march may have moved beyond my ability to track them—at least, to find them in any kind of reasonable time.
Maybe this is pointless. If we were back with the others, at least we could be strategizing.
The one thing we do know is where the scourge sorcerers’ army will attack, even if we aren’t sure when.
Rheave halts where the ground falls away into a narrow gully. I peer down at a stream even thinner than the one where we filled our canteens and washed up this morning.
It’s not quite narrow enough to jump across, but the gully only descends about twice my height. Not too bad a scramble.
What are the chances we’ll find anything if we keep going, though? Maybe we should take this as our sign to head back.
I open my mouth to say that, but Rheave speaks first. “A butterfly!”
Gripping the saplings sprouting from the side of the gully, he scrambles down to the stream bed. A pale blue butterfly is indeed fluttering around near the shrubs down there.
The insect darts toward him and then away. I spot another one, with wings a deep yellow that’s almost gold, farther down the stream.
Julita makes a sound of appreciation. Would you look at that. They’re beautiful.
Rheave cocks his head and follows the butterflies, and I can’t see anything to do but go after him. I skid down to the bottom of the gully and pick my way across the stones along the stream.
At least we won’t be visible to anyone up in the forest while we’re walking down here.
“I haven’t seen any butterflies since we went north,” Rheave says in a hush. “Alek said they don’t like the cold very much.”
“I guess these are particularly resilient ones.” I raise an eyebrow at him. “Are you looking to make friends?”
He seemed bewildered by the injured insect that landed on him weeks ago back at the college. But he cared enough to carry it to safety anyway.
Rheave appears to consider my question intently. “They feel… like they’re already friends. I don’t know why.”
I study his avid expression as we hurry on along the stream bed. It was a little odd that the injured butterfly was drawn to him. Unless…
“Daimon are supposed to be creatures of all the godlen,” I comment, “but in your natural state, it seems like Inganne would be the most approving of how you act, exploring everything and playing pranks. Butterflies are one of her animals. Maybe you and they can sense you’re kindred spirits.”
The daimon-man cocks his head, a little smile curving his lips. “Even when my creators still had a grip on me, I knew I should help that one.”
Up ahead, the butterflies look as if they fly right into the wall of the gully. Strange. I pick up my pace—and come to a stop at the mouth of a sort of alcove veering off into the gully’s side.