Chapter 23 Caspia
Twenty-Three
Caspia
The world was bathed in blood.
Xandra’s roar rattled the fortress walls.
A mother wept over her slaughtered child. A man tried to push his guts back inside his body, dropping to his knees as they all spilled free.
Everywhere I turned, there was another bariwolf. Xandra commanded them like an army of death.
She was a monster. Her fangs dripped with Andreas’s blood.
I looked to his lifeless body at my feet.
And welcomed the Divine’s embrace.
…
I woke with tears swimming in my eyes.
It took a moment for me to remember where I was sleeping.
Ozarth. Skanshon. A suite at Andreas’s favorite inn.
We’d spent so many moons beneath the stars that the gauze sheeting around this bed was almost suffocating. Even though I could see the rest of the room through the sheer fabric, it still felt too much like walls.
There was a reason our palace windows in Showe had no glass panes to keep out the elements. Those of the Starling bloodline did not like to feel caged.
A sheen of sweat covered my face, the bedsheets sticky against my skin.
Andreas’s arm was draped over my hips as he slept soundly on his stomach. He seemed so at peace, so utterly handsome and relaxed.
It never took him long to fall asleep. He’d pull me close and bury his face in my hair. Then before I could count to ten, he’d have already dozed off.
I envied him that. The more often I had the vision of his death, the more I feared sleep.
It had come six times.
I loathed the number six.
The details became clearer and clearer as the vision repeated.
His hair was shorter when he died, cut above his ears. There was a thin scar on his chin. His gold wedding ring was inlaid with amber jewels, the same color as the starbursts in his eyes.
Where had he gotten that scar? How long had he worn that ring?
Were we happy before that gruesome end?
I slipped out from beneath his arm, careful not to wake him as I climbed out of the bed and pushed beyond the canopy. The robe I’d worn after our bath last moon was draped on a chair. I pulled it on, tying the sash around my waist as I tiptoed from the bedroom.
The inn’s emblem—twin crescent moons faced together to form an elongated circle—was laid in the sitting room’s floor with emerald tiles.
Two navy velvet chairs sat opposite a plush sofa made of the same fabric.
The air smelled like orange peel and rose.
A pitcher of fresh water sat on the small writing desk beside a new bouquet of burgundy mums. The sheer white curtains floated from the breeze that drifted in from our balcony.
I stepped onto the platform, holding tight to the wooden rail, and breathed in the cool air of dawn as tears pricked the corners of my eyes.
“Fuck,” I whispered, dabbing them away.
Even when I was alone, I found myself using Calandran more often than not. If I stayed here long enough, would I forget Nelfinex? If I left here now, if I found a way to sail home, would it change the future?
How did I save him?
I pressed my palms to my eyes, pushing in so hard that white and black spots blanked out everything but the sounds of the city.
We’d been in Skanshon for four suns. Each morning, Andreas would ask if I was ready to continue our journey on to Turah. And each morning, I’d kiss his mouth and drag him back to bed, where we’d stay, naked and entwined, for hours and hours.
How could I continue to Turah when it might mean his death?
There was a clarity to this vision. It was sharper than any other. The only vision I’d seen with this much focus was Emery’s death.
If it was repeating, it had to mean something. But what?
I gripped the balcony’s rail, digging my nails into the wood. It reminded me of the suns aboard the Cirrina when I’d stood at the bow and done the same. Even this morning, with my head spinning, the floor seemed to tilt below my feet like I was aboard the ship again.
What would Xandra do? I wished I could ask her.
The bed rustled inside, the sound so faint it was something I shouldn’t have been able to hear. Footsteps shuffled across the floor before Andreas walked onto the balcony, a white sheet wrapped around his waist.
Two strong arms enveloped me as he molded his body around mine. “You’re not sleeping enough.”
Sleep was a dangerous concept at the moment. “I’ll rest later.”
He held me tighter, his body keeping me warm.
“Is it always this cold in Ozarth?” Now that the fear from the vision was fading, the chill of the morning was sinking in, raising bumps on my arms and legs.
“If you think this is cold, we’ll need to get you warmer clothes before we travel to Turah. It will only get colder until we reach the winter solstice. There might already be snow in the mountains.”
“Snow.” I repeated the word, sounding it out slowly. “What is snow?”
“Like sand but made of ice. It falls from the sky like white rain.”
The vision I had lunes ago of the man riding a horse with that young girl. They’d been in a field beside mountains capped in white. I’d thought it was sand or stone.
But it was snow.
“There is no snow in Nelfinex.” No winter.
The suns were almost always the same. We had times when it would rain from dawn to dusk, and while the storms carried a chill, when the clouds parted, the warmth would return as though it had never left.
A cart rolled through the narrow alleyway beneath our balcony, the driver coughing into his fist as he urged on his horse.
Andreas and I hadn’t spent much time beyond the walls of this room. All I’d seen of Skanshon had been the road through the city that led us to the Emerald Crescent Inn.
Since we arrived, each meal had been delivered to our sitting room, and if we longed for anything, Andreas would simply go downstairs, gold coins in hand, to make our request to the clerk.
“Do you want to leave today?” he asked.
“No,” I murmured, resting the back of my head against his chest. “Not yet.”
“Then I want to show you the city. But first, come back to bed.” He bent to press his mouth to the juncture of my neck and shoulder.
The kiss was featherlight and sent tingles down my body, desire pooling in my core.
He lifted me off my feet and carried me inside, parting the canopy to lay me down on the mattress.
I slid my hand down his rippled stomach as he crushed his mouth to mine, our tongues tangling as I untied the sheet from his waist.
He settled into the cradle of my hips, his weight pinning me to the bed as he kissed me until I was breathless.
I reached between us and took his length in my fist, lining him up at my entrance.
He rocked us together, slowly, torturously, until he was rooted deep.
“Yes.” The stretch of my body around his made my toes curl. I arched into him, my pebbled nipples dragging along his hard chest.
Andreas tore his mouth away, kissing a trail along the line of my jaw until he reached my ear. “Shades, I love to fuck you.”
Fuck, I was learning, had many meanings, but this was my favorite.
I hooked my ankles around his hips and dug my fingers into the hard muscles of his shoulders as he eased out, then thrust inside.
He hit the spot that made me melt.
His strokes were quick but deliberate. His hands roamed with intent, leaving sparks in their wake as they moved over my breasts and ribs and thighs. He stared down at me with enough desire to make me come undone.
And when he pressed his finger to my center, I shattered, my body breaking into a thousand brilliant pieces.
The chill of the morning was long gone by the time we collapsed, boneless, onto the bed, our legs twined and his body curled around mine.
Andreas fell asleep instantly, a soft smile on his lips.
I stared at him, memorizing every part of his face, from the sharp corners of his jaw to his strong chin to the dark crescents of his eyelashes, until my own fluttered closed.
The vision came immediately.
This time, I saw the broadsword in the dirt at his side. I saw the crest on his silver armor—a crossbow woven with leaves and stalks of wheat. I saw the gore and blood from where his throat had been torn open by jaws.
I woke in time to slap a hand over my mouth to keep from retching on the sheets.
The streets of Skanshon were made of gray stones, and every road seemed to lead to a bridge.
The city was built at the mouth of the Harrow River, where the water flowed into the Krisenth.
Instead of a single, wide channel, the water broke off into countless tributaries, like the branches of a willow tree.
The larger channels were full of boats and ferries shuttling goods up- and downstream.
The smaller streams gave people a place to wash clothes or cast a fishing line.
The water was as blue as the Ozarth flags hung from balconies and posts.
As blue as the starbursts in the countless gazes we’d passed since Andreas and I left the inn to explore.
We’d wound through a neighborhood of homes made with the same gray stone as the streets. Each had a roof covered in metal spikes. And above those spikes was a grid of iron bars that were mounted on posts driven into the ground.
It was strange architecture, but most of the grids had certain squares filled with a colored film that cast the homes beneath them in hues of soft blue or green or pink. Maybe the bars were Calandran art, like the sculptures and fountains in Showe.
We walked at a leisurely pace to a nearby market, exploring the stalls and carts. Andreas’s fingers stayed threaded through mine as we peered into shop windows and perused display tables. Every other merchant was selling some sort of weapon.
Swords and knives and blades. Every shape and size imaginable. I hadn’t seen so many blades since I left Showe.
My hands itched to touch them all.
“Is it dangerous in Skanshon?” I asked Andreas.