Chapter 19
Chapter 19
Heartwood’s warm lips press, tilt, demand. The scents of earth and grass and green fill my senses, and I startle at the familiar shape of his mouth against mine. Nerves pop beneath my skin and bleed into my chest. When I respond, his touch turns hungry, his lips and tongue insistent. He releases my wrist and coils his arm behind my back, bending me to him, claiming me entirely. He is root and I am water. He is oil, and I am machine.
My lungs empty as I arch into him, desperate to be closer. My hands run down his bare shoulders and over the prints of his godhood, memorizing every dip and facet as he murmurs my name into my hair.
I jerk back, breaking the spell, though his arms are reluctant to release me. Another vision, another memory, and in the moment, it was every bit as visceral as the kiss that just transpired between us.
Heartwood steps back, the pink amor of our kiss evident across his lips. “Forgive me,” he says. He’d said it before, but not to me.
I shake my head, bewildered even as my heart beats dizzying spirals beneath my ribs. I see him anew, feel him anew, the length of his torso, the brush of his hair. For a few shaky breaths, there is nothing but him. No window, no tower, no unmoving sun. “Why ... why won’t you tell me? Why haven’t you told me?” When he looks away, I press, “You said Machine Three took me away. What happened at Machine Three?”
“This,” he whispers without gesture. “You lost all of it.”
My lips part, and I remember Heartwood approaching me after I used the turning rod on Machine Three, testing my memory. “But ... but if we ... why wouldn’t you explain it to me sooner? How long has it been? Why would—”
“Because you betrayed us, Nophe.”
My mouth shuts so swiftly that my teeth click.
Heartwood runs his hands up his forehead and down through his hair, the left one catching on a snag in the long, white locks. He tilts his head, and I realize he’s listening. For what? Moseus?
“It was better this way.” The coarseness in his voice makes my own throat tighten. “You forgot me—us—and the work, and we thought enough had been done to move on without you. We were wrong.”
“B-But—” A headache blossoms across my skull as my mind desperately tries to loosen the knots of these revelations. “I wouldn’t ... I don’t even know what I did, Heartwood, but I’m an honest person. Ask anyone in Emgarden—”
He casts me a withering, yet utterly despondent, look.
“But you won’t, because of all your damn secrets,” I snap.
He takes a deep breath. “Please keep your voice down.”
I do. “Because of Moseus?”
“He ...”—Heartwood struggles—“does not have the same bias I do.”
Bias.The press of his body against mine certainly felt like more than a bias. My face flushes at the thought, but I ignore it.
Rubbing my eyes, I take a few seconds to orient myself. “Tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me how I betrayed you,” I specify, every muscle in my body tightening in self-defense. If so much as a pin drops, I’m going to burst into tears. Too much, too much, too much.
Heartwood brushes past me, but the room gives him nowhere to retreat. Folding his arms, he peers out the window. Sunlight pokes through fading mist, highlighting his features in a way that makes him look both young and old, both god and mortal. It is a breath-stealing moment. I am completely intoxicated by his beauty and wonder how it didn’t floor me the moment I first saw him on those stairs.
But that wasn’t the first time I saw him. Why can’t I remember the first?
“Theft,” he answers simply. “You’d been stealing from the machines. And if they’re incomplete—”
“The wall won’t open,” I finish. I shake my head. “Heartwood, I’m nearly finished here. I haven’t found any missing parts, other than a cord I need to work the pulley system. And that thing would have been far too long and too heavy to steal with any sort of covertness.”
His focus shifts to me, and for a moment I think he’ll kiss me again. My stomach flips at the thought.
“Moseus has worked tirelessly to repair the machines,” he says. “To document what needs to be replaced. But he doesn’t understand them the way you do.”
I try to find the best means of countering. “But why would I take pieces of them when I can study the machines here, whole?”
“Your people need the metal, do they not?”
I pause. “Was I not paid, the first time?”
He nods.
I work my mouth. Close the distance between us. Emgarden needs the metal. It’s always needed the metal. But I would never have ... there’s no new machines in Emgarden! “Heartwood, you know me. Better than I know you, apparently. I would never—”
The hidden compartment beneath the kitchen table. The frame and the equilibrated orb.
The cog in the tree.
Serpent save me. It couldn’t possibly be ...
“We feared,” Heartwood continues, mechanical now, trying to stuff his feelings back into whatever weathered chest he tries to keep them in, “that pressing the issue would hurt you further. Mortal minds are ... delicate.”
“Don’t patronize me,” I hiss.
He doesn’t react. Maybe he’s used to being snapped at. I can’t remember.
Heartwood suddenly tenses. Grabs my hand and pulls me toward the door, which opens silently on its recently greased hinges. “He’s alert. You need to go.”
I stall in the doorway. “Heartwood, do you fear Moseus?”
That catches him by surprise. “No. But he is a passionate being, and you’ve betrayed him once already.”
Moseus, passionate? I would laugh, were the situation not so dire. So confounding.
“I didn’t, Heartwood,” I insist, shocked by the twisting in my own chest. I don’t want to leave. I don’t remember him, but I don’t want to leave him.
His brow buckles with agony, and my heart pumps a sharp pang into my core. “You merely don’t remember it, Nophe.”
“And that’s not atonement enough?”
He presses his lips together.
I pull away on feet of iron. “What does it mean? Nophe. You don’t say it right.” I’d understood some of their language before, and yet this word eludes me completely. My memories are still too piecemeal.
A feather of warmth touches his lips. “Nuffy is a strange name.” It’s how the end of my name should be pronounced.
I wait.
He sighs. “Nofe is a word in my native tongue. It means goddess.”
And he shuts the door, leaving me to my own echoing hollowness.
I loved him,I think, elbows on the table in my home, fingers turning mushy grain over with a spoon. The bowl of porridge sits full, oversoaked and underseasoned, waiting to be devoured. I hear others in Emgarden, about their tasks, socializing in the road, tending their animals, hollering to one another. The cacophony floats through my windows, providing an uneven ambiance to accompany my thoughts.
I force a bite of my meal down, but it does nothing to fill this gaping hole inside me. Something is missing. And I think I know what it is.
I’ve been looking at Heartwood differently the last few cycles. It would be childish to deny it. Foolish to think that, beyond the confusion and distress, I didn’t enjoy his mouth on mine. But it was the vision, the memory, of so much more, that shook me. It lasted less than a second, but in that second I was another Pell, and that other Pell loved Heartwood with everything she was. Even cutting out the emotion of it, I know. I do not give myself freely, nor easily. I trust that she didn’t, either.
You betrayed us.
My chest hurts enough for me to double over. I need to eat, but I’m not hungry. Maybe Salki or Amlynn can brew me a tincture to make me sleep. But you know who would probably be the best at that? Heartwood. He knows all kinds of things about plants.
Hey, would you mind drugging me?I could ask him. I would like to not think about us for a while.
He’d probably do it without complaint, too.
Groaning, I push the bowl away and stab my elbows into the table, cradling my head in my hands.
You betrayed us.
Pressing my lips together until they go numb, I stand, move the table, and pry up the floor, pulling out my hidden light machine. Did I? I’ve never stolen anything in my life—it’s one of the reasons Arthen’s accusations about his knife rankled me so much. Setting down the machine, I pull the knife from my pocket, examining the leather braiding on its hilt. Who’s stealing what, Heartwood? I still don’t know why he had this. Or why I did.
There’s something else I’m not remembering. Something important. But ...
Sighing, I stuff the blade in my pocket and hunt around for a piece of parchment. I don’t have anything clean, so I rip a fresh piece from my old artifact notes. I scrawl, Meet me in the garden.
He’ll know who it’s from.
I make myself dig up emily roots for the rest of the sun and into the mist. Moseus helps me sort through his collected scrap for wires for the pulley cable. I’ve only just started twisting them together when the mist begins to lift.
I slip the note under Heartwood’s door before grabbing my bag and heading to the canyon.
The mist has long dispersed by the time Heartwood comes. I sit in the shade beneath a drape of fairy wisps, my back to the red rock, not far from a poisonous chrystanus, my eyes closed, dozing but never truly sleeping. I open them when he approaches and reach for my bag.
Heartwood keeps his distance. “I do not think it’s wise—”
“Here.” I pull out the light machine and toss it to him. He almost drops it. “That’s what I have. The only thing in my house I can’t account for, that I might have taken from the tower. My blacksmith can confirm I never gave anything to him until the first load of scraps from Moseus, if you want to talk to him. I have a feeling I mentioned him before.”
Heartwood studies me, then the machine. Turns it over in his hands.
“There was a cog, too, but I found it here. Could have been you who took it.” I shrug. “I don’t know, but it’s in Machine Two now. It opened the lift.”
Running his hand over the frame, Heartwood says, “I don’t recognize any of this.”
“Machines One through Four are working,” I add, though he already knows. “Five was inaccessible, so it can’t be from there.”
Heartwood hands the device back to me. “What does it do?”
“Makes light.”
His lip ticks. “I’m not surprised you would overcomplicate a lantern.”
I slip it back into my bag. It has to go in diagonally, or it won’t fit. I grab the strap of the satchel, but hesitate to stand. “What were we fighting about?”
He snorts. “Which time?”
I grin. I don’t know why. “Often, huh?”
Mirth softens his expression, but he’s tense. I see it in his body language, reading it the way Casnia read the Ancient scrawl on the scrap metal. Like I know part of it intrinsically, but my understanding lacks finesse.
I’ve hurt him, and I can’t remember how. Can it really all tie to Machine Three? I make a mental note to watch myself around it.
Pushing off the rock, I get on my feet. Dust off my trousers. “I don’t know what this changes,” I offer, hefting my bag, “but I wanted to show you.”
Mirth fades. “Thank you.”
“I’ll fix the tower machines,” I promise. “I’m nearly there. Your tower will operate, and you’ll see your kin again. I’ll ... go, after that. Leave you to your people, and your peace. I ... I never meant to hurt you, Heartwood.”
He looks away too quickly, teeth clenched, shoulders stiff. I’m doing it again, without any effort at all. Hurting him, and he’s doing a pathetic job of masking it. Just like me. Sighing, I head through the arch. Heartwood doesn’t follow. He needs his garden and his solace.
It’s a long walk, but I stop at home to stow the machine before returning to the tower. The end is so close, but I have a lot of work ahead of me, and I intend to finish what I started.
The trip has exhausted me. I need to sleep. When I get to the second floor, I notice the lift has been called. Moseus has gone upstairs. Might as well fill him in. I need to dig up more emily roots. It’s not easy, and it will not be happening until after a solid mist.
I summon the lift back and step in, letting it take me up to the fourth floor. No Moseus, and Machine Four has been rolled back to expose the passageway near the ceiling. I try to recall if I told him where the lever was. Curious, I climb up it, moving silently. I want to see what he’s doing. If Heartwood is a riddle, Moseus is pure mystery.
I’m almost to the circular door, high enough to peer through it, when I nearly lose my grip on the machine. Moseus stands there, outside the liquid mirror. He’s removed his heavy robe, and ...
He’s not complete.
I claw through mortification as I try to make sense of what I see. Moseus stands before Machine Five with his arms outstretched, like he’s trying to commune with it. In his torso is an enormous, smoke-edged hole from the top of his shoulder blades to the base of his spine. I can see the mirror shield right through it.
Mouth dry, I quickly pick my way back down, desperate to stay as quiet as possible. Tiptoe to the lift and drop back down to floor two. By the time I reach my room, a cold sheen of sweat covers my skin.
Heartwood said Tampere took from him, that he’s only a fraction of what he was. It took from Moseus, too. It took a lot.
If I didn’t believe they were gods before, I definitely do now. And as I shut my door behind me, pressing to ensure the latch clicks, I decide to adopt Heartwood’s methods.
And say absolutely nothing.