Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
Fieran woke as the sunset splashed a deep orange against the deeper blue and purple of the evening sky.
After stretching, he and Aaruk awkwardly scrambled to exchange places.
Aaruk stretched out on the mattress while Fieran settled with a sigh and a hand pressed to his wound into the front passenger seat.
“We should stop to look at that.” Dacha gestured briefly at Fieran’s side before he returned the hand to the wheel.
“It’ll be fine for a while longer. Moving just makes it hurt.
” Fieran took in the rolling fields on either side of the dirt road, the sight only broken by the occasional farmhouse and barn.
“We can tend it when we stop for the night. If we stop. I can drive for a spell if we want to push through the night.”
Dacha shook his head. “As much as I want to keep moving, all of us will need our sleep. We have a long trip ahead of us.”
That they did. With the miles they needed to travel on unfamiliar roads, it was going to be iffy whether they could reach Landri at the right time.
Sure, Uncle Edmund and Dacha had already planned on making this trip. But Uncle Edmund could pass as a Mongavarian, and they would’ve had a far easier time of it.
“Have you been able to communicate with Mama more in the heart bond?” Fieran stifled a groan as the truck hit a particularly deep rut. “Is Pip still all right?”
“Yes.” Dacha’s gaze flicked from the road to Fieran. “She is all right, and she is with your Uncle Edmund.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
” Fieran grimaced as he leaned his head against the seat.
Uncle Edmund would look after Pip as if she was his own daughter.
But considering Jayna was likely spying somewhere here in Mongavaria, Uncle Edmund wasn’t above encouraging people to sneakiness and danger.
Dacha opened his mouth, sighed, and shook his head. “He will see that she is not hurt.”
Fieran should find that comforting. But the longer he sat there, thinking about Pip in the clutches of the enemy and locked away somewhere, the more a tightness clenched his chest and clawed up his throat. What must they be doing to her to keep her captive? “I need to get to her.”
Dacha glanced at him, his gaze lingering longer than before. “She will be all right, sason.”
“But how do I know?” How would he stop this worry from eating him from the inside out? He would go insane before the week was out at this rate.
“You fell in love with a strong, capable young woman who can look after herself.” Dacha met Fieran’s gaze briefly before turning his eyes back to the road ahead of them. “Trust her. Trust that she will do what she needs to do to get to you, just as you will do what you need to do to get to her.”
Fieran remembered the way his mother had growled I have it handled and all the stories he’d been told over the years of how Mama had fought her way across Kostaria to rescue Dacha from the trolls.
His parents were an example of people who were not just strong together but also strong apart. That was what made them capable allies for each other as they faced whatever was thrown their way.
Fieran loved Pip both for her vulnerability and for her strength. He would have to trust that she was strong enough for whatever she faced in the next week. She had incredible magic and a core of iron when needed. She would be all right.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t still desperate to get back to her. Perhaps he was the one who was weak without her, not the other way around.
He and Dacha lapsed into silence. The deepening gloom of night closed around them, but Dacha didn’t yet turn on the truck’s headlamps. The lights of a few distant farmhouses broke the night, and someone might glance out and see the vehicle if they didn’t run dark.
After a few more minutes of quiet, Dacha released a long exhale, as if he’d come to some kind of decision. His fingers flexed on the polished wood of the steering wheel. “This morning, you asked if I had ever wondered what it would feel like to be burned by the magic of the ancient kings.”
Fieran winced. That had been a joke. An inadvisable one fueled by his wooziness, pain, and semi-sedated state.
Dacha continued speaking, his gaze focused on the darkness outside the windscreen, before Fieran could work up the words to respond.
“My dacha had strong magic, but it was plant magic like your Uncle Weylind’s.
When I came into my magic, he did his best, but he could not hold back my magic when it flared out of my control.
He tried to hide it, but I know I burned him. Several times.”
Fieran swallowed, bracing himself against the truck door.
His whole body tingled with the urge to run, to leap out of the truck, to tell his dacha to stop telling him these things.
He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want the burden of the truth laid on his shoulders to carry.
He didn’t want to see his dacha’s broken pieces rather than the perfect armor of the dacha he’d held up on a pedestal as a child.
But he was an adult now. He saw, with the clarity of an adult, all the ways his dacha’s trauma had shaped Fieran’s childhood.
Fieran might not carry the same scars, but he was still indelibly marked by them, a secondhand trauma he couldn’t ignore as much as he wanted to remain in his blissful ignorance.
“Weylind has never confirmed it, but I believe I burned him as well.” Dacha’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel now, his gaze focused ahead as if he couldn’t bring himself to see Fieran’s reaction. “So, no, I have never wondered.”
What could Fieran say? There were no words, and any words he had were lost in the scrambling panic that screamed at him to plug his ears rather than acknowledge what his dacha was telling him.
Would he still have asked his dacha to cauterize his wound if he’d known the internal wound he’d be reopening?
Yes, probably. It had been what needed to be done, and, as bad as it had been, it had hurt far less than the whole nearly getting his magic ripped from his body then shoved back into place thing.
But he would’ve been far less cavalier about it.
“It isn’t that I’ve wondered, exactly. Just curious. Occasionally. But not…I don’t…” Fieran wasn’t even sure how to explain. It wasn’t like he went around hoping to get burned by the magic of the ancient kings. It was just fleeting, morbid curiosity.
“I am thankful you do not know and must instead wonder.” Dacha’s grip on the steering wheel eased a fraction, the set of his mouth less strained.
“Because I accidentally linked my magic to the elishina, your macha can use my magic. You never had to fear burning anyone because someone who could hold back your magic was always around. We were very deliberate about that.”
“I never feared my magic. Not after the first time it broke out of my control.” Fieran flexed his fingers in his lap, his magic locked deep inside rather than rising to the surface as he normally would let it.
He’d been terrified the first time he’d come into his magic, and it had lashed wildly out of his control.
But the moment his dacha had enfolded Fieran’s magic within his, Fieran had sensed the vast, far greater strength found there.
He’d never worried after that, secure in the knowledge that his dacha—and his macha with his dacha’s magic—would always be there to keep his magic in check while he was still learning.
“As you contemplate getting married and, someday, having children of your own, you will need to consider how to handle the reality of raising a child with the magic of the ancient kings.” Dacha’s voice went slightly rough, the pink flush to the tips of his ears giving away his discomfort at bringing up these topics.
Fieran’s own ears burned, and he shifted in his seat. “Pip is essentially immune to my magic.”
“Yes.” For the first time in the discussion, Dacha glanced at him with a hint of a smile playing across his mouth. “She is a good match for you, sason.”
Fieran blew out a breath, shaking his head as his own smile returned. “You’re just wondering what kind of magical mutants we’ll end up with, combining her unique magic with the magic of the ancient kings.”
“Yes.” Dacha’s smile broadened. After a moment he sighed and shook his head. “You are going to make me a dachasheni before I am even two hundred.”
“Don’t rush things. I’m not even engaged yet.” Fieran slouched deeper in his seat, his knees knocking against the wooden dashboard.
“I will not turn two hundred for another twenty-five years yet. That should be more than sufficient time.” Dacha’s grin betrayed the humor beneath his sternly serious tone.
“If you want grandchildren so much, talk to Merrik and Adry. The way they’re going, they’re probably going to beat Pip and me to both marriage and kids.” Fieran grinned. The thought didn’t itch at him the way it had before.
Dacha snorted, a twist of agreement to his smile.
Fieran’s smile faded. “Merrik isn’t immune to Adry’s magic.”
While Merrik’s plant magic was decently strong, it wasn’t nearly as strong as Uncle Weylind’s. He didn’t have any chance of holding back even the weakest tendrils of the magic of the ancient kings.
“No, he is not.” Dacha’s smile vanished in a blink, that hardness back in his eyes.
“If they should have children with the magic of the ancient kings, they will face more difficulties than you and Pip. But Adry will be able to contain the magic. As can the rest of us. Their children will not be alone.”
Not as Dacha had been, he meant.
Still, after hearing what Dacha had gone through—the pain he still carried from the knowledge that he’d burned his father and brother while coming into his magic—Fieran couldn’t help the tension tightening his chest.
After a long beat of silence, Dacha shook his head again, a trace of his smile returning. “It will be good to have a generation grow up actually knowing their dachasheni.”