Chapter 21 Silver
Silver
I’ve never felt so powerful in my life.
In the middle of the chaos I created at the Broken Citadel, I enlisted the man making spectral doors to create one that opened into the Forest Realm.
And by enlisted, I mean that I made him so afraid of me that he had no other choice but to comply.
Trembling, he cut a glowing rectangle into the sand, and when I stuck a hand into the dark void that opened up, I felt the scratchy needles of fir trees.
So I jumped, and the magic carried me, and it felt like riding the wind itself. It was exhilarating.
I mean, not at first. At first it was terrifying, and my own skin started to bleed fear like mist, there in that shadow tunnel of incorporeal magic. But I pulled the wisps out of my chest and I let them slip away from me, and all that was left was sheer joy and jagged exhilaration.
Until I landed in a burning city. More fear billowed in my chest, and I ripped it out, too, even more viciously this time. Because I had to focus.
I had to find her.
Fortunately, it didn’t take long. And I had the power to drop down in the middle of the conflict and make our enemies scatter.
I saw the whites of Reltas’s eyes before he fled in panic.
I heard Kiar cry out in terror, the handful of seeds she’d been clutching falling to the ground from limp fingers.
And then there was nothing left but an empty square, because everyone had run before my awesome power, leaving only the fading wisps of their fear behind them.
With a grin, I look back at Mance.
Only to find her contorted into a ball, scrunched up against the boundary of Mara’s necklace, gasping and whimpering, her eyes flung wide with panic.
I swear, rushing toward her, trying to apologize, unclasp the necklace, and pull away her fear all at once. Doing a clumsy job of all three.
For a brief moment, I wonder how my magic even got through Mara’s barrier, but then the clasp gives and I’m focused entirely on coaxing the smoke from her body, letting it dissipate into the air. When the last of it is gone, I pull her into my lap and she moans.
Then she pushes away from me and throws up in the dirt.
“Sorry,” I say again, gently gathering her hair away from her face and holding it back for her as she lurches and vomits a second time. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m still figuring out range and control. That won’t happen again, I swear.”
She looks up at me, face pale, eyes direct and probing. “So it’s true,” she says, voice wavering. “You really went into the Citadel.”
I tense. “Kiar forced me to,” I tell her, weirdly defensive. “She has seeds that can control your body if she plants them under your skin.”
She accepts this without question, a testament to how bizarre things have gotten in the last few days, but her eyes are raking my face. “Are you . . . okay, though?” She puts a hand up to my cheek but stops just short of touching me, as though afraid I’ll dissolve on contact.
I lean into her hand, pressing my skin against her fingers. “I’m okay,” I tell her.
She blows out a breath, though her expression is still conflicted.
Then she throws herself back into my arms and I gather her against my chest. I’m probably squeezing too hard, but she lets me, burying her face in the crook of my neck.
Her breath feathers against my throat, harsh at first, but as she gradually relaxes against me, it evens out, and it’s only then that the tension starts to leak out of my own body as well.
“Why would Kiar do that, though?” Mance mumbles against my throat. “Send you to the Citadel, I mean. It seems like a huge risk and I can’t understand what she thought she had to gain.”
I grimace into her hair. “Well, her first plan was to kill me. This was a fallback.”
Mance nods again, this time brushing against my jaw, and I swallow before hurriedly filling her in on the rest. The growing magical army. The plot to enlist Cliff Realm citizens to make the army even larger. How Reltas’s marriage to Mance would give him the power to do it.
When I get to that point, I falter. “Speaking of which . . . You’re not, uh . . .” I clear my throat. “. . . already married, are you?” I try to make the question sound casual, but my heart is beating out of my chest. Reflexively, my arms tighten around her.
To my relief, though, she shakes her head right away. “The wedding kinda went up in smoke,” she tells me.
“That’s what this is?” I ask, looking around at the wreckage. Now that I’ve scattered all the people who were trying to put out the flames, they’re spreading faster, leaping from branch to branch and rooftop to rooftop at alarming speed. “Who started the fire?”
She stills, seemingly unwilling to answer. I bring my gaze back to her face just in time to see something almost imperceptible close off behind her eyes. Then she merely says, “I need to go.”
I shake my head. “. . . What?”
She extricates herself from me, and hot, dry air fills the space she just left.
“I need to go,” she repeats. “Now. Reltas may not care about the myriad ways in which he’s flagrantly breaching the Treaty, but the other realms will.
They may not have offered me support when it was just about my marriage, but a plot like this will be enough to force them to act.
This is good. Or, well, not exactly good. But manageable. We can manage this.”
“By starting the very continental war you’ve been trying to prevent this whole time?”
“He’s initiated the war already, and it sounds like continental conflict is impending even if I do nothing. But I can get ahead of it. We can control it. Contain it. I have to get back to the Cliff Realm and get a plan together.”
She makes like she’s about to leave right then, but I grab her arm. “Hold on!”
She only speaks faster. “I don’t have time to hold on, Silver; time is of the essence. Once he’s regrouped from the fear you struck in him, he’ll make his own move. We have to act first.”
“Just tell me why you don’t want to answer my question,” I push, because that look in her eyes is still bothering me. “What aren’t you telling me? Who started the fire?”
She goes silent, clearly weighing something.
Her lips press into a thin line and she stares at me as though willing me to just drop it.
She even tries to pull her hand away from me, but I hold on tighter, waiting.
Finally, she drops her head. “It was . . . another part of me,” she says, voice small.
The words hang in the air between us for a moment, confusing and absurd. And then, suddenly, they hit me square in the chest.
Mance burned down the town square? People’s homes and livelihoods? That makes no sense. I can’t see any of the parts of Mance that I know doing something like that. Which means . . .
I flex the hand at my side, trying to keep my voice level. “Why haven’t I met this part?” I ask.
“We didn’t want you to.” Again, she speaks distantly, as though she’s not even present in this conversation.
I stare at her. “You hid her from me?”
“It was a group decision.”
I grit my teeth. “And how long ago did you make this decision exactly?”
“It was . . .” She swallows. “It was actually the first one we made. Together, I mean. Can I go now? We can talk about this more later. I have things to—”
“Mance,” I say firmly, as the last few months of feeling like something was missing start to take a different shape. “I want to meet her.”
“No.”
The response is so immediate, so decisive, that it takes me a couple seconds to process it. “No?!”
“As I just said, we don’t want you to. Trust me. It’s for the best.” She puts one hand on her chest, almost compulsively, and grimaces. “Look around you. Look at what she did. She’s out of control. She needs to be contained, not trotted out for a meet and greet.”
“I don’t care if she’s out of control. She’s still you. You said you wanted all the broken parts of me, why would I not want the same?”
“I said I’d take all the broken parts you’re willing to give me,” she clarifies. “I’m not willing to give you this. You can’t just force me to.”
My shoulders hunch. “No one is trying to . . . force you. It would be one thing if you were up-front about it, told me it was something you were struggling with and you weren’t ready to share it.
I could be patient if that were the case.
But you hid her from me. We can’t be in a relationship if you’re deliberately hiding parts of yourself from me, Mance. It’s not going to work.”
Everything I’m saying is true, but there’s more that I’m not saying. A desperate clawing in my throat that I’m shocked I can even speak around.
Because I hear what she’s really saying. That she doesn’t feel like she can trust me with all of herself. That I’m not worthy of it.
That even now, with all this power, I’m not enough.
“Don’t say that,” Mance says, her face paling and her eyes going wide. “It’s not—it’s not that I was trying to shut you out, I just . . . I just want to give you the parts of me that are good. The best parts!”
“I’ve never wanted your best, though!” I explode. “I want your all, I want your everything! I don’t just want to stand next to you when it’s all going great; I want to hold you when it’s hard! Why won’t you let me?”
“I—” Her face screws up like she’s about to cry. “I can’t, Silver! I just can’t!”
“Then I can’t!” The words echo around us, bigger than I meant them to be.
She goes still. Hazy fear leaks from her skin, making her appear to be clothed in wispy tendrils of smoke. “You don’t mean . . . ,” she whispers, and even more smoke spills from her mouth.
I expect fear to leak from my own skin as well, but it’s not coming. I must have pulled at it too hard.
And honestly, I can’t seem to bring myself to care. What has fear ever done but get in the way? If she doesn’t want me, then that’s fine. I don’t need her. All she does is make me feel like I’m not good enough, and I’ve had plenty of people in my life making me feel that way as it is.
“I do mean it,” I say harshly.
Her face crumples, like I’ve slapped her. Then her desperate eyes go distant and she splits, flinging herself as far away from me as she can.
In another second, she’s gone.
Leaving nothing but curling smoke behind her.