39. Eradin
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
ERADIN
The pearl came back to me smaller than I’d given it.
We’d worked out how we were going to do this without a word, because words were a mouthful of lake down here.
One of us breathed while the other went still and gray, and then we traded, mouth to mouth, buying each other another handful of seconds.
Him. Me. Him. Me. A rhythm you could set a heartbeat to, if either of our hearts had been where they belonged.
It should’ve meant nothing. A trick to keep two bodies alive. But somewhere in the tenth time or twelfth passing, his mouth on mine stopped being a mechanism and started being his mouth, and the breath I took off it carried more than air.
I told myself it was the drowning. Drowning did strange things to a person.
I didn’t quite believe myself.
Between passes, we hunted the dome. I dragged Fenian’s hands along the clear curve of it while my own body worked the far side, methodical, like he did everything.
We found nothing but cleks of clear, unbroken nothing, with the dead standing witness, the light too far above to matter, and our dragons still trying to batter their way through.
During one pass, I felt something new. I was driven deeper, into something unexpected buried far inside him.
Longing.
Directed at…
No, that couldn’t be right.
But the magic didn’t lie. I felt it clearer than Selira’s heartbeat.
Attraction so strong it made the air between us vibrate. Want that he’d been hiding, shoving down, trying to ignore.
For me.
Heat flooded my face so fast I got dizzy. My stomach dropped, then swooped back up, then dropped again.
If he was seeing and knowing what I was seeing and knowing, then he knew everything I felt for him.
All the stupid, embarrassing thoughts I’d shoved down, from the way I’d watched his hands on Aristus’s neck, to how his voice went rough when he was trying not to show emotion.
The moment in the kitchen when he’d stood close enough I could smell leather and him.
All of it was pouring through this fucking magical connection like I’d been stripped naked and stood in front of him, fully exposed.
His wanting flew through me the same as his grief had, except this wasn’t old and buried.
And now I knew about the heat that ran through the frame I was wearing every time we passed the pearl from mouth to mouth.
He wanted me. The real me. The commons stable hand, the stubborn scarred truth of who I truly was, wanted like a man who’d been starving so long he’d forgotten hunger had a name.
My belly dropped, and not from the cold.
Because if I could feel his want…
He knew I wanted him just as much.
Confusion slammed through me. Why would he want me? I was commons. Dirty and exhausted and wearing yesterday’s blood on my leathers. I worked in the aerie. Stole things. Had magic I shouldn’t possess.
Was this trial a test for him or for me? Because there was nothing about me that made sense for him to want.
Denial came next. I was reading this wrong. The magic was showing me something else, and I was interpreting it through my own…
Oh, fuck, no.
My own attraction?
The realization tried to crack me open from the inside.
I’d been noticing him, sure. The way you notice the sunrise after a week of rain.
The way he held his shoulders when he stood outside his tent last night, backlit by faelights.
How his voice changed when he talked to Aristus, going soft and tender.
The exhaustion he wore like armor that I wanted to soothe or erase.
Fates help me, I was noticing him the way a woman does a man, and I’d bet anything this trial was showing him everything I’d been determined to hold back.
The thought made my blood boil.
But it was undeniable. The magic stripped everything bare, leaving nothing behind but his craving.
I’d spent my life sorting the world into them and us. The boot and the neck under it. Fenian had sat at the top of the pile since the day I first saw him, a beautiful weapon in a hunting party. I’d used his crown to keep him at arm’s length because distance was easier than the truth.
The truth was drowning in my body that kept giving me what was left of the air.
He wasn’t my enemy.
The realization settled in my chest like a balm.
The elite court was the true villain here.
The moment the thought solidified, something inside me clicked. A lock releasing.
The magic of this place recognized the shift.
A knot I’d carried since childhood came loose.
I knew what he knew now. It had bled into me along with the rest of him.
I found his gaze and lifted my hands—his hands—and blue fire crawled off the knuckles, the killing color that had never once been mine. My own hands came up wreathed in red. My mother’s gift, in a prince’s keeping.
We swam together, running our hands along the dome, sharing the dwindling air of the pearl, and let our magic pour free.
Red met blue and recoiled, but I sensed this wasn’t the dome fighting us.
It was us.
The colors slid off each other, spitting, refusing to braid, and I felt exactly why. I was still holding onto the distance between a commons and an elite, and I didn’t quite dare hand my trust over.
Cooperation, I could do; I’d done it for at least twenty passes of the pearl. But I sensed the magic wanted more than teamwork. It wanted me to let him all the way in, and some old animal part of me threw the bolt on the door out of habit.
The magic guttered and died between our palms.
The dome didn’t so much as flicker.
And behind me, stone ground against stone.
Lord Callix’s eyes glowed. His stony face split into a slick smile. He lowered his outstretched arm.
All around us, the drowned lords and ladies were dragging their stony feet through the sand, stirring up bones and dropped weapons.
They turned rabid smiles toward the only two warm things left in the lake.
Us.