Chapter 34
FEVERED
LEILANI
Astral Mountain, Meissa, Northern Realm of Estelia
THE CANDLE ON the windowsill sputters, its wavering flame casting long shadows over the glistening walls.
It’s almost burnt down, but I’ll not light another.
The sky is starting to brighten, it won’t be long till dawnrise, and we need to ration our store, for who knows how long we’ll be stuck in this star-forsaken cabin, waiting for Blayze and Astrophel to recover before we can attempt the mountain?
The words ‘if they ever recover’ scratch at the door of my mind, like unwelcome guests. I refuse them entry.
I peer through the grimed window, scanning the mountainside for the hundredth time since beginning my watch.
Though my brandsong whispers danger, everything is still.
The wind whistling over the mountain face, and occasional soft snores from the other members of the Quaternity, drifting from the platform above me, are the only sounds.
Even Serafine’s plaintive croons, a constant ambient noise since Blayze sustained his injuries, are temporarily stilled.
After three moonsrisings, she finally left his side tonight, presumably to hunt.
She’s yet to return, leaving me alone in my vigil.
I stretch my legs to ease the cramped muscles.
I’ve been at my post longer than I thought.
The poppy elixir will wear off soon and, assuming the pattern since the lightning strike holds true, Blayze’s night terrors will begin.
When they do, I’ll hand the watch to one of the others, make a proper sweep of the perimeter. Hunt for tracks in the snow.
The image of Arden’s pitiless face in the mooncrystal, the memory of her feral beauty, those burning eyes so full of hate, niggles like a loose tooth. She’s out there somewhere, lurking. I’m sure of it. Waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
Blayze twitches, ripples of pain distorting his features.
My chest tightens. In spite of everything – how angry I am at him for keeping the truth of himself from me – it’s hard to watch him suffer.
I place my hand to his brow, smoothing back a forelock that falls stubbornly forwards.
It’s damp. Scalding. Moving him to the cabin’s cooler ground level hasn’t broken his fever.
Despite Tansy’s best efforts, his wounds are infected.
So, we watch. And wait.
Fine fingers of moonslight glance off his prone body.
Blayze’s head is tipped back, his gilded throat bared, all traces of suspicion and roughness erased.
I take in the sweep of his bronzed lashes, the full bow of his lips.
Despite the pain, his face is softer in sleep, almost boyish.
I’m glimpsing the Clanschief as he must have been before the hardships of the Necropole and his father’s cruelty whittled him into something sharp and craggy.
My gaze snags on his torc. I trace the twisted metal collar with my finger – that strange draw making me find reasons to touch him, even in my anger.
I replaced it as soon as Tansy pronounced his condition stable, concealing his brand.
No one else commented on it, appeared to notice.
But then, to an untrained eye, it’s just one of many livid scars after the lightning strike.
The others aren’t as familiar – as fixated – with brandmarkings as I am.
Why didn’t he tell me?
All this time, Blayze knew and never breathed a word. Allowed me to think myself alone. An aberration. A freak.
Now all those pained looks make sense. Only, it’s not just me who disgusts him – he hates himself too. A pair: as opposite, as star-crossed, as two people can be, yet irrevocably bound together. Perhaps the last two Branded left in Arcelia.
If he ever wakes up – when he wakes up – Blayze has a lot of explaining to do.
My gaze strays again to the window. Guilt tugs low at my belly. Who am I to talk? I’m keeping secrets too; I’m in no position to lecture anyone about honesty.
A bead of sweat trickles down the thick column of Blayze’s neck, tracing a languorous path towards his collarbone, and suddenly I’m all too aware of the proximity of his supine body, stripped to the waist because of the fever.
The squirming sensation I’ve felt in his presence ever since our first meeting intensifies.
My pulse leaps as I allow my gaze to trail down his sculpted chest, to take in the older scars that lattice his shoulders and the tops of his arms, the newer ones from the lightning strike, dipping lower still, hovering on the chiselled planes of his lower abdomen…
I snap my focus back to his face, blood pooling my cheeks. Stars above, what’s wrong with me?
And then it all makes sense. Not just his pained looks and inhuman strength, his surviving the lightning strike and having an emberwing bound to him, whatever it was he did to the starshine I conjured when we fled Galtair.
But the draw I feel – the draw I’ve always felt towards him – it isn’t desire, it’s this.
Only this. Kinship. Relief blooms, rapid as a moonflower.
We’re bound by shared magic; that’s the reason I’m so jittery around him.
Danger!
A gasp catches in my throat as my brandsong’s warnings shift from whisper to growl. I turn back to the window, heart galloping, but everything remains still. No sign of Arden. No sign of the wolves.
Danger!
I turn my attention back to Blayze, shivering as my brandsong growls again.
Don’t let the warnings be for him.
Blayze whimpers. I take up the earthen vessel at my feet and unstop it. Lavender and peppermint perfume the air as I pour a few drops of the oil onto my fingers and trace slow circles on his temples, mimicking the ministrations I’ve watched Maris and Tansy perform to soothe Blayze back to sleep.
His muscles unclench, his breathing turns less ragged, but then a deeper, half-stifled moan tears from his lips, contorting his face again.
He arches his back, fisting his hands so the corded muscles of his arms strain.
I reach for his shoulder but before I can touch him, his hand circles my wrist. His skin is hot and clammy, his grip urgent and bruising. He draws me towards him.
He mumbles something that might be my name. His coppery lashes flutter open, and our eyes lock. I’m drowning in molten honey; his gaze is its own kind of brand. Heavy-lidded, bright with fever, pupils blown wide.
I should fetch Tansy so she can examine him, but his iron grip circling my wrist stays my feet. So too does the warmth of his chest, searing through my shirt, and the gentle thud of his heart, slow and steady compared to mine, which skitters like the beat of moon-moth wings.
His rasped breaths are soft against my face, still sweetened from the poppy elixir.
His free hand reaches for me. A shiver licks my spine as his fingers graze my jaw, lingering over the sensitive skin by my earlobe.
I should pull back, but I don’t. I don’t move at all.
The amber musk of his skin is making me light-headed, weak-kneed.
The cabin narrows to his smell, his scorching touch, as some strange, aching want pulses through me.
I want him closer; I want his lips on mine; I want…
His fingers tighten around my wrist, and I don’t think of resisting. I melt into him instead.
His lips are soft, but his kiss is anything but gentle.
There’s desperation behind it as his mouth catches mine.
His tongue parts my lips and sweeps in, claiming me.
Strong fingers rake my hair, tugging me closer.
It’s too much, and not nearly enough. My hand slips to his shoulder.
I clutch him to me, deepen the kiss. Strong arms circle me, crushing his body so flush against me I can’t breathe.
Heat surges, burning away all my doubts, obliterating everything but the feel of him.
The cabin dissolves completely; there’s only his arms, his warmth, the blunting sweetness of the poppy filling my mouth as our tongues swirl in a fevered joust. My hands slide down, nails digging into his hips.
My body driven by primal impulses, yielding now to his strange gravitational pull.
I need Blayze closer still. I need more.
I… I must press against him too hard – an anguished moan dies on his lips.
He swears as he tears himself away. Eyes rolling back, he collapses on the furs.
Lost once more to pain and fever.
I straighten so fast my spine cracks, smooth my rumpled shirt and hair with tremulous fingers, and glance up towards the sleeping platform.
Stars! What if someone saw? Guilt sinks its teeth into my gut again as I strain to hear something beyond the pounding of my own heart.
All’s still. I heave a deep sigh of relief.
No one saw, and Blayze likely won’t remember any part of it.
It will be like it never happened.
He’s thrashing again, mumbling incoherently, lashing his head back and forth on the furs.
With shaking fingers, I spill a few more drops of the peppermint oil and continue massaging his temples.
I try not to think about the thrill of his mouth capturing mine, the warmth of his velvet-soft lips, the thrust and swirl of his tongue.
I try not to compare the longing that’s been kindling inside me for moonscycles, catching aflame tonight like a comet burning a star-bright path through the night sky, with the marmoreal chill when Astrophel first kissed me at Thawtide.
I try to pretend it meant nothing. I repeat the mantra to myself, inventing excuses for my behaviour till his groans subside and Blayze sinks once more into drugged torpor.
It meant nothing. A moment of weakness – of madness.
It meant nothing. Some strange kink of our brands.
It meant nothing. An involuntary physical response. Blind lust.
It meant nothing…
But it’s getting harder and harder to lie to myself.
I’ll end my watch early, hand over to Astrophel. He’s recovered enough to sit here quietly for a few hours – and I need to breathe, to think. To clear my head. Most of all, I need to get away from Blayze and the impossible draw he holds over me.
I stagger up to where my betrothed lies sleeping.
Shame sours my stomach as I shake him awake.
I didn’t initiate that kiss with Blayze, but I didn’t pull away either.
And though we’re not bound yet, though I never sought our union, I can’t shake the feeling I’ve betrayed Astrophel.
And while I don’t feel for Astrophel what I feel for Blayze, I do care for him.
I don’t want to hurt him. He opens his eyes and stares sleepily at me.
My cheeks burn. After everything Astrophel did to save me from the hoarclaw, from the Arx Magnum, from those frostfangs on the ice, is this how I repay him?
I crawl into my own furs, too tired and heartsore now to check the perimeter, but I’m plagued by disquieting dreams, haunted in wholly different ways by two pairs of stricken, amber eyes.
The eyes morph the longer I dream. The fire drains out of them. In its place, soft grey depths rise, etched with a wholly different kind of pain. I know these eyes.
‘Mother!’
I sit up, hugging my arms around the terror in the pit of my stomach, wrenching back to consciousness. I reach for the silk of her dress, forgetting it was lost on the ice.
Did I scream aloud? The soft murmurs to my left and right suggest the others are still asleep.
I focus on their rhythmic mumble, try to unsee my mother’s beautiful face wracked, contorted into ugliness.
Something shifts inside me, yanks out of alignment, like a dislocating joint.
The change I’ve feared, the one the healers have warned of for moonscycles.
The end – her end – it’s finally here. Or very close.
A dream. Just a dream. I curl my knees to my chest and bury my face in them.
But the vision doesn’t fade. Instead, threads of light stretch before my eyes, forming pictures, a glittering tapestry of the future.
Part of me doesn’t want to look, but I have to know.
I reach with my mind’s eye for one of the silvery strands. Terrible, vivid images flood my mind.
The bare bones of my nightmare acquire flesh.
This vision is no dark mirror. The Arx Magnum’s letter has arrived. Or rather, it arrived some time back, but my mother has just learnt of its existence. This is what caused her sudden relapse. Worrying about me.
My fault.
Monster, they called me. And monster I am.
Constantly lying, kissing other people’s lovers, betraying those who’d risk their lives for me, hastening my own mother’s death…
I shudder. Perhaps Shadow has seeped deeper into my marrow than I thought.
Or perhaps I’ve been wrong all my life, and it’s not magic that makes me monstrous. It’s some defect in my makeup.
My fingers brush the Celestial Chain, cool beneath my shirt.
I lift it into the open, cradling the pendant, peering at the faint cleft Izarius made when he spliced a fragment away to create the distillation that, at this very moment, is allowing me and the other members of the Quaternity to breathe the mountain’s cursed air.
I can only pray that taking that chance, making that tincture, exposing myself to Shadow, hasn’t compromised the Sister-Stones.
That if I succeed in finding the lost sceptre, I’ll still be granted my one wish.
That fragile hope is the only thing standing between my mother and death.
But I no longer have the space of half a sunring – nothing close to that.
It might already be too late, and there’s a mountain yet to climb.
I only realise I’m crying when I taste salt.
Then, a dim awareness of an arm around my shoulders, soft, soothing words murmured close to my ear, and the scent of sweet hay and leather.
Astrophel. Here when I need him – again.
I lean into his warmth but can’t focus on his words.
Can’t hear what he’s saying. There’s a buzzing in my ears, and I can’t catch my breath.
And where earlier, I didn’t have the strength to resist Blayze, now I don’t have the strength to resist the dark currents of panic as they pull me under.