Chapter 18 #3
As they started their training once more, Anelize couldn’t help but listen in on a blazing, rapid pulse behind her.
Warm and searching, a flame in the dark.
When she glanced over her shoulder, she found Aeric heading for the door.
His eyes finding hers as if he felt her gaze on him, softened when he sent her a small smile before disappearing.
She followed the sound of his heart for far longer than she should have.
That night, she sat before the fireplace in the common room in one of the chairs. Everyone had long since gone abed, leaving behind only the distant sounds of the whispering winds outside.
Adan’s words remained with her long after they’d parted ways. The pain in her heart for what she’d done all those years ago had remained but confessing them to someone had eased the burden. If only for a fleeting moment.
Enid had known what Anelize had done. It was only after she’d grown old enough to hear the truth that Anelize had told her.
The fear that her sister would hate her for it had persisted until she finally confessed the truth, and she’d felt foolish for thinking that someone as forgiving as Enid would hate her.
Instead, her sister had pulled her into an embrace and cried for her. For what she’d had to do.
What she wouldn’t give to hold her now.
Thoughts of her sister followed her as they always did when she was finally alone.
Only now, she was muttering to herself as she struggled to wrap her hand in a cloth to staunch the three cuts she’d made during her conjuring. Perhaps she would ask Zara to heal her tomorrow, if she wasn’t feeling too fatigued.
“May I join you?”
Her heart stumbled over itself at the sound of Aeric’s voice. Glancing up, she spotted him standing beside the other chair next to her. When she nodded, he sank into the chair with a sigh.
They stared into the fire in comfortable silence before she began maneuvering the bandage around her hand.
“Do you think you’re ready?” Aeric finally asked.
She knew what he meant.
“I believe that is something you should ask Adan. He is my keeper.”
“I highly doubt anyone could keep you.” Aeric grinned at that. “Though, I want to know what you think. How you feel.”
Blowing out a breath, she forgot about her bandage and looked to him where the flames caressed the sharp lines of his face, painting one side a golden hue while the other remained in the shadows.
“I believe I can do this. I must, for all our sakes. I will do it,” she said with a surety she felt growing more and more with each passing day.
“But?” he questioned, as if knowing she had more to say.
“But if I were to fail and die in the process of our attempt to destroy the Loom, then what becomes of the rest who remain?”
“Apart from being sentenced to certain death?”
Anelize scoffed. “Must you always make light of everything?”
“I believe my humor is what keeps me so likable.”
Silence stretched between them, before Aeric said, “I can’t make any promises, nor do I know of a way to see what lies ahead of us, Anya.
What I will say is that I will do anything in my power to ensure the Loom is destroyed.
The king cannot continue as he has been all these years, and if it were up to me, I’d kill him myself. ”
“Why don’t you?”
The answer came to her faster than she expected. “There is more at play beyond the king. If he were to be killed, the council would take his place. Men who are driven solely by their greed and their prejudice. Their hatred for the Vedrans runs just as deep.”
“And the prince?”
To her surprise, he said with a tone that revealed the closeness she’d sensed between them didn’t remain above the surface.
There was far more between them. A history she had yet to discover.
“The prince is quite possibly the only person I would trust to replace the king. Rule over this wretched kingdom and turn it into some semblance of a place we can all freely call home. But that is much too far away as of this moment.”
She could see it then reflecting through his eyes. Deep and vast as the sea beneath its frozen depths. Longing. The same longing she’d seen in Adan and Enid’s eyes. A place where they could all belong, in peace without the constant fear of hiding from the world.
“So it would seem.”
She felt his attention shift onto her while she resumed her work. She’d been well on her way to chucking the bandages into the fire and forsaking trying to maneuver her hand around it, when he suddenly rose. Moving like silk over skin he knelt before her.
She tensed, watching him with a perplexed look on her face. Then he pointedly said, “No cheap shots this time, yes?”
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m helping you. That is, if you’ll let me,” he said carefully, holding his hand out.
“Do I look that incapable?”
He released a breathless laugh. “Can’t I merely offer to help someone who clearly needs it? Come on, you can’t think me all that bad after all our shared history of escaping death on more than one occasion.”
When she still didn’t hand over the wrinkled scrap of cloth, he shook his head and plucked it out of her hand. The fabric equal parts smooth and rough against the pads of her fingers as it slid out of her grasp.
To her surprise, she didn’t fight him as he inched closer, his focus homing in on her palm.
This close, where he remained on his knees before her, she watched the way his dark brows furrowed at the cuts on her hand.
Forced herself not to move as he took it into his own to hold in place before he began.
For a shallow injury, she didn’t expect to flinch when the fibers of the bandage brushed along the edge of one of her cuts.
The deepest one she’d accidentally done.
Gasping, she pulled her hand away out of instinct. Only to have his hold tighten just a fraction, making him lean in closer as a result.
There was a sudden sound of a log in the fireplace snapping, sending embers flickering in the air within the hearth.
Their eyes met as he glanced up. For a moment, they seemed to hold each other in place, studying each line and curve. Committing the smallest details to memory.
“Sorry,” Aeric murmured as his long fingers slowly, carefully, resumed their work.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. Anelize rolled her lips, aware of how dry they suddenly felt. Hoping the glow within the fireplace wouldn’t reveal the way her cheeks warmed as his eyes flickered to her lips for a brief second.
Eventually, he said, “About what happened to the shop…”
Anelize blew out a breath. “The folk, for all their fears of receiving the wrath of the Watchmen, don’t mind taking their own twisted sense of justice into their hands when they want to.
The shop wasn’t the first place affected by the aftermath of a Vedran being discovered living amongst them.
I doubt there was hardly anything that could have been done if one of us had tried to stop it. ”
“It doesn’t mean you are not within your right to be hurt by it,” he asserted, wrapping her hand one more time. “It doesn’t make it right.”
“Perhaps not.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was as Henry said before, that the folk don’t truly know the difference between their fear and their prejudice.
Their cruelty masked by their own misery.
It is easier to hate, to lose oneself to bitterness, than to accept they are just as much to blame for their docility.
That unwillingness to fight back. Those who do, ultimately suffer the consequences. ”
He stilled as if he could already sense where her thoughts were heading, before she said, “Maybe if I hadn’t run that day. If I had stayed and let the Watchmen take me, then the shop and my aunt—no matter how cruel she had been to us over the years—they would both still be here.”
Maybe then, she would have been with Enid and they’d be miserable and locked away, but they’d be together. As they had always been.
Fingers curled beneath her chin, forcing her to lift her head.
“Look at me.” Aeric’s voice was rough. His words demanding.
His eyes were burning as though the flames he could conjure had been captured within them. Fierce, unyielding, capable of burning anything in their path.
“You are not to blame for the cruelty of this world, Anya. I know not all that you’ve been subjected to in this life before we met, nor will I pretend to understand the pain that you have been forced to endure.
But I know in my twisted, undeserving heart that is true. Nothing more and nothing less.”
A knot formed in her throat, constricting her much like a viper would, wrapping around and around until no air kissed her lungs, filling them full of life.
Listening to his words, feeling the sincerity in them as surely as she felt all her grief and regret—it eased those parts within herself. Enough that she could breathe.
Then she confessed, “I can’t lose more than I already have, Aeric.
I fear—I fear that if I do, if I were to fail in saving my sister, I’m not sure if I could survive beyond that.
Not that. All these years, I thought I needed to protect her, but in truth I am the one who cannot breathe, cannot live without her.
Not truly. And now, I am nothing until I can hold her in my arms again. ”
His hand reached up and he ran his thumb over her cheek, wiping away a tear that she hadn’t felt escape.
“I will do everything in my power to ensure she is safe. Until we can get her and the others out. You have my word.”
She wanted to believe him.
For the first time, she wished for nothing more.