Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
Safi knew she needed to finish packing. She’d gotten the map; she’d handled her Hell-Bard captain; all that was left was to gather her travel clothes for the night’s departure. And eat—she should probably eat.
However, all Safi was actually able to do was to stagger through the lodge toward her bedroom. Tears over Caden had accumulated in her skull. And worse, always worse, the Cahr Awen were being noisy.
Relentlessly noisy, but in an incoherent way that resulted from a hundred souls mashing together with no single language and no real grasp on reality. It was like having a beehive for a skull. They buzzed, they droned, they never wanted to sleep.
Tonight, they were especially rattled. Do something seemed to be their message—but that was as much clarity as Safi could glean from them.
And gods below, her head hurt. All she wanted to do was curl onto her bed with her velvet band across her eyes. Surely the souls would quiet eventually, and maybe, if she was lucky, she could get a few hours of sleep after that.
Unfortunately, Safi didn’t reach her door before Monk Evrane cornered her. So close, Safi thought, gazing at her nearby square of Hell-Bards.
“Excuse me,” Evrane said, holding a satchel the size of two fists. “I have a healer’s kit here that Iseult requested. But she is not in her quarters. Perhaps I can give it to you?”
“Of course,” Safi forced out. Be polite. Don’t cringe. “That’s very helpful of you, Monk Evrane. Thank you.” She tried to move past.
But the monk cut into her path. “I thought perhaps Iseult was injured, but now I suspect you are the one who is actually hurting.” Then she quickly added, “Your Imperial Majesty.”
Evrane was a woman accustomed to titles and royalty, and as such, she hadn’t once tried to cross the barriers of Safi’s crown since joining them. A wall had come up around Safi that only Uncle Eron and Caden seemed comfortable enough to cross. And Iseult, of course.
Although, to be fair, Safi did avoid Evrane as often as she could, giving the woman no opportunities to even pass within her imperial cage. Safi’s brain hurt all the time. She didn’t want Evrane nagging her precisely as she was doing now.
Liar, her magic nudged. You know that is not why you avoid her.
“No pain,” Safi lied, “I am fine.” Her voice didn’t sound convincing—and Evrane clearly didn’t believe her, because for once, the monk pushed against Safi’s cage.
“Are you injured?”
“No, I’m fine.” Her magic scratched at her spine. Lie, lie, lie.
And Monk Evrane nudged once more: “I can ease pain, you know. Or craft you Painstones that will help whatever it is that ails you.”
Painstones. Safi had tried one of those a week ago. It hadn’t helped at all.
“Or,” Evrane continued, advancing a single step closer and dropping her voice, “I can help you fall asleep.”
Ah. Now they had gotten to the crux of the matter.
“It’s the Cahr Awen souls, Monk Evrane. All the souls that are trapped inside me from the broken Threadstones.
They … push.” Safi dug her fingers into the left side of her forehead, as if this motion might somehow explain how it felt. “It hurts and makes sleep difficult.”
“Hmm,” Evrane agreed, as if all of this made sense to her. “I cannot relieve your burden, Your Imperial Majesty, but I can attempt to dull the pain—and I can certainly give you enough relief for sleep. That is … if you will allow me into your quarters?”
Safi swallowed. She didn’t want Evrane in her quarters. She didn’t want Evrane talking to her in this voice accented by Nubrevnan. Most of all, she didn’t want to open her eyes and meet the dark Nihar irises she knew were standing right there. Inescapable.
Safi swallowed a second time. Then, after several seconds of only taut silence to fill the hall, she twisted away from Evrane. “All right,” she said, finally letting her eyes open. “You may come inside.”
Safi didn’t bother to remove her day’s clothes, filthy though her shirt was and even filthier the gray breeches.
Even her boots she kept on. The flames in her hearth rolled heat through the room and flickered orange light over a tall, many-paned window with a desk beneath it and a wide canopied bed several paces away—a bed onto which Safi now flung herself.
“Do what you will,” she said with a flip of her hand toward the monk who’d followed her. Then Safi closed her eyes and waited. She couldn’t look at Evrane closely. She couldn’t.
Evrane didn’t move for several seconds, and Safi could easily imagine the indecision the monk must feel.
She adhered so strongly to formality. To ritual and station, to bows and titles and of course, the holy adulation she afforded both Safi and Iseult.
All her life Evrane had dreamed of finding and supporting the Cahr Awen, now here was the chosen pair.
Now, here were all the Wells being healed one by one.
But in the end, Safi was still just a girl with a headache who hadn’t slept in so very, very long. And in the end, Evrane was a healer witch.
Safi heard when Evrane moved: a slight clinking of belt buckles and blades, a soft swish of her white Carawen cloak as if she pulled it back from her shoulders. Safi felt the weight of the monk easing onto the mattress beside her.
“It is your head that hurts? Anywhere else?”
“No. Just the head. And … well, the neck in turn.” Safi was careful to keep her eyes clenched shut. Evrane was very near. Nearer than she had been in the hall. Nearer than she had been since returning to Safi’s company a month ago.
Almost as near as her nephew had been during their brief encounter inside a mountain.
“I cannot draw out the souls that cause the pressure,” Evrane explained, lowering her voice to a gentle intimacy.
“I will do what I can to dampen the pain by reducing the swelling in your brain—only by a small amount, of course. But it should help relieve the pressure. And then I will send a sleeping wave through your body. Will that be all right, Your Imperial Majesty?”
Again, Safi nodded. It was all she wanted; it would make her days so much more bearable. It would make the pain and the pressure more bearable too, since they were not a burden that anything could relieve other than healing the final Well.
Which I am about to do, she reminded herself—and reminded the souls in turn. In a few hours, I am going to do what you want.
But that didn’t appease them. It never appeased them. They were bees trapped in a barrel, and now they simply buzzed worse than before.
“I will touch your head,” Evrane said. “But my hands are cold. I am sorry.”
“Cold is good,” Safi murmured, and it was true. Sometimes, when the weight of her blindfold wasn’t enough, she would tuck cold stones beneath her velvet wrap so they pressed against her eyes.
Evrane’s hands laid upon her, and ah. There was the wave, like a sweet tide on the Jadansi. For several minutes, as pain dripped and dropped out of her skull, Safi felt as if she were back in Venaza City. Back beside the sea forever lapping against the wharf where Mathew’s coffee shop lived.
It made her throat choke up. Made her entire rib cage ache. How long had she and Iseult been gone? Could she even measure how much their lives had changed? They would never get a place of their own now. They would never get to escape and simply be.
Despite Safi’s best efforts, she was less free now than she’d ever been.
She had a crown upon her head—and it weighed almost as heavy as these souls trapped inside her.
Meanwhile Iseult had a power so vast, she was stuck forever on a knife’s edge, afraid that if she moved, the knife would cut and kill all she loved.
At some point, Safi wasn’t sure when, tears started to slide down her cheeks. And although she knew where the tears would lead her … although she knew she would have to wipe her cheeks eventually …
Safi opened her eyes and looked at Evrane. The monk’s hands were on Safi’s brow—no longer cold—and the fire behind the monk lit her hair into a silvery halo.
“He’s not dead,” Safi said in Nubrevnan, and there it was. The words Safi was afraid to say. “He’s not dead, and I saw him.”
For several seconds, Evrane did not move. Her gaze was fastened on Safi, her pupils large and unfocused while her magic still floated through Safi. Then Evrane’s eyelids shuttered halfway. She breathed, “Oh.”
Her hands withdrew. The caress of her magic did not. “How do you know?”
“I saw him inside a mountain,” Safi said simply.
“It was filled with ice and winds and shadow, and although he was scarred and … and…” She motioned to the right side of her face, to where burns had changed the prince into someone almost unrecognizable.
“I knew him in an instant.” I knew his eyes, so very much like yours.
“He isn’t dead,” Safi repeated, more forcefully this time.
“Merik still lives.” She pushed upright, a wobbly movement that sent Evrane grabbing for her and shoving pillows behind her back.
But Safi didn’t need pillows. She felt better than she’d felt in days.
Perhaps, she thought vaguely, because this was a pressure that needed releasing too.
“I don’t know where he is now, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.
I don’t really understand what I saw or how Merik came to be there.
For a time, I thought maybe I’d dreamed the entire thing.
Except, I know…” She pressed at her stomach.
Then her chest. “I just know in the very core of my magic that it wasn’t a dream.
Merik’s alive, somehow, and he’s out there.
” She waved ineffectually toward the window, as if Merik were merely on the ramparts.
As if he might turn up at any moment, scarred but still himself.
Evrane nodded slowly, a thoughtful triangle forming between her brows.
It was clear she didn’t understand what Safi was saying—and how could she when Safi didn’t understand it herself?
But it was also clear she was overjoyed to learn her nephew lived.
Safi didn’t need to be a Threadwitch to spot this.
“Thank you for telling me, Your Imperial Majesty.” A pause. A swallow. “I will … will send word to all my contacts so they may search for him.”
Safi exhaled a soft Hye. Then she added: “And I have already asked all the spies in Henrick’s … or rather, in my vast network to search for him too. Hopefully we can find him. Hopefully you can see him again.”
Evrane didn’t answer. Her thoughts currently lived in another place, her fingers splayed across her lap like sea stars in a tidal pool. She looked older than she was. And tired. Neither monk nor healer witch, but simply a woman who’d lost too much.
Then, as if watching the tide rise up—as if watching the sea stars climb back into the waters they knew best—Evrane’s demeanor changed.
“Sometimes I marvel at how selfish grief can be. Are we sad for those we lost? Or are we sad for what we did not remember to do?” She fastened her dark Nihar eyes onto Safi, and with the same gentleness from before, she eased Safi onto the pillows.
Then she laid her hands on Safi’s forehead, and the soothing, salty tides swept into Safi anew.
“I know you hate your uncle, Safiya, and I suspect that in many ways, Merik feels the same way toward me—and likely Aeduan feels it too, for I raised him with as much harsh care as I gave Merik. But in the end, nothing can change that we do the best we can with the tools we have. Sometimes we use our tools wisely. Sometimes…” Evrane shook her head. “Sometimes our best is not enough.”
The tides swept in more strongly, but they were not drowning waters. Nor rough and stormy. They were gentle currents meant to carry Safi’s floating body out to sea, where healing and sleep awaited.
“I hope that I see Merik again one day, if only so I may tell him that he has turned out far wiser and far fiercer than I could have ever dreamed he would be. Now sleep, Safiya, and dream of peace in your mind, peace in your body.”
Safi sighed. Her muscles softened. And there it was: the true sleep that had eluded her for days.
The last thing Safi heard before she sank under was: “Thank you, Light-Bringer, for this gift you have given me tonight. It was the reminder I needed that the path I am on is true.”