Chapter Twenty-Two Fia
Chapter Twenty-Two
Fia
The wine tasted strange on my tongue—like bitter mallow or soured wort. I had a feeling food would be similar. I was reasonably certain I never wanted to sleep again.
But I would commit gross acts of treason for a bath.
So I gathered the folds of Irian’s overlarge mantle around my frame and stood from the table, feeling the eyes of the group follow me.
I knew they had questions. So did I. But I could read Irian’s careful stoicism better than any book.
I had seen the way his hand had lifted toward me, then dropped away.
I had heard the hurt hollowing his rough burr.
Irian was in pain. And not just because I’d charred the flesh from his hands.
But as I followed him toward what I assumed were our chambers, I could not summon my own emotions.
I, too, should be feeling something. Triumph or horror or heartbreak.
But all I felt was a strange tranquility.
After everything I had experienced in the Deep-Dream, it was a relief to feel numb. Distanced.
Talah had left my body. For now, that was all that mattered.
We entered the same room in which I’d awoken an hour before.
Just an hour? It felt like a lifetime. The walls, bed, and ceilings were all carved from the same black rock as the rest of the caverns, pricked through with gemstones and veins of metal.
I dallied in the center of the room while Irian ran a bath, skimming my eyes over the unfamiliar surroundings.
My gaze snagged on deep scratches cut into the stones; shredded tapestries; a shelf that had been crushed, then hastily mended. Something twinged in my stomach.
“Who did this?” I pitched my tone lightly over the sound of running water. “You haven’t been letting Linn into our chambers, have you?”
“You did.” Irian did not laugh. “During your transformations.”
My eyebrow crept up my forehead. “Transformations?”
“Did you truly have no awareness of the outside world?”
I slowly shook my head. “What did I become?”
Irian seemed at a loss for words.
“Everything,” he said at last. “A swan. A deer. A wolf. A serpent. By day, you seemed to sleep. By night, you took on the shapes of a hundred animals. Scratching, howling, pecking, screeching. And in the hour before dawn—”
He trailed off.
“Tell me,” I prompted, impatience chafing at my pleasant calm.
Irian would not meet my gaze. “Talah peered from your eyes and experimented with your body’s… pleasures. Or tried to.”
“Truly?” A tendril of sharp, searing horror threatened to pierce my calm.
I stared at the deep, broad scratches marring the stone, then gazed at the rumpled sheets of the broad bed.
Within the Deep-Dream, ínne had defended my most profound self from Talah’s inward advance.
But I suddenly recoiled from the thought of what a heavy burden Irian must have carried in protecting my physical self from her outward attacks.
“And you? What did you do, while I transformed?”
“I held you,” Irian said, simply. “As I promised I would.”
His last words to me on the Longest Night settled, delicate as snowflakes, on my tongue.
Not in a thousand lifetimes will I ever let you go.
Affection rose in me, hot and fierce—the first complete emotion I’d felt since waking up.
I longed to throw myself at him—to crush my arms around his neck and crash my lips to his and remind myself what it meant to have a body.
Instead, I wrapped my arms tighter around my chest and willed myself to stop glowing.
“Irian,” I chided with a laugh. “Of all the things to take literally!”
“Did you mean it some other way?” His eyes were grave. “What does it mean to you to never let a person go? Should I have set you down when my arms began to tremble? Should I have dropped you when my back began to ache? I took you at your word. And I held myself to mine.”
Another deep pulse of tenderness surprised me. I did not have to look at myself to see I was glowing a little brighter. “I cannot fault you for that, mo chroí. But I did not intend for you to single-handedly carry me to the ends of the earth.”
“I did accept help when it was offered.” The smallest smile touched his plush mouth. “Eventually.”
For a long moment, we both looked at each other.
Then he surged toward me—not with the heedless intensity of before, but with anguished precision.
As if he had tallied every inch of distance between us and found each one intolerable.
As if he were a lodestone drawn inexorably to me, his guiding star.
Irian gazed down at me from a hand’s breadth away, energy searing the space between us.
“Oh, Fia. This is too cruel.” My light flared, fracturing his perfect face into shards of brightness and shadow.
“This is worse than absence. This is presence turned to suffering. For months I have waited—I have wanted—” The words choked him.
He lifted a fist to his mouth, as if to steady himself.
“So many times over the past months, I believed you returned to me, only to have the press of your skin be a taunt, the brush of your hands a mockery. Yet now that you are indeed returned, I am denied even that.”
“Is that all I am to you?” The words emerged without the lightness I had meant for them. “A body to be held?”
My words conjured some horrified mordancy onto his features and, strangely, seemed to calm him.
“No. It is but a perverse irony that all the nights I held myself back from you were bitter practice for now, when I truly cannot touch you.” He lifted his still-healing palms toward my cheeks, cupping the air around my shining face.
“Have we two not sacrificed enough? Death and pain and twisted magic and separation? When do you and I earn a moment of peace, mo chroí? I would trade a thousand years of torment for one day with you. But I do not know what we have done to deserve this fate.”
I gazed up at him, his desolation marring the veneer of eerie calm I’d carried with me from the nemeton. This was cruel. He was right to rage—right to seethe and storm over the injustices etched into our stars. But I could not join him in it.
I knew that if I started, I would not be able to stop.
Abruptly, Irian turned away, spinning the taps on the bath until water no longer gushed. Steam wafted temptingly from the tub. He scraped hair back from his face, visibly mastering himself. He forced lightness into his demeanor as he gestured toward the rows of vials and unguents.
“There is soap. I believe this one is shampoo? Whatever it is, it is heavily perfumed. And—”
“Irian,” I said gently. “I know how to take a bath.”
I stepped toward the large tub, dropping his cloak to the floor before sliding my thumbs under the straps of someone’s borrowed shift. Laoise, most likely. Irian turned on his heel, angling his head away from me.
“Really?” It was easier to tease him than it was to rage with him against our fate.
I smiled up at him as I slid languorously into the warm water.
“You have seen me without a scrap of clothing before, and in far more compromising positions. One might think you human with all this overwhelming modesty.”
“Just being considerate of your tender sensibilities,” he growled.
“Whatever my sensibilities are, I doubt them tender.” I loved him for making this easy on me. “More like well seasoned, to handle the likes of you.”
I leaned back and ducked my head under the water.
When I surfaced, water sluicing from the crown of my head, Irian had moved to the floor.
Propped against the tub, he dangled one arm over the side, trailing nearly healed fingertips in the warm water.
He watched me as I wiped water from my eyes and smoothed wet hair down my back, his eyes golden and blue as an afternoon sky.
“How I have missed you, mo chroí.”
I believed him. Oh, how I believed him—his longing for me blurred the air between us with heat. I could not fathom what he must have experienced these past months, could only imagine all he had done to keep me—and possibly everyone else—alive. But I knew this. Knew us.
“And I you,” I whispered.
“Where were you that you could miss me?”
“Says the man who’s been hauling my unconscious body around for months.”
The brief flash of his smile was like a diamond—something I wished to polish until it shone, then cherish forever. “In truth, colleen, I would like to know where you went. For it is something that has troubled me greatly.”
“I—” Beneath the water, our hands lingered mere inches apart.
Too close. Yet immeasurably far. I wished I could touch him.
Instead, I laid my cheek on the cool edge of the tub.
Irian mirrored me, until we both leaned against the stone, faces inches apart, eyes locked.
“The Bright One called it the Deep-Dream. But it mostly seemed like the inside of my own mind. My thoughts, my memories. That was where I hid from Talah, for a while.”
“Hid?” Irian’s plush mouth formed the word like a curse.
“She was… hunting me. I think she had to catch me, consume me, before inhabiting my body.” Remembered fear reared inside me.
“So I hid. In my memories. Good ones, at first, then banal ones. But eventually I realized it took her longer to find me in memories I was too young to recall, memories so harsh I’d repressed them.
Still she came. Until at last I had to confront parts of myself even more consequential and terrifying than my worst memories. ”
Irian’s eyes flicked between mine, searching. “Do you wish to tell me?”
Somehow it seemed almost sacrilegious to speak of all I’d seen, all I’d learned. “Perhaps someday. But I have spent too long inside. Will you not tell me of outside?”