19. Drum Beats and Lightning Strikes Are Quite Handy #4
“I had a vision earlier,” Sapphira says as she scrubs a pot, her hands pruned and soapy. “Well, I think it was.” She tells Isabel what she saw and watches the questions that play across her face. “I think it came from the sword. Memories of its previous battles.”
“And you think it was Askerh?lla?”
She shrugs, wiping sweat from her brow with her sleeve, hands dripping. “He mentioned Svikari. His brother. And it was his sword. Domhen said so.”
“Do you think he, or the sword, was trying to tell you something?”
Sapphira sighs. That’s the same question she’s been asking herself since it happened.
“I don’t know. But maybe it will continue to reveal itself to me.
If there’s a message, I might know soon enough.
” She doesn’t want to believe that the ?res?s elder was right, but she can’t think of any other explanation for what she saw.
Something is happening. She just doesn’t know what.
Isabel props her head in her palm, leaning over the counter in her chair.
Then she leans back. “I think I’m ready,” she says.
“You asked me why I never left Cielo, and I had excuses. Ones that I’ve been telling myself my whole life.
But I think I’m ready to start living for myself now.
I’m not scared anymore. I’m going to follow my passions wherever they take me, even if it’s out of Cielo.
Even if it’s not what my mother would have wanted. ”
Sapphira wipes her hands and turns to Isabel, a smile on her lips. “I’m proud of you, bookworm.” Isabel blushes. “And if that was your way of asking me if I’d come with you,” she sighs, acting put out by the thought. “Then I guess I will.”
Isabel laughs, gets up from the counter, and takes Sapphira’s hands. She looks toward Kaelen and Dorian, who are fast asleep, and whispers, “Come with me.” Then she leads Sapphira to the lake.
Blue lights glow across the surface, the stars poking holes in the water. The night is warm, and bugs chirp from the forest.
Isabel peels off her dress, slowly. Dry-mouthed and unable to look away, Sapphira joins her, hopping out of her scabbard and tunic.
She wades into the water up to her chest, and her gaze trails, starstruck, across Isabel’s smooth brown skin and up into those shining eyes.
The night is heavy on her shoulders as tension mounts between them.
“You’re beautiful,” Sapphira whispers, brushing a hand over Isabel’s horn and watching her shiver.
“I know that is inadequate, dead words. But there are no words to explain to you how I feel. If our hearts had not been open, both at the same time, I may have never met you. But I have, and I never want to part from you.”
Sapphira holds her breath as Isabel wades closer, her head tilted back to look up into Sapphira’s eyes. Their warm breaths mingle in the mist that hovers around them in the air.
The stars bunch behind Isabel’s head, but she is the one shining brightest of all. In only a few hours, Sapphira has gone from thinking she would lose Isabel to knowing she is immortal. Because Isabel will live in her forever.
Tears shine in Isabel’s eyes as their fingers thread together, meeting like pieces of a puzzle.
Her eyes never leave Sapphira as she says, “I have never been so bewitched by another. There is magic in the threads you have woven around my heart. Magic I am too weak to break. Your love is a wound I can never heal, Sapphira. And that is terrifying because I know that even if you were to ever leave me, I wouldn’t want to heal. I never want to lose this feeling.”
“Then don’t .”
Isabel is so close now that no light can part them. Her body molds to Sapphira’s. “I never imagined the stars would bring me you,” she whispers, her words dissolving against Sapphira’s lips.
Sapphira groans, pushing back, her hand twining in soft curls as she tugs.
When she pries her lips from Isabel’s, Sapphira gasps, “If either of us is to be broken, it will be me. Because there is nothing in this life that will ever eclipse you.” Pulling away, she lifts Isabel’s hand and places a soft kiss on the sensitive skin of her wrist. “I am not sure how many pieces I have left to break, but I will break every one of them for you.”
Sapphira is leaning up for another kiss when a light shines brilliantly across the water, swallowing the blue-black dark. The light streams from Isabel’s satchel, which lies forgotten on the shore. Sapphira’s eyes peer over Isabel, her head tilting in confusion as the woman slips from her arms.
“Hey, where are you going?” Sapphira asks, hopping through the water to hurry after her.
Isabel walks out of the lake, crouches beside her bag, and pulls out a bundle of banana leaves—the same ones she’d been checking on the mountain.
Isabel doesn’t answer, quiet as she reverently unwraps it.
She pulls out the dead star from the leaves.
Light like the sun spills brightly from it, leaking out of the glassy orb.
There are cracks all around it, and they grow with each thunderous clap as the star begins to split open like a hatching egg and darkness fills the starry night.
Isabel and Sapphira gasp in unison as a small, sleeping face glances up at them from a flower petal, small eyes opening slowly.
“What . . . is that?” Sapphira asks.
“It’s a faerie.”
Sapphira hears in a small, high voice like sweet nectar. “Here are your three wishes. Your token for catching me.”
Sapphira shares a look with Isabel. “Wishes?” she asks.
On a cushion in front of the faerie, three small eggs the size of seeds lay. They glow: one green, one red, and one yellow.
“Green to find, red to know, and yellow to keep,” the sweet voice says.
“Thank you,” Isabel replies breathily, shaking as she plucks the seeds from the flower. Sapphira has never seen her this excited. She’s near to bursting.
Isabel pulls a small velvet pouch from her satchel and dumps the regular seeds that were in it onto the ground.
Then she places the wishes in the pouch.
She brushes a finger across the faerie’s cheek, and the faerie only smiles at her before flying off.
Isabel watches until she disappears into the night, then places the pouch into her satchel.
A strange feeling twists Sapphira’s stomach. It’s the same one she got when she fell into the earth on her way to Sule?hare?n so many months ago.
The feeling that something is soon to change.