Chapter Thirty
“I must wash before the feast,” Aemyra said to her father the moment she stepped off the altar.
“You have done well,” Draevan said, eyes gleaming in the light of the fires.
Trying not to appear too desperate to leave, she picked up the skirts of the ritual gown and made for the trees.
Her people wouldn’t notice her slipping away; they were likely unable to see straight with the copious amounts of wine they were drinking.
Thank the Goddess Dildain’s stores had been plentiful.
Aemyra hastened through the light of the torches, jewels clinking, when Riya hailed her.
The phoenix warrior was wearing her ruby amulet, the large stone reminding Aemyra of the garnet in her dagger and the jewels of Greer’s headdress.
Perhaps it was Brigid’s influence that made the women of Tìr Teine partial to red gems.
Ducking behind a bonfire with a dismissive wave, Aemyra managed to avoid Riya. She had to get to Fiorean, had to set eyes on him before something ripped him away again.
Adarian intercepted her. “Who lit the torches?” he asked, the only person in a mile radius who looked concerned.
“Shh,” Aemyra hissed. “Not now.”
Adarian looked ready to protest and she hurriedly garbled, “I will explain everything, but don’t let anyone follow me.”
As though weighing up the sense in letting Aemyra keep yet another secret from him, Adarian glanced to where Laoise and Katherine were exchanging stilted conversation.
“If you are not back in an hour I’m coming after you,” he said, his voice hard.
“Thank you,” she gasped.
Giving her twin a quick peck on the cheek, Aemyra raced off into the trees. Not caring about how much noise she was making, she made for the river.
Shivering in the thin dress, her breaths were shallow as she squinted through the darkness for her husband. The tree boughs dampened the sound of the revels and Aemyra felt as though she had slipped into another world entirely.
A fact she realized only when the blade of a knife was at her neck.
“So, when were you going to tell me you lost your magic?”
The arms she had dreamed of for months slipped around her waist, holding her solidly once again.
She stilled in Fiorean’s hold. She would have known the planes of his body anywhere. His chin rested on the top of her head as he held her in place with the edge of the knife.
Moonlight was rippling across the shadowy river and Aemyra felt her heart stutter.
Fiorean stepped slowly around her, blade held against the tender skin of her throat. His auburn hair cascaded down a tall frame, his skin bleached bone white by the moon as though he had come to haunt her.
The sight of him stole what little breath she had away. Even in shadows, his emerald eyes were piercing, with bruising circles underneath.
“Is this real?” she whispered.
Fiorean smirked and Aemyra felt the wall around her heart crack.
“I leave you alone for a few months and you go as mad as my late brother,” he said.
Fighting with her own senses, Aemyra saw the way his boots sank into the soft earth, the way his unbound hair fluttered in the summer breeze.
“How are you alive?” she asked.
Fiorean took a step closer, the knife still extended. “I believe it’s my turn to ask questions.”
“I don’t blame you if you hate me for what I have done, from what your dragon has allowed me to see, I deserve it,” she said.
Fiorean raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t even put up a fight? That’s not the woman I know.”
“I’ve changed,” she replied, holding his stare.
Stepping back, Fiorean wreathed both of his arms in columns of flame, the light illuminating the riverbank with the strength of his power.
She felt it then, his magic calling to her.
He was the only other fire Dùileach with a gift to match hers, and Aemyra had always felt drawn to it. To him.
But even as she recognized his magic, hers remained smothered by fear.
“You didn’t shield on the riverbank, and you didn’t light the torches during the ritual,” Fiorean said, sounding concerned instead of condescending. “What happened?”
“You did,” she shot back. “You made me think you had betrayed me, you let me believe the worst of you and then goaded me until I shot an arrow into your back. You let me think you were dead by my hand.”
“If I’m being completely honest, I was shocked the arrow hit me at all,” Fiorean said.
Aemyra punched him for the jibe.
She might have been exhausted, but Draevan had taught her well. She was in possession of a spectacular right hook.
Despite the force behind her swing, Fiorean’s head barely moved, his jaw flexing.
“You think I’m not angry at you too, Aemyra?” he asked, voice dropping dangerously low. “I am furious.”
She swung for him again and missed, leaving herself open for Fiorean to grab her wrist. Anger simmering through her blood, Aemyra felt as though she was waking from a long slumber.
Landing a swift kick to his shin, she feinted left and struck twice more on his shoulder, aiming for his wounded back. Fiorean twisted away from her reach, his auburn hair flying as he ducked and dodged.
“You were chosen by Brigid herself,” Fiorean said as Aemyra put more effort behind her swings. “Act like it.”
He caught her with a strike to the shoulder and she sucked in a breath.
Quicker than she would have thought possible, Fiorean lunged. She had forgotten how well he could control every movement; he managed to wrap his arms around her body and pin her arms.
Fiorean was glowering down like he wanted to take a bite out of her.
“You can rage at me all you want, but at least you are alive to do it,” he said, his lips a hairbreadth away from her own.
The heat from both his body and his magic wrapped around Aemyra and she felt the air around them shiver. Her emotions were so contradictory they were almost impossible to bear.
Athair Alfred’s manipulations had ruined so many lives, caused so much death. When the promise mark burned, she hissed.
“I am afraid,” she seethed. “And I am so infinitely angry that I am afraid. This fear is exhausting me faster than this war and it will not go away. It lingers in my mind, polluting my thoughts and my magic, twisting itself with suffocating accuracy through my flames until it snuffs me out.”
Every trace of the confidence she had summoned to condemn Laird Maryk was gone. Like she had constructed the facade from spider silk and now it was unraveling.
“Everything hurts, all the time.”
Fiorean reached for her. “You have done brilliantly, Aemyra. Those words I said to you in the throne room were only ever meant to get you to leave, to buy us time.” His fingers traced lightly down her bare arms, over the streaks of blood.
“I didn’t believe them for one minute, and neither should you.
I tried to harness the Bond between Aervor and Terrea in those first months we were apart to explain everything, but as we have already established, communicating with my beathach doesn’t come naturally to me. ”
Suddenly, everything that had happened since the last time they had properly spoken threatened to overwhelm her.
Fiorean’s emerald eyes skimmed her body, the ritual dress leaving nothing to the imagination. She made no move to cover herself; there wasn’t an inch of her that Fiorean hadn’t already claimed as his own.
His eyes landed on the dagger sheathed on her golden belt, the garnet gleaming darkly.
“You know, when someone gives you a gift it is generally considered rude to break it apart and forge it into something else,” Fiorean muttered. “That gem belonged to my great-grandfather…”
Aemyra wanted nothing more than to remain in his arms, but how could he forgive her for believing the worst of him? How could she forgive him for concocting a plan out of sheer desperation and thinking he knew better than his queen?
“What is it?” he asked.
How could she begin to explain in a way he would understand? Without Aervor showing her Fiorean’s memories, she might never have believed he was truly on her side.
“It’s all right,” he whispered.
It was then that she knew Terrea had been sending visions to Aervor too. At once it felt like a violation of privacy, and a kindness.
“Bloody interfering dragons,” Aemyra hissed, choking on the tears burning the back of her nose.
Fiorean gave a sad smile. “Don’t blame them. They’re far smarter than we are.”
A nudge came through the Bond. Aervor had kept Fiorean’s survival a secret, so Terrea had sent Aemyra’s memories to him, lest the male dragon try to kill her Dùileach in revenge.
“This is all so fucked,” Aemyra said, wiping her nose on the back of her hand.
“Yes. Your father killed my brother, and my dragon killed your family,” Fiorean said, searching her face.
Aemyra looked up at him, hardly daring to hope that anything salvageable could come from this. “How can we ever forgive each other?”
Fiorean’s cold mask disappeared; in the moonlight he looked more God than man. The arrogance of the prince who had sat sprawled across her throne was nowhere to be found.
“Oh, Aemyra. I would have forgiven you even if I had found myself in the Otherworld after you shot that arrow,” Fiorean said gently.
Then, as if they had been parted for years instead of months, he kissed her.
For the first time in weeks, her thoughts stilled.
There was no anxiety, no rage, no grief, just blissful emptiness.
It was like mind-stilling with Riya, only better.
The only thing she was aware of was the smell of orange blossom and the heat of his chest against her breasts.
His tongue laved eagerly into her mouth as though he was a dying fire and she was the air that fueled him.
His teeth dragged across her bottom lip and the sensation liquified her spine.
How was it possible she had lived for months without this?