Chapter 28 #2
His shame is heavy like iron, but as viscous as the mud of a bog and the same shade of brown. It soothes the rankles of my irritation, a bitter reminder of everything Niko still shoulders.
I set the bottle down on the table. “Now…are you going to tell me what the hell happened, or should I begin the world’s most depressing guessing game?”
Niko considers this for far too long, before sniffing haughtily and leaning back into the couch. “You said you were going to brood too. So you first.”
I roll my eyes.
Niko waves his hand with a flourish. “Allow me a moment to ruminate in someone else’s misfortune please, Samuel.” And then, “If you’d do me the kindness.”
I let out a disbelieving laugh. “Whatever pleases His Most Royal Pain in the Ass.”
Niko scowls. “You’ve spent too much time with Willa. I’m sure she’s had the title etched on a placard somewhere.”
“If the title fits.”
He tilts his head in frank assessment, before letting out a beleaguered sigh. “This guessing game is rather one sided,” he pouts, winding a ribbon that’s slithered drunkenly to the floor back around his wrist. “As the sole cause of your misery has been the same for the last two centuries.”
I grin. “Well then, let’s move on to yours, shall we?”
Niko purses his lips and drags a hand through his hair. Silence stretches between us, and I simply sit in the cradle of it until he gives in, as he always does.
“Did you know I tried to warn her?” he asks finally, his voice quiet. “I tried to send her away from the island, even though it meant the death of Letum and the mainland.”
I didn’t know, but if Niko means to shock me, he fails. He loves with an intensity I’ve never witnessed in anyone else. It led me to follow him in his wildest of schemes, because I’ve watched the way he holds on to anything he deems as his.
“I warned her…what being their savior would cost.” He shakes his head with a rueful grimace, tugging thoughtlessly at another ribbon. “But I hadn’t known the true price. I was reckless and desperate and arrogant, and now, there is no fixing it. There is no reversing it.”
He drops his head into his tattooed hands once more, grinding his palms roughly into his eyes.
“I should have fucking known better than to try to hold onto something beautiful when I’ve been fated to watch everything decay. My world, my body…and now Willa.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, my confusion palpable. “Willa isn’t decaying…she can’t die.”
I stare at his crumpled form, his defeat bitter on my tongue. In the three hundred years we’ve known each other, I’ve never tasted its like from Niko. When everyone else lost hope, the Carrion King has always been driven by something different: ruthless determination.
It was something not even the Aeternalis had ever been able to take from him, a steady flame that held strong against the currents of the universe. But it is extinguished now by his sorrow. Not for himself—but for our queen.
Our queen who has been plagued by her own shadow, strangled slowly by it each day as it feeds on her fear and shame.
“Do you mean—are you talking about her shadow?”
Niko nods miserably into the cradle of his hands.
“I thought it odd…it felt…” I search for the right word. “…I don’t know. Almost like a hole?”
He huffs a breath. “It is of the island, just like the Everlasting’s. We thought it a merry little magic trick as children, but it was a manifestation of Somnya. A way to draw him closer, to siphon his magic. Just as he did to so many others.”
Niko’s ribbons flare around him at the mention of the Aeternalis.
My eyes widen. “And magic…magic is borne of the heart.”
Events of the past begin to reorder themselves in my memories—how the Aeternalis never seemed satiated, always seeking more pain, more suffering. Always seeking more.
Niko nods. “Peter created something he could never sustain. Not by himself. It is why he needed the dreams of the children. Why he needed their inherent magic. And even then, it was not enough.”
All of Niko’s actions since his return suddenly become crystal clear.
“And now, the island is siphoning from Willa’s magic.
That’s why you’ve been trying to steal the island back from her.
” I shake my head, setting him with a hot glare.
“Damn it, Niko…that’s why you slit her throat?
To see if you could draw her close enough to death to break her connection to the island? ”
Niko works his jaw, but he doesn’t deny the accusation.
An impatient sigh whistles through my nose as I pinch the bridge between my thumb and forefinger.
“Is there a reason you chose to attack the woman you love, rather than just telling her the truth and asking for the island back?” I shoot him a warning look.
“And I swear to the star above, if it was only because of your penchant for dramatics, I will shoot you myself.”
Niko’s ribbons don’t even bother to rise to the threat.
“The shadow does not like being spoken of. Every time I have tried to warn her, it threatens her. It slithers around her throat and squeezes. It dives beneath her skin and explodes from her eyes. I didn’t…
” His words drift off as he rubs his temples gingerly.
“I didn’t want to risk hurting her any more than I already have. ”
He pulls his death from the air to wrap around his waist, and as a fresh wave of pain washes between us, I wonder if he’s punishing himself with it.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he says hoarsely. “I’ve failed. There’s no way to take the island back from her. And now I’m cursed to bear witness as every sacred thing in her turns to dust.”
He grabs at the rum, but I shimmy it out of his reach.
“You gave up the island. It stands to reason she can too.”
Niko waves me off irritably. “Its hooks are embedded too deeply, Sam. My connection to the island was surface level. There was nothing to siphon from death. But Willa…” He swallows audibly. “Willa is so full.”
Despair fills the air—pale blue, like the ice of a glacier. This time, I don’t reach for my magic to assuage it. I simply tell my best friend the truth.
“With respect, sir…My captain does not give up when the seas are rough.” His black eyes snap to mine. “He does not give up when things are messy, nor when they’re painful. He leads us fearlessly through the eye of the storm to calm seas.”
“Sam—”
He falls silent at the shake of my head. “It’s okay to take a breath, but a breath is all you get. Do you understand me?”
Niko watches me sullenly. “I’ve given all the breaths I have, and it’s never once been enough.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. You and Willa have both been giving things up your entire existence. Pieces here and pieces there, constantly tithing to a universe that takes everything and gives nothing back. How are you ever going to be at your full strength when you’re always half a person?”
He goes so still, I swear, he’s stopped breathing.
“When are you full, Niko? When are you at your strongest?”
A long moment passes between us, before he straightens, his gaze suddenly far sharper.
“With her.” The reply is so soft, it is hardly words.
But they don’t need to be as we both know them in the way we know each other.
Niko’s heart is more familiar to me than my own. Cruel, jagged, loyal, beautiful.
His voice is agonized. “Only ever with her.”
“Maybe that’s what you need to start with.”
He scoffs, swiping the bottle deftly from the table. “I’m pretty sure seducing her and then orchestrating her attempted murder thoroughly destroyed any chance of that.”
“You seduced her first? Have you any sense at all?!” I blurt out, before shaking my head and raising my hands in exasperation. “You know what, nevermind. I don’t think I want to know.”
“Even if I hadn’t, I would have ruined it somehow.” He stares down at the rum without taking another swig. “I am death, Sam…and death is the eventual ruin of everything worth having. It is always an end. Never a beginning.”
I rise to my feet. “You may not have a shadow of the island’s making, but you are being strangled by shame just the same. Life is only sweet because of death. That isn’t ruin. That is the beauty of existence itself. It’s time you remember that.”
He watches me with a wary gaze, his body tense like he’s waiting for the moment I take the words back. And it breaks my heart a little in the same way Niko always has. After all these years of him being a true friend to me, he still doesn’t believe he’d be worthy of the same.
“A breath,” I remind him.
He dips his head in understanding. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“The plague has been over for a year, Sammie. And yet, you hesitate. Why is that?”
Now, it is my turn to avoid his gaze, as his question teases my own emotions to the surface. A multitude of colors washed together, too many tastes and textures to discern any of them. More than three hundred years alive, and my own heart remains as foreign to me as a stranger’s.
It has always been easier to name another’s—to feel the things I have no claim to. Easier to dissect their pain, their hopes, their love, than pay any mind to my own.
“You make Willa as full as she makes you,” I finally answer, “whereas I have only ever worsened Adira.”
Niko’s eyes widen in fury. “Sam—”
I shake my head, gathering up Niko’s anger and his pain and his love and shoving them into the hole in my heart. He may be a masochist as Adira claimed, but he is far braver than me. He is inundated in his pain every day, while I spend my time hiding from mine within the shroud of others’ agony.
I shoot him a light smile. “The queen will be waiting for me. You should come to the revel.”
“I won’t ruin Willa’s moment with my presence. But…” Niko licks his lips, like he’s gathering his thoughts. “I will take a breath, Sam. Only a breath.”