Chapter 47
Chapter forty-seven
Iraise the hood of my cloak, burrowing into the thick fabric despite the heat of the day. Even the smallest slices of sunlight penetrating through the shade of the Grove canopy are unbearable against my still-healing wounds, though I’ve found most things to be unbearable now.
The sun. The silk of my shirts. The wide gazes of the children, and the whispers that follow me any time I’m brave enough to leave Adira’s treehouse.
I’ve always thought whispers to be airy things, but they are not.
They carry a distinct weight, one that settles over a person, heavy enough to change their shape.
I’ve spent more time than I care to admit wondering how Niko has been able to stand it all these years.
Pulling the hood further over my face, I begin down the Nyawa. A perilous journey on the best of days, made far worse by the way each step pulls my ruined skin. I’ve only made it three steps when Adira’s scolding voice sounds from the porch above.
“And just where do you think you’re going?”
For a moment, I consider diving off the side of the tree, certain it’d be less painful than enduring this conversation.
When I turn to look up to the princess, I decide the fall would definitely be the safer choice.
Addy’s eyes are narrowed in hard challenge, her inky black hair whipping around her though I feel no wind.
And while she has left her spear inside the house, and is dressed casually in her usual draping silks, she somehow appears ready for battle.
I clear my throat. “The Lunaedon.”
“Sam—”
“My captain needs me,” I tell her simply.
There are few things in my life that have ever felt as solid as my loyalty to Niko.
And it isn’t the misplaced sense of martyrdom Adira sees it is as.
It is that Niko is as much a part of me as my own heart, and whenever I find myself floundering—whenever the world is too heavy to remember the shape of my own body—standing next to him always reminds me.
I need something concrete; something immovable to hold onto. And whatever it is that exists between Adira and I is forever moving, the unpredictable rush of a current. She has been more than gracious in allowing me to recover beneath the shade of the Grove, but it was only ever temporary.
Nothing has changed between us. It’s time for me to go.
Adira’s eyes flash with fury. “You’re still recovering. You’re in no shape to—”
I shake my head, breathing a sharp sigh out of my nostrils, and trying not to think about what her sudden anger would taste like if I still had my magic.
“I’m well enough to wield a sword, and I can’t stand another day of lying around like an invalid.
I won’t burden you with my presence any longer. ”
Addy blanches. “Is that—is that what you think? That you’re burdening me?”
The air between us grows thick with scar tissue and regret, and I know instinctively one word will upset the precarious balance we’ve kept between us all these years. A balance I don’t know that I have the energy to keep any longer.
I yank my hood off with a labored sigh, and stomp back up the three steps I’d made it down.
“Yeah, Addy, that’s what I think. You’ve made it perfectly clear over the last two centuries, and I refused to believe it because I read things in your emotions that weren’t mine to read.”
It comes out more forceful than I intend it to, like the words have broken free of a cage. My emotions have far too much room without my magic, and I cannot predict when they will spark to life.
“I believe it now. I have no more magic to delude myself with. I’m setting you free.” I raise my chin. “I apologize for holding on for so long.”
Adira’s gray eyes begin to churn, her fingers curling into small fists at her side. For a moment, I think she might hit me, but she only shakes her head and says, “And here I was, thinking Niko was the arrogant prat.”
“Well…he is,” I agree, uncertain what Niko’s ego has to do with anything.
“So are you!” she shouts so fiercely, I have the good sense to take a step back. Adira’s small size may fool some, but I’ve seen the wildness contained within. I’m reminded once more, as she tilts her head in a manner reminiscent of a jungle cat, and the air sparks with her magic.
“You’ve always been able to see my emotions, so you’ve never actually asked me about any of them. If you had, you would not keep such ridiculous notions in your big, thick skull.”
I stare at her.
“I want to be with you, Sam. I have always wanted to be with you, and every day apart has been a unique form of torture. You are the only thing in this universe that brings me peace, and you are no burden.” The storm in her eyes dies, leaving behind only the barren gray of dull sky. “I am.”
“What…what are you talking about?” I ask incredulously. “You’ve never been—"
“The wild was dying!” she interrupts. Licking her lips, she tries again, softer this time. “And every day since, I have been dying.”
Impatience trickles hotly down the back of my neck. “We all were.”
Adira shakes her head. “Your magic absorbed others’ pain, Sam, and made you feel it instead.
You already bore so much with Niko, and I knew without asking…
you would bear mine, too. And I refused to be the cause for your martyrdom.
I could not be the knife with which you hone yourself, nor the blade to cut you.
” Her voice breaks. “I love you too much for that.”
I stare at her stupidly, her words winding around me like a feverish whisper.
Adira said love; not loved. I’ve spent so much time wondering what it would feel like to hear those words again—how it would taste, what color would shimmer in the air.
It seems the height of cruelty that the universe would rob me of my magic for a moment like this, leaving me with only the maelstrom of my own emotions swirling in my chest.
“Why didn’t—” My words crack, my throat suddenly dry. My lungs too, like all the air has evaporated. “All these years, Addy…why did you never tell me?”
Her face crumples in anguish, in regret, and suddenly, I know why. The moment I’ve been dreaming of for centuries is abruptly consumed by a prickling heat—a heat that’s raced to the surface of my skin and clogged my throat. A heat, I realize, is my own.
A silly epiphany to most, but I’ve spent so long mired in the anger of others, mine is foreign. It is not icy like Niko’s or scorching like Willa’s—it is ringing. Metallic. Bitter.
“That wasn’t your place.” The words are low.
Adira’s expression is pleading. Even a glimpse of her pain would normally sear through me like the deepest of wounds, but I feel none of her desperation now. Only my own.
“We all do what we can to protect those we love. How can you fault me for doing the same?” A tear rolls down her cheek. “I could not be the cause of your suffering, Sam. You would have died right alongside me, and I…I would not have survived it.”
“That wasn’t your place!” I shout, the words wild. Untethered.
Adira’s eyes widen, and I feel sick that I’m the one who caused it. That I’m the one who made her feel unsafe, if only for a moment. But I cannot seem to take it back. Cannot seem to reel in the anger pricking through every part of me.
My gaze flashes to hers, and though she doesn’t rear back, her lower lip trembles.
The wild eats the weak, Sam. And you make me weak.
That’s what she’d told me all those years ago on this very balcony.
“All this time,” I say faintly, running my palms over my bare scalp.
Every wound pulls tight, the pain not serving as the anchor I seek, but as fuel for my anger.
“All this time you let me think it was me. You let me think I wasn’t strong enough to be the consort of the Princess of the Wild.
You—you let me think I was undeserving.”
“You wouldn’t have allowed it any other way, Sam.”
I let out a humorless laugh. “The worst part is that I loved you enough to respect your decision. To never ask you to choose me over your kingdom,” I scoff, with a bitter shake of my head. “I let you lecture me about being a martyr when you were doing the same thing.”
“Sam—”
I raise my hand in a desperate plea to stop her words. Everything is suddenly too much. The sun on my skin, and the scratch of the cloak, and the raging storm of feeling I cannot seem to swallow down. “I can’t be here. I have to go.”
For the first time ever, I am the one to turn away.
I hardly see where I’m going as I stumble down the treacherous steps of the Nyawa, my skin burning, cloak trailing behind me like a dark cloud.
With the way my head swims, it’s a miracle from the second star I make it to the forest floor without breaking my neck.
The moment my boots reach the sponge of the earth, I bend over, bracing my hands on my knees in an attempt to catch my breath. To settle the rage and regret flooding through me in an untenable deluge. But no matter how I gasp for air, the storm in my chest does not abate.
It only grows until I am choking on regret. Until Adira’s words of so long ago—you make me weak—fade into nothingness. I only hear her words of today, the only words that matter. I love you.
What the fuck am I doing?
I have loved Adira for so long, it is in the shape of my very being.
I have respected her every wish for the simple chance to give her every moment of reprieve, of safety, of happiness she deserves.
I never dreamed I’d be worthy of the same.
And instead of getting down on my knees to thank her for loving me so well, I fucking spurned her for it.
Whether I have drowned in the emotions of others, or been inundated in a flood of my own, there has always ever been one feeling I recognized: my love of her.
I turn on my heel, whether to fall at her feet and beg forgiveness, or damn it all to hell and kiss her senseless, it doesn’t even matter. It only matters I get to her.
I’ve only taken one step when the ground shudders beneath my feet.
Once, softly. Then again. A deep tremble that resounds beneath the undergrowth, through my boots and up my legs. The leaves of the canopy rustle wildly and the trunks groan. The air grows heavy, a sense of dread pressing in against me. So thick, it feels like it’ll bury me in the earth.
For a brief moment, the Grove is silent but for the creaking of the wooden bridges swinging high above.
The ground gives another great shudder, and like the yawning maw of a beast, gapes open in a violent explosion of earth and roots.
The reverberation throws me from my feet, my spine colliding with a hard trunk. A groan is yanked from my chest as my scarred skin drags over the rough bark, reigniting the fire of every wound. But the pain is nothing to fear spiking through me as I scrabble upward, hand already on my sword.
As I gaze out at the destruction, there is no question the dread I feel is entirely my own. A physical thing that stuffs itself between my ribs to mingle with the horror settling over me.
Because climbing from the depths of the hole are the Strayed.
The same ones Willa buried here over a year ago.
For a moment, I’m frozen inside my shock, for it cannot be.
Death returned to the island with the queen’s anchoring.
I saw it with my own eyes in all the victims trapped beneath the Hollows, and in the deaths of those around me at Dreaming’s Eve.
How then, are the Strayed still alive?
Perhaps alive isn’t the right word. They move; they snarl.
Their eerie laughter rents through the air like a poison spreading.
But their small bodies are rotted like they’ve been touched by one of Niko’s ribbons.
Skin sloughs from their bones in large swathes; maggots spill from their open bellies; gelatinous eyes dangle from sockets, while others are missing entirely.
The smell of decay and death wafts from them, but it isn’t what sends bile barreling up my throat.
It’s that every one of the undead crawls in a ragged sort of unison toward the Nyawa.
Straight toward Adira.