Chapter 22 Nasrin
NASRIN
Ifrowned, trying to curl into sleep as someone grasped my shoulder through the warm blankets and shook it.
“What is it, Thaleo?” I grumbled.
“That’s a strange way to say Tilly.”
My eyes shot open. Dawn was stealing in with cool grey fingers.
“What is it?” I tried to clear the fog of grogginess that had gripped me upon waking since my head injury. But I knew this was unusual. No one had bothered waking me up early while I’d been recovering.
Something was wrong.
“The borog is dead,” Tilly said. “One of the men flying patrol discovered its body during the night.”
Relief, then a terrible dread, slammed me, one after the other. Warm. Then very, very cold.
“What happened?”
Tilly hesitated. Never a good sign with her, as she usually had no problem saying what needed to be said.
“What, Tilly?!”
“Someone killed it,” she said. “And probably died in the process. They haven’t found a body yet. But Gahn Thaleo’s braxilk was nearby, refusing to leave. And they found Gahn Thaleo’s weapons.”
This was too much for my battered brain to process.
“So…So where is he, then? Where’s Thaleo?” I stared at her. “If his braxilk was there, and…”
Jesus. No. Please, no.
“I’m so sorry, Nasrin,” Tilly said. Her eyes were shiny with fresh tears. I’d never told her how I felt for Thaleo. But I supposed by now it must have been obvious.
“They believe he’s dead. A group of men has gone to investigate and to try to move the borog’s body, to see if…” She grabbed my hands and squeezed, as if trying to prop me up against the horror of her words. “They’re going to see if anyone’s underneath it.”
Underneath it. Under the great and terrible mass of that thing.
No one would survive it.
Not even Thaleo.
Someone was weeping, the cave echoing with her ragged sobs. When Tilly dragged me into her arms, I realized it was me.
“I want to go!” I choked out. “I want to go with them!”
I needed to see. I needed to know.
I needed to know what had happened.
I never even told him that I loved him.
“I don’t think-” Tilly began gently.
“I have to, Tilly!” I smacked tears violently away from my face. “I have to…Have to know.”
“The warriors will tell us as soon as they’re back,” she assured me. “As soon as they find anything.”
Oh, God, what if mortally injured, he’d managed to drag himself away? What if he was trapped in some dark place alone? Alive. Dead. Somewhere in between. With no one there to find him.
“I’m going,” I hissed, scrambling out of the bed and shoving my slow limbs mercilessly into the casings of their clothes. “Tell Valeria I’m going. Fire up the fucking shuttle.”
With the borog dead, there was no reason we couldn’t fly it.
Even though I’d asked Tilly to talk to Valeria, I was the one on the move, running dizzily out of the cave and through Thaleo’s mountain.
“Nasrin, wait!” Tilly called, following. “Valeria’s already taken the shuttle out there with Grim!”
Made stubborn by grief, I ignored her completely, racing down, then out of the mountain, as if I could run all the way to him.
Even though it would take me days to hike through these mountains.
The sun was rising higher, now. Early morning bringing out that rose hush that I’d admired so much the morning of the vaklok.
The morning of the day that he’d first held my hands.
And I didn’t know if it was sorrow, then, or my poor brain giving out on me after the exertion.
But my vision sputtered, and my knees buckled, and the only thing that kept me from smashing my head and getting concussed all over again was Tilly’s small but resolutely loyal body clumsily catching me.
Though she couldn’t stop my fall completely.
We went down together, both of us falling onto our asses with her behind me.
Winded from the run after spending so much time in bed, I sat there gasping, my tailbone aching.
“Sorry,” I said to my friend for knocking her down to the ground. “But I have to…” I got shakily onto my hands and knees. But I couldn’t make my body stand, no matter how much my mind screamed at it.
Fucking pathetic, really. So pathetic compared to him.
So instead I just stayed like that, on my hands and knees, staring at the stone until it glowed its usual aqua with bright sun. The sound of shuttle engines finally made me look up.
When the shuttle landed, Valeria and Grim came out at once.
“What’s wrong?” Valeria said. “Why is she out here?”
“I tried to stop her,” Tilly said. She was still on the ground beside me. “She wanted to know.”
“Nasrin, you need to rest. You’re recovering from a serious head injury!”
“Would you stay inside and rest?” I cried. “If Grim was out there? And you didn’t know if he was alive or dead?”
Valeria sighed and shook her head.
“No, I wouldn’t,” she said. “Well, shit. I won’t keep you in suspense.
Between the shuttle’s power and the party of men who went to investigate, we got the borog rolled over.
There was no body beneath the borog’s. Though more than one man said the blade stuck under the borog’s throat was Gahn Thaleo’s. ”
“So what else is being done?” I demanded, trying once more to rise from my knees but halted by dizziness. I leaned against Tilly for support. “What if he’s still out there somewhere? And he needs our help?”
She crouched down to meet me eye-to-eye.
“They tell me that the borog’s blood is highly toxic.
It can burn right through you, and anyone who got underneath it to stab it would have been doused in the stuff.
” She looked suddenly pained. “He didn’t survive the encounter, Nasrin.
They’re going to keep looking. They’re searching all the small caves and nooks and crannies of the surrounding area.
But ultimately, they’re looking for a body. ”
I didn’t sob this time. I simply lay down on the stone, pressing my cheek to the warm smoothness of it. I’d rested my cheek against Thaleo’s chest just like this. Memorized the rhythm of what had seemed like such an unkillable heart.
But there was no heartbeat here.
I didn’t fight Grim as he picked me up and carried me back inside.
I passed that terrible day in a state of half-consciousness.
I didn’t stir from my bed in the healer’s cave, even when Salina and Tilly brought me warm drinks and food that I did not touch.
When I saw the grief carved into Salina’s face, I felt even worse.
Like I had no right to my sorrow. The Deep Sky people had known and loved Thaleo for their whole lives.
I’d known him for such a brief time. And had spent an even smaller portion of that actually liking him, let alone loving him.
In quiet moments alone, I punished myself for this, thinking of all those instances before I really knew him when I could have let down my walls, put aside the barbs of my judgment, and spoken to him.
Spent time with him. Like a miser, I wanted to hoard every possible moment I’d had with him.
And I’d left so fucking many on the table.
By evening, there had been no change. No real news brought back by the warriors returning to eat and rest. All we knew was that Yeralk refused to come back to the main mountain, and no body had yet been found in any of the caves or other areas of the valley where the borog had been killed.
It shattered me to think that Thaleo might have been dragged away by yet another predator of the mountains.
I ate nothing that day. By sundown I wasn’t sure I was even capable of lifting my head off of the bed. I watched the light fade away, darkness slowly collecting like dust on the surfaces of the cave until everything was indistinct.
And I must have slept then, because I dreamed of him. I dreamed of Thaleo outside on Yeralk’s back. Dreamed of him coming in through the balcony window, like some stoic alien Romeo.
A rose by any other name.
My name meant rose, too. Wild rose.
What a strange thing to remember now. This confirmed it really was a dream. It was not the real Thaleo that moved on silent feet into the room, standing over me like something I had conjured through the sheer, broken force of my yearning.
But I didn’t care if he was real or not, this wordless shadow of the man I’d known.
“I love you,” I whispered. Tears seeped from the sides of my eyes. “I’m so sorry I didn’t get a chance to tell you.”
“Sleep, beloved.”
His voice was so fucking real to me. But in the way that dreams sometimes don’t make sense, I could see now that Thaleo didn’t look quite right. I couldn’t see his face, but the outline of his body was wrong. His long hair was gone.
“I don’t want to,” I choked out. “I don’t want to sleep. And I don’t want to wake up.”
Because when I do, you won’t be here.
He got into the bed with me then, and panic flooded me. Because this felt so damn real that there was no way I’d be able to keep sleeping through it. Like a dropped stitch on a knitting needle, the dream would lose its pattern and unravel.
But it didn’t happen. Thaleo laid his body down behind me, and it felt just like him. I could feel the heat of him. I could fucking smell him.
“Thaleo?!” I was afraid even to say his name.
“Yes?” Knuckles drifted along the line of my cheekbone, the shell of my ear. Quietly, as if testing the word, he added, “Mate.”
I jumped out of the bed.
“You’re real,” I stammered, shaking violently. “Are you? You are, right? You’re here with me?”
Thaleo sat up and faced me. Like this, the balcony with its window was behind me, the moon and starlight falling across his face.
It was a face I recognized, but also didn’t. The long hair with its white streak was gone, just as I’d thought. His eyebrows, too, as if something had burned all the hair away. But his skin was entirely intact. Even…
“Your scar!” I gasped. “It’s gone!”
“Is it?” He reached up and touched his own face, his fingertips tracing the line of an old wound which was not there. “The borog’s blood destroyed much of my flesh,” he finally said. “When the Vrika healed me, I suppose that it all grew anew.”
With trembling hands, I reached out and touched him then. Smoothed my palms over his head, the places his brows had been. Even his sight stars matched up now, his left eye no longer saddled with his uncle’s damage. I cupped his jaw.
It was him.
This wasn’t a dream.
I broke down, unable to be strong for him. Tears poured from me, and Thaleo asked me what he could do for me, what he could do to make this all better. But I just shook my head and told him he’d already made it better. He’d already made it perfect.
And then, I asked him to tell me what happened.
He drew me gently into his lap, stroking me as he told me everything.
He explained how, after I’d fallen asleep, the borog came and chased off the Vrika.
That it had happened so quickly that no one else had seen, and he’d been compelled to follow alone on Yeralk.
He told me how he’d killed the borog. That he’d almost died. That he should have.
“But the Vrika brought me to its nest,” he said, his fingers never moving from my body, my hair.
“It healed me with blood from its own body. Even so, I needed time to recover. I slept for a long time before I woke, found Yeralk, and returned. But before that sleep, when I was up there…The Vrika gave me my mate vision.”
My breath stopped.
“It was you, Nazreen.” Thaleo’s voice was thick with something that might have been pain. Might have been awe. “It was always you.”
“Are you just saying that?” I asked, even though I knew he was telling the truth. I’d once considered him a reprehensible liar.
But he wouldn’t lie to me. Not about this.
“It was your face I saw there,” he said. “I do not know how I could have believed it to be any other.”
“But…Why did the Vrika wait so long?”
Thaleo could have been saved so much suffering over trying to choose between his duty and me if he’d known I was his mate from the very beginning. Hell, Gahn Buroudei got his mate vision of Cece before we even arrived on this planet!
“I do not think that would have worked,” he said softly, his sight stars caressing my face. “You had to be free to choose me on your own. And I, you.”
He was right. Would I ever have loved him, ever have let him in, if he’d tried to claim me as his mate from the beginning?
No. I probably would have pushed him away every chance I got.
“We chose each other,” I agreed slowly, wonderingly, my hands cradling his jaw.
I shifted so that I was straddling him and could better see his face.
“I love you, Thaleo. I loved you before you ever got your mate vision. And I love you now.” I let my lips ghost across his. “I wish I’d told you that before.”
He groaned deeply, as if my words were the balm to a wound. Or maybe were the wound itself. Like I’d caused an ache deep inside him.
And maybe not just deep inside him, I thought, when I felt him stir to hardness below me.
Our tongues met with the tenderness of mutual worship.
When I pushed him down onto the bed and took him inside me from above, I worked my body over his with the reverence he had always shown to me.
I rode him slowly, lovingly, my eyes on his, feeling the perfect miracle of him inside me until I was coming undone.
He met me there, in that place of pleasure and poetry, claiming me so deeply.
And I claimed him, too.
Because I chose to.
Because he was mine.