Chapter 32
Nyxiana
There’s tea in front of me and it isn’t going to do a thing for me, never has.
Blood is the only thing my body can make any use of.
It’s been that way since I was born. I make it anyway and now there’s a cup, steaming.
My hand goes around it and has something ordinary to do for a while. That’s all it’s for.
I’ve been telling myself for the better part of an hour that I’ll go and find him any minute now. If anyone else in this pack were sitting at a table doing that, I’d have named it out loud.
Lyanna knocks on the frame and comes in. She leans against the doorpost with her arms folded.
“How are you holding up?”
“Steady,” I say. “Stronger than I’ve been since before Drakoria. I’m ready to go.”
That’s all true.
“Good.” She looks at me a moment longer. “Then go.” She takes herself off toward the lodge without making a thing of it.
That’s the second time in two days she’s given me exactly as much as I asked for and not one word more. I don’t know what I did to earn that from her but I’m not going to go looking.
I put the cruor in my coat pocket, eleven coins in a cloth bag.
The case with the shards goes into the bag at my hip.
Three of them now - Drakoria, the North Range, Doria, each one wrapped separately.
Blood Moon might be the last of them. If it is, I want the other three in my own hands when it happens.
Everything I’m carrying to the fourth realm fits in a coat pocket and a bag the size of two fists.
Every other person in here packs for days when they leave.
Nova takes lists. Harper takes a bag she can’t lift by herself.
I’ve been going to Blood Moon with what fits in a pocket since long before any of them were born, because a woman who travels light has never had to explain to anybody where she’s going.
I don’t need clothes. Whatever I have to look like when I’m standing in front of my father, my blood already knows how to handle.
Shifters get taught that trick and think it belongs to them but it came from the angels.
I have it straight from my mother’s line, and it has never required me to change my body to use it. So there’s nothing left to pack.
There’s one thing left to do and it’s four hundred feet away in the training yard. Dane’s had him running defense drills with the younger ones most mornings this week. That’s where he’ll be and I already know what I’m going to say - come with me.
I go down to the yard.
One of the younger wolves catches sight of me on the way in, giving me a nod without breaking his stance. Nobody goes stiff when I walk into a place anymore. That took months - I marked the exact week it stopped.
I get close enough to see Valen properly.
He’s got one of the boys mid-drill with his guard dropping.
He steps in, puts a hand on the kid’s forearm, moves it up four inches without breaking off what he’s saying.
His hair’s damp at the temples from an hour of this, his are sleeves pushed up past the elbow, hands as steady on that boy’s arm as they were on me in a room in Doria.
Heat goes through me, fast and low. I’ve got no use for it standing in the middle of a training yard. Then I remember what I did to him. None of this is mine to reach for since I’m the one who put it out of reach.
The words don’t come. They’re right there, they were arranged before I got out of my chair but my mouth stays shut.
I turn around and go back the way I came before he looks up.
I tell myself I’ll try again when the drill’s done.
He has six people in front of him, an audience.
This isn’t a thing to say over a training yard.
There’s a low stone wall on the east side with a view of the whole yard.
I sit down on it and wait the drill out, telling myself it’s about timing.
He runs them another half hour. He’s good at it, doesn’t shout at any of them, doesn’t let one sloppy thing pass, says the correction the same way every time until it takes.
The smallest one gets worked longest, and that’s been true every day this week.
By the end of it that kid is holding a guard he couldn’t hold on Monday.
Nobody in this pack asked him to take this on, he simply started doing it, the way he started walking the perimeter. Now it’s his.
Training over they break off toward the lodge in twos and threes and the yard empties out.
There’s no one left standing in it but him.
I get up off the wall and cross to him, this time will be different.
I say that to myself the whole way across the dirt until he looks up.
For as long as it takes him to work out that it’s me, there’s nothing in his face at all.
Then there’s everything. His eyes come to mine, direct and open in a way this pack has never been given.
The drill goes out of my head, Blood Moon with it.
Every arranged word I brought down here goes after both.
All that’s left is his mouth, a mouth I’ve had on me, twice.
I know exactly what it does, how long it takes, the sound he makes.
Looking now is worse than remembering because it’s near enough that closing the distance would take one step and no explanation at all.
I open my mouth to ask him to come with me to Blood Moon.
“How many more mornings does Dane want out of you?” Comes out instead.
Valen doesn’t look surprised by the question. He answers the same way he’d answer anyone.
“Two more weeks. He wants them clean on the low guard before the fall run.” He picks up the practice staff off the rail. “The little one’s nearly there.”
“He looked better today.”
“He is better today.”
Then he goes back to setting the rail. I stay still, close enough to catch his scent.
Sweat, pine, and whatever sits underneath both that’s only ever been his.
He doesn’t ask me why I’m still here. Before the porch he would have.
He’d have set the staff down and waited me out.
He has more patience for silence than anybody I’ve ever met, he used to spend all of it on me.
I walk out of the yard without saying a single word I’d planned.
Halfway to the treeline I make myself stop lying about it.
It was never the audience, the drill, the timing.
There was never going to be a moment where saying it got easier.
Asking him to come would mean letting him see how much I want him there.
Not a second pair of hands in a realm that’s about to get complicated.
I could say that out loud without any trouble.
My body still answers to him across a yard while I’m furious with myself, he’s furious with me and neither of us has anywhere to put it.
I learned to manage everything by myself when I was young enough that it took.
The whole thing depends on nobody ever seeing what I’d do without it.
Kaspian gets closer than anyone alive and even he doesn’t get that.
My mother doesn’t have it. My father has never been offered it.
I don’t know how to start with the one person it would matter most to say it to.
Carrying it in silence is easier than finding out his answer is no. So, I pick silence.
I go past the last cabin, out to the open stretch behind it where nobody has any reason to be, stand there a moment with the bag against my hip.
Then go. The dark comes up clean. It takes me the instant I ask it and lets go the instant I’m through.
Nothing in me has to be spent getting across.
This is my realm answering my blood. It’s never argued with me.
I come out under the red moon, into air thick and cool, smelling of stone, iron, and the smoke they burn in the upper city.
Every part of me settles the moment I’m standing in it.
This is more home than Ash Hollow has ever managed to be, and I’ve loved Ash Hollow since the winter.
None of that makes the other thing any smaller.
My body is still half turned back toward a training yard three realms behind me. The only hard part of this entire trip was the thing I didn’t say, and I’m going to be carrying that through everything that happens on this side.
Time runs faster here, always has. Whatever the pack does today at Ash Hollow, I’ll have lived through more of it than they will.
The seal is going now in a way it wasn’t a month ago, and every realm we’ve opened has taken more out of it.
There’s less left every time. Nobody has said a number out loud yet, they don’t need to.
I square my shoulders and start walking toward the part of Blood Moon that’s about to stop being simple.