Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
My city is burning around me.
I lie on my back, unmoving, in the ruins of my childhood home.
Watching the flames lick at my body. Listening to the wood popping and crackling, waiting for the moment when what remains of the structure finally gives way and collapses and buries me.
At least a hundred times, I've been back to this place since the night of Emberfall.
A hundred times I've wished for it to end in death.
Take me, I silently beg.
But the fires never do.
I blink, and I'm awake, and the flames are gone.
So is the heat. The light. I'm somewhere damp and cold and far away from every home I've ever known, with stone curving above me.
Below me is a thin blanket, which does little to protect me from the hard surface I'm curled up on. Water drips somewhere nearby.
I'm in a cave, I realize.
Somewhere in the mountains north of Mouren, most likely.
A soft scraping sound echoes through the space.
I know what it is after only a moment of closing my eyes and focusing on it, because I used to fall asleep to this sound sometimes, on nights when I stayed at Malachi's house.
He was often up late working like this, always doing something with his hands and his knife.
A lot of the methods I use for my own tinkering projects I learned by watching him—though he was always the neater artist, using only the smoothest chunks of wood, the sharpest blades, the most precise cuts.
I open my eyes again and try to sit upright…only to realize that my hands are bound together with chains. There's something around my right ankle, too, weighing me down. The horror of these things registers, but it lasts only a moment before I'm distracted by something else—
By Malachi, who is sitting on a rock near the cave's entrance with a knife in his hand, carving something from a block of wood.
I stop breathing long enough that I nearly pass out again.
There's a small, nearly extinguished fire at his feet. He's blocking all of its warmth and most of its light, the red-orange glow reaching only far enough to occasionally catch and flash against his knife.
I try to speak but nothing comes out.
I've had far too many nightmares that start in similar ways.
A strangled noise finally escapes me, and Malachi's hands go still at the sound. He angles his head toward me, a soft smile spreading across his face.
“Owyn.” He breathes my name like he's releasing a secret, like it's a gift he's been holding on to for all these years. “It's been far too long. I've missed you.”
It's somehow more horrifying than anything yet—this greeting paired with the smile that still hasn't left his lips.
Like nothing has changed and he never left.
Like I never watched him die, never put flowers on his gravestone, and all the tragedies and vows I've built so much of my life upon are suddenly just… gone.
I make more of an effort to right myself, scrambling and slipping awkwardly to sit up, straining and twisting in my bindings.
I start to lose my balance, but I manage to fall back against a broken stalagmite—to brace myself against it, so at least I'm still upright, still able to look Mal in the eyes as he turns to face me more fully.
“Relax,” he says. “You're safe here. And I apologize for the way we had to take you. It wasn't really my idea, but some of my soldiers were getting restless, demanding a move be made. Though I do have to admit that I was curious, too, about how you would react to her distress.”
“Her distress…” This snaps me briefly into full, furious clarity. “What the hell did you do to my dragon?”
“She's fine, now. Close by. Contained.”
“That isn't what I asked.”
“I don't think you want the gruesome details right now. You’ve had a rough enough night already.”
I'm suddenly shaking so badly I can't bring myself to reply.
“Are you cold?” He doesn't wait for my answer, just stands and removes his fur-lined cloak, crossing the space to drape it over me.
His hands linger for a moment after he secures it around my shoulders, close enough that I can see the familiar rough edges of his knuckles.
The emerald ring that belonged to his father.
The scar that bisects the side of his left hand, which he got during the summer we first met, when he scaled the fence behind my house in the dark and caught the rusted iron edge at the top.
His cloak smells like smoke and cold metal. Not like him. Not like the pine and warm earth I remember. I want to rip it off me and throw it out of the cave, and I want to go with it, to run away and never look back and try to make sense of any of this.
But now he's close enough to me that I can fully take in his appearance, and so the only thing I actually manage to do is stare.
It's like coming home after a long time away, finding that everything is where I left it and yet nothing feels entirely the same.
His deep brown eyes are familiar but harder.
More calculating. His dark hair is longer, his face sharper within the soft curtains of it.
He always carried himself with an easy confidence, but now the casual stillness feels like a trap lying in wait, rather than the openness that used to make me feel so safe in his presence.
He's recognizable, but more like a monument to the man I loved rather than the man himself. One sculpted by the hands of an artist who understood exactly how to recreate him without understanding what was worth recreating.
“We're a good ways up in the Grimfells now,” he says, casting a look toward the dark entrance of the cave. “The weather can get brutal in a hurry at this altitude.” He cocks his head. “You never did care for the cold, did you?”
For a long time, I simply keep staring.
I stare and I stare and I stare until I run out of ways to lie to myself, to trick myself into thinking there's some way this isn't real.
“How?” I finally whisper. “How are you…”
He gives a humorless little chuckle, settling in front of me and pulling the collar of his shirt down so I can see part of a massive scar that splits through the center of his chest. “A fair question, considering this, huh?
It's the same question Meira's soldiers asked when they found me lying somewhere in the Ashlands, practically cleaved in half.”
My heart plummets into my stomach at the memory of him being carried off, his lifeless body disappearing into the smoke-filled sky.
For all these years, I've tried very hard to not think about the part that came after. How I looked for his body but never found it. I just assumed it had been devoured, bones and all; such was the fate of so many others.
“I think this kept the dragons from ripping me entirely apart that night.” He holds out his arm, displaying the mark we share.
“Though barely. Your bond with your divine one wasn't fully awakened, or strong enough to really allow you to get a hold on those other dragons. Not back then. So I had no chance of truly controlling them, either.”
“Meira's soldiers found you…”
“And they were kind enough to nurse me back to health, just so I could suffer more fully once they locked me away in her prison. Five years of suffering, to be precise.” His head tilts back, his eyes fixing on the ceiling. “I thought of you often. It helped me get by.”
Something about the way he says helped sends a fresh chill skittering down my spine.
My voice comes out wobbly despite my best efforts to steady it. “If I'd known you were still alive, Mal, I would have…”
He slowly lowers his gaze back to mine. “Your dragon knew. I can feel both of you now, and I'm sure she can feel me, too—and she no doubt recognized the pull I exert on your bond long before tonight. She knows how the ancient magic of a Flamebound mark works.”
“She…she didn't tell me anything.”
“Maybe because she knew you'd already moved on.”
“Moved on?” The words cut like glass on their way out of my dry throat. “You think I just moved on? Are you insane?”
“If I were, it would be understandable, right? After everything that's happened? But no, Arowyn. I'm very much in my right mind.” He gets to his feet, making his way back to the fire at the mouth of the cave.
I try to jump up and follow him, only to be brutally reminded of the chains binding me; I end up slamming down hard on my knee, sending sharp pain slicing through it. “This isn't necessary. Please. Unchain me and let's…let's just talk like we used to.”
“You've become a little too unpredictable for that, I'm afraid.”
“Unpredictable?”
“Yes. For example: Never in a thousand years could I have predicted I would find you playing queen in the halls of the Mouren Palace. And yet, that's exactly what you've been up to as of late, isn't it?”
I don't know a safe answer to this, so I keep silent.
“Rumors are that you intended to marry him, even.” He kicks the carving he was working on into the fire, stoking it with the toe of his boot until the wood catches and goes up in a brief, brilliant blaze.
The knife is still in his hand, I realize; its metal glints wickedly in the sudden flare of light.
“Inseparable, people are saying. The Mouren King has finally met his match. Such a beautiful love story, apparently. One for the ages.”
I keep my eye on the knife. It's difficult to keep track of it as the fire dies down again, my lack of depth perception making it even harder to pick it out among the similarly colored cave walls.
“I considered waiting until your happy wedding day for our reunion,” Malachi says, staring into the dying embers, “but you know I'm not one for dramatics.”
“I wasn't planning to marry him, Mal,” I say softly.
But it's a half-truth at best, and he can tell.
“If you say so.” He gives a rough, humorless laugh. A heavy pause, then he cants his head toward me, dark eyes catching the last bit of firelight. “Just out of curiosity: Did you fuck him?”
“That's…that's none of your business.”