Chapter 46 #2
I kept going because if I stopped, the inevitable would happen.
“You haven’t told me what Raiden said on the terrace.
You haven’t decided what useless thing you’re buying in the market.
You still have half a bottle of wine under your bed that you think I don’t know about, and you said you were going to show me how to fix that braid I keep making crooked. ”
Vareena’s eyes shone.
“No. You don’t get to look at me like that.” My head shook harder. “You told me if I got emotional before you finished your hair, you’d get emotional too, and then Lidia would say something horrible about us.”
A sob broke from Lidia. “Fuck you.”
Vareena almost smiled.
I held on to it. “There. See? She’s already ruining everything.”
Lidia came down beside us so quickly her knees struck the stone. She reached for Vareena and stopped just short of touching her, as if suddenly unsure where there was still a piece of her that didn’t hurt. Vareena solved it for her. Two fingers moved weakly, and Lidia caught them.
“You look terrible,” she said.
Vareena’s lips barely moved. “You too.”
Lidia laughed into their joined hands. Dax turned away, but Emrin didn’t let him go. Raiden kept pressure on the wound even though all of us knew by now that it wasn’t helping.
I refused to know.
I looked at Calis. “There has to be more you can do.”
Her eyes were wet. “Lyra—”
“Don’t.”
“Lyra.”
“Don’t look at me like that. There are hundreds of wielders in this mountain. There are healers. There are Council mages. There has to be someone.”
Calis’s breath caught, and for once she had no answer ready. “There isn’t enough left to repair.”
The words did not fit inside my head. “What?”
“The creature tore through her liver and one lung.” Her voice shook. “I can slow the bleeding. I can ease the pain. I cannot replace what is gone.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No.”
Vareena made a small sound, and when I looked down she was watching me. I hated the look in her eyes because she understood. Her hand moved weakly toward me, and I caught it.
“Lyra.”
“I said no.”
“Scared.”
The word was barely sound, but everything in me stopped. I bent over her until my forehead touched hers. “I know.”
A tear slipped from the corner of her eye and disappeared into her hair.
“I don’t…” She swallowed painfully. “I don’t want…”
She couldn’t finish. She didn’t have to.
“I know.”
There was nothing beautiful about it. Nothing noble. My best friend was afraid to die, and I couldn’t save her.
“I’m here,” I whispered. “Raiden’s here. Lidia’s here. Everyone’s here.”
Her gaze moved slowly around us. Dax finally turned back, and Emrin came with him. He dropped to one knee near Vareena’s feet, and for once there was no clever remark waiting behind his teeth.
Vareena’s eyes found him. “You owe me…”
His face broke. Dax leaned closer. “Probably. I owe most people a lot of things.”
Her mouth moved again. “Thirty.”
“What?” I asked.
Dax looked at me, then back at Vareena. Even now, she managed the faintest flicker of satisfaction.
“The bet,” she whispered.
Dax’s face crumpled for an instant before he forced out a quiet laugh and dragged the back of his bloody hand across his mouth. “You’re seriously collecting now?”
Vareena blinked at him.
Apparently she was.
“I thought you bet thirty coppers on me making it to Solstice,” I said.
“I did.”
“Then why do you owe her?”
Dax looked almost guilty. “She told me my odds were insulting.”
Despite everything, I stared at her. “You joined the bet?”
Vareena’s mouth twitched.
Dax shook his head. “Joined isn’t the word I’d use. She hijacked it.”
A weak breath escaped Vareena that might have been a laugh.
“What did you bet?” I asked.
Dax’s eyes stayed on her. “That you’d make it past tonight.”
The words landed somewhere I didn’t have room for them.
She had known me for almost no time then.
I had barely understood the Sanctum, barely understood my own magic, and apparently while Dax was wagering thirty coppers that I would survive long enough to see Solstice, Vareena had heard about it and decided even that wasn’t enough.
“How far past?”
Dax’s jaw tightened, but Vareena answered before he could. “Next one.”
My throat closed. “You bet I’d make it to next Solstice?”
Her eyes found mine.
Dax swallowed. “Thirty coppers. She said you were too stubborn to die in a year.”
“That sounds like her,” Lidia whispered.
I looked down at Vareena. “You never told me.”
Her lips barely moved. “You’d be…”
She had to stop for another breath.
I leaned closer. “I’d be what?”
“Insufferable.”
A laugh broke out of me before collapsing into a sob. “You secretly bet thirty coppers on me and I’m insufferable?”
Vareena’s mouth curved.
Dax scrubbed a hand over his face. “For the record, she was extremely smug about this.”
“You encouraged her.”
“I tried to raise her.”
Vareena’s eyes shifted toward him, and Dax nodded. “Yeah, yeah. Bad decision.”
I tightened my fingers around hers. “You’re going to collect it yourself. You hear me? Next Solstice, you can take every copper he owns.”
Dax’s face crumpled so quickly he turned away.
Vareena only watched me.
And somehow that was worse, because I understood then. She hadn’t bet thirty coppers because she thought she knew how long I would survive. She had bet because, before I knew whether I belonged here at all, Vareena had already imagined me still being here a year later.
She had given me a future before I knew I had one. “No,” I whispered. “You’re collecting it.”
Her fingers shifted weakly against mine.
I squeezed them harder. “We’re both going to be here next Solstice, and you’re going to make Dax pay you in front of everyone.”
Dax made a broken sound behind me.
Vareena’s eyes softened.
I hated it. “Don’t look at me like that.”
Her fingers shifted weakly inside mine, and the tiny movement nearly undid me.
For a few breaths no one spoke. The battle filled the silence instead—Fire roaring near the western breach, Earth grinding beneath the floor, someone crying out for a healer somewhere beyond the overturned tables. The air tasted like ash and blood.
Like Edenlo all over again.
Vareena’s eyes closed for half a second. When they opened again, they found Raiden. He was still holding her hand, and I had never seen him look afraid before tonight. He bent over her and pressed his mouth to her temple, holding it there while her chest lifted beneath Calis’s blood-covered hands.
Barely.
Then it fell.
I waited for the next breath.
It didn’t come. “Vareena?” Nothing. “Vareena.”
Her fingers had gone slack inside mine. I stared at them, then at her face, waiting for some irritation to cross it because I was saying her name too many times.
“Vareena?” Someone said my name behind me. I ignored them and put both hands against Vareena’s wound. Blood welled around my palms.
“Lyra, stop.”
Hands caught beneath my arms and tried to pull me back, but I tore myself free and dropped over Vareena again, pressing harder into the wound beneath her ribs. Blood slipped between my fingers immediately, hot and slick.
“No, it’s okay. I can help her.”
Someone touched my shoulder. I shoved them away.
“Pressure first. That’s what you do.” I pressed harder, trying to remember everything my mother had ever shown me. “Keep pressure on it. Keep the bleeding controlled. Keep the heart from emptying too fast.”
“Lyra…”
“I know this.” I looked down at Vareena’s body, at the blood covering my hands and wrists. “I know this.”
Gods, I did.
Before the Sanctum, before the Veil, before anyone told me there was Starlight beneath my skin or Shadow waiting somewhere inside me, I had been the healer’s daughter.
I had grown up sorting herbs at a kitchen table, tearing linen into bandages, carrying boiled water, watching wounds stitched shut beneath steady hands.
I knew how to set a splint and clean an infection.
I knew which herbs brought down a fever and which ones stopped pain.
I knew how to keep frightened people talking when agony made them retreat too far inside themselves.
That had been my world. Before magic and prophecies, before anyone called me Starborn or impossible, before my name became a reason for people to lower their voices in corridors, I had known exactly what my hands were for.
They were supposed to help.
“I can help her,” I said, but my voice broke around the words. “I know how.”
Nothing changed beneath my palms. There was no breath, no flutter, no pulse, but I pressed harder anyway.
“Come on, Vareena. Come on.”
Blood spread farther beneath my hands. Panic climbed into my throat. Maybe ordinary healing wasn’t enough.
Fine.
I had more than ordinary now. I reached for the Light. Starlight flickered beneath my skin as I dragged at every bright place inside me, every silver—blue, every gold thread I had ever touched.
“Please. Please, just—”
Starborn.
The voice slid through my mind so suddenly I flinched.
The Codex.
I had almost forgotten it was there.
I ignored it and reached deeper.
Starborn, her soul is within the sky.
“Please.”
You cannot mend what has already—
“Shut up.”
Kieran went still somewhere behind me, but I didn’t look at him. No one else could hear the voice threading through my skull. No one else knew that the Codex had chosen this moment to speak after watching me beg.
I shoved harder against Vareena’s wound and forced every ounce of Starlight I could find toward my hands.
Close it. Make her breathe. Make her heart move.
I didn’t care if Light had never been meant to do this. I didn’t care what Calis said was beyond repair or where the limits of magic were supposed to lie. I was asking the impossible of a power that should never have existed in the first place.
“Do something.” The Starlight shivered beneath my skin. It did nothing.
So I reached for the other thing.
Shadow.
The Codex went silent. Only for a heartbeat. Then its voice returned, sharper than I had ever heard it.
Do not. It is not natural. Let the dead be.
“I don’t care.”