Chapter Twenty-One – Esme
Chapter Twenty-One
Esme
The burning starts between my ribs, where his stinger went in, but it doesn’t stay there.
It pours through my veins into my chest, down into my stomach, out along my arms and legs, up my throat, all the way into my fingertips.
Every part of me throbs. My body shakes, and I can’t make it stop.
I understand, from somewhere far away, that I’m not in charge anymore.
Osric is holding me. I know it because his arms are hard and warm under my back, and because his voice keeps reaching me and fading, reaching me and fading.
“Stay with me. Please. Stay with…”
A sob.
“Esme. Esme. Esme.”
The words reach me in pieces. My name turns into a sound that has lost its meaning.
Then the pain changes. It slips into a feeling I’ve never had before. A broad smile takes over my lips. I stare up at the sky with wide eyes while the world breaks open into color, heat, and light.
The desert is alive. The black cliffs rise and fall in a slow rhythm, breathing around me. The sky bends closer, low enough to touch, and the stars swim down through it toward my face. The dust on my skin glitters and burns cold, and I decide I’m covered in stars too.
When Osric speaks again, I don’t hear the words. I feel them instead, warm patches spreading across my cheek and throat where his breath lands. The ground under me carries a pulse, deep and patient, and I can’t tell whether it belongs to the desert or to me.
The world comes back to me a little at a time. My torn dress settles over my body. Arms slide under me and lift me, and then his chest is under my cheek, smooth and hot, rocking with every step as he carries me back toward the house.
The shaking stops somewhere along the way, and what’s left of me feels like a puddle of liquid poured into his arms. My body has gone limp, and I’m not afraid.
I watch the sky. I watch the breathing cliffs.
I watch his face above me, lit from inside by colors that shouldn’t exist, and for one strange, endless stretch, I swear he’s a god carrying me out of one life and into another.
I wonder if I’m dying. If this is death, it isn’t frightening. It’s bliss, pure, endless, and golden, and I want to stay here forever.
He lays me on a bed, and I feel cool sheets under me, then his hands.
His voice stays low and constant, and the ceiling above me is alive with slow light.
I float there for hours. For years. For eternity.
Time means nothing. My body is far away, and at the same time, it’s more alive than it has ever been.
The colors fade, and I sleep.
Waking is slow and heavy. I blink at the ceiling, and my vision is perfectly clear.
Osric is beside me in bed, his face pale gray. His hand moves over my hair, then my cheek, then my hair again.
“You’re awake,” he whispers. “You’re here.”
“Yes.” My voice comes out hoarse, so I swallow and try again. “I feel amazing. Osric, we have to do it again. I want to always feel like that.”
He laughs, startled, and then the laugh cracks in the middle and turns into sobbing. He presses his face into my chest, and his whole body moves with it.
“Hey.” I wrap my arms around his head and hold him. “What’s wrong? I’m fine. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I thought you would die.” His voice is muffled against me, rough and low. “I was certain of it. I stung you and you screamed, and I thought, this is it, I’ve killed her.”
“You didn’t kill me.”
“Then you didn’t die, but you didn’t wake either, and I thought I’d made you sick.
That I’d broken you. That I’d trapped you in some awful state and you’d stay there forever.
” He lifts his head. His dark blue eyes are wet, and one tear has tracked down his cheek.
“You’re alive. You’re healthy. You’re mine. I don’t know how to believe it.”
I take his face in both hands and kiss him, gentle and slow.
“Believe it,” I say. “I’m your fated mate. Now we know it, both of us. It’s clear as day. There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore.”
He gathers me into his arms, tucks my head under his chin, and holds on.
The sun is rising outside, but neither of us cares. We fall asleep.
***
Hours later, we finally untangle ourselves, and I get a proper look at where I am. The walls are carved stone, the bed is wide, and his boots stand by the door. He didn’t carry me to my room. He carried me to his.
He runs a bath and washes me himself, kneeling in the tub, working the cloth over my skin slowly, barely pressing, checking my face after every pass. Bruises are scattered over my hips, wrists and thighs, purple and tender.
“I did this to you,” he says.
“They don’t hurt.”
“They shouldn’t exist.”
“Osric. They don’t hurt. I promise.”
He doesn’t argue, but he makes me stand up so he can kiss the bruise on my hip, then the one on my wrist, then every bruise he finds as he washes me. When he reaches the mark between my ribs, he pauses. It’s small and dark, the size of a fingertip.
“Does it hurt?” he asks.
“It’s numb.” I push my fingers into his wet hair. “You can stop worrying now.”
“No, I can’t,” he says, and kisses the mark his stinger left.
I let him fuss over every inch of me, because he needs it, and because I like his hands on me. Both feel like excellent reasons.
When we come downstairs, Darina is in the kitchen, scrubbing a counter that’s already clean. Nim crouches on the table beside her, tail wrapped around her paws, watching Darina with worried eyes.
Darina turns. She sees me and exhales, long and loud. Then she crosses the kitchen and hugs me so hard that my feet nearly leave the floor.
“You’re all right,” she says into my hair. “You’re all right. I’ve been worried sick this whole time.”
“I’m better than all right,” I chuckle, blushing.
She pulls back, holds me at arm’s length, and looks me over from head to toe. Then she looks past me at Osric.
“Is it done?” she asks him. “Are you truly together now? Mated?”
My face goes hot. Beside me, Osric shifts his weight and studies the floor – the most dangerous creature in Otheera, embarrassed by a question about his mate. We’re both fools.
“Yes,” we say, almost together.
Darina lets out a long sigh.
“Good. Then go and sit in the dining room, both of you. I’ve been cooking like a mad person from the stress. There’s enough food in here for a wedding feast, and someone has to eat it.”
“I’m starving,” Osric says.
“You’ve barely eaten in three days,” I tell him, steering him toward the dining room.
Darina carries out bowls and platters until the table can’t hold any more.
The three of us sit down together. Osric eats fast and single-minded, reaching for the next dish before he’s finished the last. Darina keeps refilling his plate without being asked.
I eat slower and watch them both, and I think this is the strangest, sweetest meal of my life. Also, the most ordinary.
Halfway through, warm fur brushes my ankle. I go still. Under the table, a small body winds between my legs, once, twice, pressing against my shins with her whole side.
“Nim’s rubbing against my legs,” I announce, and I can hear how delighted I sound. It’s embarrassing, but I don’t care. “She finally likes me!”
Darina laughs. Osric doesn’t. He lowers his fork and looks at me across the table, quiet and intent, and says nothing. I feel too special to ask.
Darina sets down the bread she’s holding.
“I’m happy for you,” she says. “Truly, I am. But you’re newly mated now. You might want the house to yourselves. Just the two of you, without me underfoot.”
“Stop right there,” I say. “You’re not underfoot, and you’re not going anywhere. You’re not some servant to be dismissed now that I have a husband. You’re my friend.” I turn to Osric. “And she can’t keep doing servant work in this house. She cooks, cleans, she does everything. That has to end.”
“Agreed,” Osric says immediately. “I’ll hire help. Whatever you need. Now that I’m mated, I can return to the city guard, and on a guard’s pay, we can afford proper staff.”
“Would that mean moving into Haara?”
“Only if you want to.”
I think of the black cliffs breathing around me.
“I like this house,” I say. “It’s more isolated, and it’s more ours.”
“Then we stay.”
Darina raises both hands.
“You shouldn’t trouble yourselves over me. I like the work. I’ve always worked.”
“No way,” I say. “You can work if it makes you happy, but not because you must, and not for us. Friend, not servant. Say it back to me.”
She rolls her eyes, but she’s half smiling when she says it.
“Friend, not servant.”
“You’re welcome in my house for as long as you want to stay,” Osric tells her. “Both of you have my word. I’ll sort out the help as soon as I can.”
“Good,” Darina says. “Now eat. All of this isn’t going to disappear on its own.”
Osric takes her at her word. I finish my food, watch him empty a third plate, and decide I’ve been patient long enough.
I get up, round the table, and climb straight into his lap.
He grunts, adjusts, wraps one arm around my waist, and keeps eating over my shoulder without missing a bite, reaching past me for the bread.
“Really?” I ask him.
“I’m starving,” he says again, mouth full, entirely unashamed.
Darina laughs so hard she has to put her cup down. I laugh with her, settled against the warm shell of my mate’s chest, with his heartbeat under my ear. Nim is weaving between the chair legs below us.
I think that of everyone who has ever stood on that auction stage in Concord, I must be the luckiest.