Chapter 7
HOME
SAERIS
IT WAS LATE by the time dinner was done. Everyone was yawning and complaining that they had overeaten. Everyone, that was, except me.
I was wide awake, and I’d barely touched the food on my plate. My stomach was a quarter of the size it had been, and it had already been small to begin with, thanks to growing up in the Third.
Kingfisher walked me through the halls of Cahlish back to his rooms with his hand resting easily in the small of my back.
We had barely been alone since I’d transitioned, and this .
. . well, it felt a little strange. There had always been tension between us, but this felt different.
I knew him better now. It was strange, but it was as if I knew myself better.
I had undergone a major transformation, there was no denying that.
But I kept searching for the things that were different about myself, and all I kept finding were things that were the same.
The things that really mattered hadn’t changed, and that was reassuring.
I was independent. My temper was still quick to rise. My sense of humor was still dry. I still loved the smell of coffee, and the thick flaky pastries I had first eaten in Ballard.
And I still loved the male walking beside me.
I’d fought my feelings for him for so long that giving them space to breathe now felt a little frightening.
As I could now feel Fisher’s emotions bleeding into mine, my own must have bled into his, too.
When we reached his bedroom, he didn’t immediately go inside.
Instead, he spun me around, hands at my waist, and pressed me back against the carved oak door, leaning into me so his chest was flush against mine.
His huge frame dwarfed mine. A wall of muscle met my palms when I laid them against his chest.
“You know I would marry you,” he rushed out. “You must know that I want to.”
Blood rushed to my cheeks. “Oh. Uh . . .” I didn’t have the first clue what to say. “It’s okay. Really. If you’re not the marrying type—”
“I’m not.” His eyes were burning. “The marrying type. I never have been. Before, the very idea would have sent me running for the hills. I just . . . I could never imagine the kind of love I would need to feel to choose that path for myself. But now I don’t need to imagine.
Now I can’t think of anything I want to do more.
Marrying you would be . . .” He shook his head, his eyes searching my face.
“Then why?” I whispered. “Back at dinner, you said . . .” I frowned, trying to remember his exact words.
“I didn’t lie. I still can’t do that,” he said, tucking a wave of my hair gently back behind my ear. “I said there wouldn’t be a wedding. Because there can’t be, Saeris.”
“I . . . I’m sorry, I . . . don’t understand.”
He blew out a long, sad breath. “A Fae wedding ceremony is extremely sacred. It is the greatest commitment two lovers can undertake in Yvelia. Not because they swear to love and honor each other for all their days. Not because they give each other their hearts, either. It’s sacred because they give each other their names.
Their true names. And I can give you everything else, Osha. But I can’t give you that.”
He’d explained this to me once. A person’s true name held power. With it, a person could control the other. They could command them to do whatever they pleased.
“It’s okay, Fisher. You don’t need to give me that. I . . .” I shrugged, not knowing what to say. “I understand. If telling me your true name is impossible, then—”
“I don’t know it,” he whispered. “I’ve never known it. We usually receive our true names on our fourteenth birthdays, and my mother—” He blinked. “Well, she died before I turned fourteen. And my father was already gone. So . . .”
He had never looked so uncomfortable. He ducked his head, not meeting my gaze.
“No one knows. If they did, it wouldn’t be good.
I’ve hunted through her papers. Her books.
I used to hope that she might have written it down in a private journal, perhaps, but I never found one.
Her notebooks were full of drawings. Of me, mostly.
And of little birds with flashing blue wings.
But she drew you a lot, as well.” He laughed softly under his breath.
“She really did like drawing you. But you see, that’s why I wasn’t forthright about it before.
We can’t get married because I don’t have a true name to trade. ”
I stared at him, waiting. When he didn’t lift his head to look me in the eyes, a blast of laughter ripped out of me, startling him. “What? What’s funny?” he asked.
“I don’t have a true name to trade, either, Fisher. I’m just Saeris. You can be just Kingfisher, too.”
I expected him to laugh as well. To realize that he was sad for no reason, but gently, he reached for my hand and slowly raised it to his lips.
He kissed me, his warm breath fanning out over my skin.
“It doesn’t work that way, Osha. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t given a true name.
I was, and unless I share it with you, the ceremony can’t take root.
There’s nothing to be done about it. So .
. . I do understand. If marriage is important to you, then—”
“Please stop talking,” I breathed. “I think you’re about to say something stupid, and I already told you at dinner. I don’t need to get married. You were right. We’re God-Bound. That’s far more significant than a wedding ceremony. We’ll live our lives together and be happy, no matter what.”
I couldn’t read him. His expression was so guarded. It felt as though he were trying to peer into my soul. Clenching his jaw, he exhaled down his nose, then said, “You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure!” I laughed, but then sobered quickly, knowing what I was about to say. “I love you, Fisher.” It was the first time I’d said it. “I love you, and nothing else matters beyond that. Wherever you are, I’ll beg the gods and all the fates to let me be there, too,” I whispered.
A slender tendril of shadow trailed along the line of my cheekbone, caressing my skin, soft as a butterfly’s wing, as Kingfisher’s eyes flashed.
“Good,” he growled. And then my feet were off the floor, and his hands were below my thighs, lifting me.
I reacted, wrapping my legs around his waist, looping my arms around his neck, as he kicked his bedroom door open at last and carried me inside.
“Say it again,” he growled.
My cheeks were burning. “Say what?”
“Don’t play with me.”
“But I—”
“Please.”
I leaned back so that I could look at him properly, and the open, raw emotion on his face stole my smile. The hope in his eyes destroyed me.
Like there was a possibility that it wasn’t true. Like there was any realm or reality in which I didn’t love him, but he was praying that I might. He was out of his godscursed mind. “I love you, Fisher. Of course I do. Always. Forever.”
His mouth slammed down onto mine. The kiss was pure fire, and relief, and a culmination of all the unanswered tension that had been mounting between us for the past few days. He tasted me, his tongue exploring my mouth, his heart racing against my chest as he wound his fingers into my hair.
When he drew back, the quicksilver in his eye had formed a fine corona around his iris. “There are too many pricked ears in this godscursed manor,” he groaned. “They aren’t going to like what they hear over the next few hours.”
A shiver sank into my bones at that. He planned on being inside of me for hours. He was planning on making me scream. Gods . . .
When he kissed me again, cradling the back of my head in his hand, something within me shifted.
A pin falling into place inside the tumbler of a lock.
I could suddenly feel the air inside the room.
The way it eddied around the furniture and rose up to bloom against the roof rafters.
I didn’t understand how I knew to do it, but I felt the air thickening.
The molecules swaying with the tide of the room stopped, stilling, and my ears suddenly felt as if they were full of cotton wool.
The instant it happened, Fisher noticed, too. He stopped carrying me toward the bed. His spine stiffened, his demeanor changing in an instant. “What just happened?” he asked breathily. “Something . . .”
“I don’t know. I just . . . I didn’t want anyone to hear us. I reached out, and I did it.”
He turned his attention back to me, his dark waves falling into his eyes as he ran the bridge of his nose along my jawline.
“That’s a neat trick, Little Osha. An affinity to a small magic, perhaps.
I wonder how many others you have up your sleeve.
” His voice was a deep rumble that started somewhere down in his boots. “I can’t wait for you to show me.”
He had a level of faith in me that I had struggled to have in myself over the past few days.
The marks on my hands didn’t move underneath my skin the way his did sometimes.
They were locked in place, the lines beautiful and intricate.
I had no idea what they meant, or what I might be capable of because of them.
Fisher’s hands skated over my bare arms, fingertips tracing the script that wound around my wrists as if he were contemplating the same thing—but he said nothing further about the binding.
A wave of euphoria rocked me as he ducked, running the bridge of his nose along the line of my jaw a second time.
Things had been hard after my mother had died.
Hayden was even more of a handful then than he was now.
For a few months, after I’d made sure my brother was out cold and dead to the world at night, I’d go and lay on the cracked roof tiles and smoke myself into oblivion.
Getting high wasn’t the answer. I knew that even as I did it.
But, for a brief period of time, it was a crutch that helped get me through the day.
I’d stopped when I started feeling like I needed it instead of wanted it.