CHAPTER 41
brAX
Present Day
There is a ripple in the deep stillness—a heart beating in time with my own—when the surface of the water breaks overhead.
A hand grips my wrist, a touch I know well. Another breaking I endured to become what I am. He pulls me close, the terrible pain of my open wounds nothing compared to the pain of those memories that rush to the surface just as we break the turbulent waters above.
“Vari!” he yells, his voice drowned amidst the rain that beats against the sea. “Stay with me.”
And isn’t that the same request he denied me so cruelly when I begged it of him?
My lungs burn, but not for lack of air, when he hauls me to the sandy shore of Brax. His hands are at my side, a swear on his lips as he attempts to rebind the gauze falling from the bloody lacerations.
But it is the warship I watch in the distance, the flames that lick up its bow as lightning continues to strike it in an unnatural fashion.
The mast cracks, splitting in two as it falls upon the deck, the ship lost to the arching fire of the fates.
As if Terr herself willed an end to the lives of those aboard it. I don’t blame her.
Wrapping an arm around my waist, hooking the other beneath my knees, he pulls me to his chest. He breaks toward the A’kori ship that made it to shore. The rain pounds the ground around us, a small break in the clouds above offering a momentary pause to the deluge stealing the heat from my bones.
Though there are many voices on the ship, they all slip past my ears as he races to the captain’s quarters, laying me in the center of a large wooden table as he yells, “Bri’vek eh hiven!”
I’m hardly aware of the heavy blanket he drapes over the wracking form of my body.
A young feyn with a kind, freckled face barges into the room the next moment.
They share a quickly whispered exchange in feyn speak before, with an apologetic glance, the young male clasps my side, releasing his gift.
I scream as the parted sinew of my side knits back together. Though the pain of healing is nothing compared to the disgust I feel at Nix’s mark searing itself onto my neck. My vision turns to a blinding white before shuddering to black.
“You’re safe, Vari.”
It’s the last thing I hear before I let myself drown in the void of my agony.
Safe. You’re safe.
The gentle light of morning is a stark contrast to the heavy blanket of dark I’ve lived in for the last week of my life. The windows of the captain’s cabin, a welcome sight for someone who wasn’t sure they would ever see the sunrise again.
Gingerly brushing my hand along my side, I test the healer’s work. He did well. Only a small amount of scarred flesh is left to remind me of the crossing. Not that I could ever forget it, even without the marks upon my skin.
Swinging my legs over the table’s side, my feet smack against the wood of the floor.
Perhaps it is vanity that leads me to pass by the large doors of the cabin when my freedom waits behind them.
But I find myself in front of a small mirror hanging above a basin of fresh water, fearfully curious of the creature the crone freed.
It’s still me. Only different. Only … feyn. My features are sharper and more defined. The blue of my eyes like the icy waters in early spring, dark hair like soft spirals of silk, capturing the light as if they might contain it.
The odd leaf-like shape of my ears, the only thing to declare that I am, as Felias warned, something else entirely.
“Vari?”
Had I not memorized his voice when I was still too young to be called to the service of the crown, the smell of storms gathering would announce his arrival.
He doesn’t seem surprised when I turn to face him.
Not horrified like I expect. Maybe it is only that he has had all night to come to terms with what I am.
His gaze doesn’t wander. It stays firmly glued to my own. An apology I do not understand written in the lines of his eyes.
Eyes that I treasure. Eyes that, like his voice, I thought I memorized many years ago. Now different. Now … feyn.
Eyes that are now the brightest of blues, icy like my own.
The pointed tips of his ears peek out from within the thick drape of his white hair.
He begins toward me, his brow drawn and jaw tight as he approaches.
I find that I hardly know this male. There is no hint of the pleasing smile that settled me so often when I was young.
No hint of the man who broke every barrier I’d been taught to maintain.
Each step is cautious, as if he fears I might run. Maybe I should. Maybe I’m only fooling myself, thinking I know any part of the male that stands before me. The man, I trusted. With my life. With my secrets. With my heart.
He was careless with all but one. My stomach twists itself into a knot I can never unfasten when I realize that the secrets of mine he kept, were not secrets I had known.
“You lied to me,” I say. The words bite at the quiet stillness, and I refuse to let the sheen of my sorrow reach my eyes.
Better to face him with anger than to allow him to break me all over again.
“Only to protect you,” he explains.
I nod, a sarcastic rendition of my understanding. “Protect me from what? From Leanna?” I ask in mock curiosity. “Or was it the feyn? Or the fea? Vos? Nix?” My voice cracks and he swallows hard, his eyes softening.
He reaches for me, his hand stilling the moment my back stiffens in response, a vacant mask falling over my features.
“Don’t do that,” he pleads.
“Isn’t this what you taught me to be?” I ask coldly, as if I am completely unaffected by it—by him.
“I came to La’tari to find you, when you were young.” The words spill out of him as I move to step around him, uninterested in the tale he weaves. True or false, it makes no difference to me.
He places himself in front of me as he continues, “I wasn’t sure it was you until the day you met Bagya in the woods, and she frayed the threads that bound your power. She told me—”
“Bagya told you?” I spit the question.
Traitor.
“What did Bagya tell you, Vakesh?”
As if the clouds themselves feel the rage building within me, they blanket the morning sun and the room darkens.
“Did she tell you to lie to me? Tell you to train me? To gain my trust? To use me? To foc me?!”
Fists balled at his sides, this time he doesn’t block me when I walk around him. His mouth hangs open as if he’d gone to speak only to find that all the air had been let out of his lungs. I don’t look back when my hand falls on the lever of the door, but for a moment, my feet still beneath me.
“You can blame all of Terr, Vakesh. But they were all your choices. Every single one of them. And maybe you did what you did to protect me, but as fates would have it, you are the only one I ever needed your protection from.”
Every step away from him unravels a binding that I hadn’t realized tethered my very soul. Every breath I draw into my lungs, an entreaty for a new life, one without the weight of longing and fear.
The deck of the ship is busy with the crew rushing to do as they have been commanded but it is Felias that catches my eye as he dips his chin toward me in recognition. I turn away without a word. Everything I had to say to the man has already been said.
Long and determined strides find me upon the shores. There is no path that will take me to the dense forests of Brax but the one I make. I set out heading east, determined to become lost among the ancient stands.
All I know about myself is what I have been told.
Drakai, Fea Dien, lady, mi’ajna. All names I was given by others in place of the name I should have called myself.
Perhaps lost upon a foreign soil, with no home and no one to tell me who and what I am, I might finally begin to know her.
The woman, the female, the stranger, who faced me in the mirror every day of my life and never left my side.
“Tha’haynah?” Tig’s gentle voice quiets the violent raging of my soul, and I pause just long enough to answer. The sprite is lost among the wild and thorny bushes growing upon the dunes, when I say into the wind,
“Launa rek’hi meiur. Rin’nik voh rei thai’es.”
Come with me, friend. To where fate will find us.
I don’t wait for her reply. There is no need. For as surely as the sprite is my friend, she has worked to weave the web of my fate, twining it with her own.