Chapter 30 #2
He clasped my forearm last. His grip was iron, and his voice dropped low enough that only I could hear.
"I was surprised to see our father at the funeral," Kaan said.
"Him showing up here might have been political," I mused, although I wasn't convinced.
"He never does anything without purpose, Hakan.
If he came to that funeral, he came for a reason.
If he spoke to Ada, he wanted something.
And if he spoke to you —" Kaan searched my face.
"Be careful. With yourself. With her. If anything changes — in your magic, in your mind, in how the shadows feel when you call them — you tell me. Swear it."
"I swear it."
"Good." He held my arm a moment longer, something unresolved flickering behind his expression. Then he released me, turned, and the shadows opened for him and Nesilhan like a curtain, swallowing them both into darkness and distance.
I watched the space where they'd been and felt a cold finger trace down my spine that had nothing to do with the morning air.
That was weeks ago.
I opened my eyes. The mirror stared back. The rune behind my ear — behind my left ear, right where his thumb had brushed — glinted faintly in the morning light.
A father's blessing.
The Sky Tower. Last night. The memory surfaced not smoothly but in jagged pieces, like something that had been broken and reassembled wrong.
I'd gone there without deciding to. One moment I was lying beside Ada in the dark, listening to her breathe, and the next I was standing on the tower's observation platform with my hands braced against the stone railing, staring down at my fingers.
Dirt beneath the nails. Knuckles split and bleeding.
The metallic taste of something wrong coating the back of my throat.
I didn't know how I'd got there. I didn't know what I'd been doing before.
The wind was cold. The stars were wrong — smeared across the sky like wet paint, pulsing faintly in colors that stars shouldn't be. I blinked and they corrected themselves, but for a moment the whole sky had looked like a language I couldn't read.
I was staring at my hands, trying to understand why they were shaking, when her voice hit me from behind.
"Hakan."
Ada stood in the tower doorway. She wore my shirt — the dark linen one, too large for her, slipping off one shoulder — and her hair was loose, tangled from sleep.
Her feet were bare on the cold stone. She'd come looking for me without stopping to dress, which meant she'd woken and found me gone and panic had done the rest.
"How long have you been up here?" She crossed the platform, arms wrapped around herself. "It's freezing. Come back to bed."
"I don't remember coming here."
She stopped. "What?"
"I was in bed. With you. And then I was here." I looked at my hands again. The blood had dried to rust in the creases of my knuckles. "I don't know whose blood this is."
"Hakan, you're frightening me."
"I'm sorry but I'm scared that I can't remember how I got here."
She reached for me. I stepped back — maybe she shouldn't be close to me. I could be dangerous.
Something moved across her face — not hurt, not exactly, but the weariness of someone who has reached out too many times and been refused. She let her hand drop.
"Talk to me," she said. "You haven't talked to me in days.
Not properly. You come to bed after I'm asleep and leave before I wake up.
You sit beside me at dinner and I can feel you not being there.
Like you're behind glass. Like —" Her voice thickened.
"Like someone's hollowed you out and left just enough to fool everyone else. But not me. You can't fool me."
"I'm handling things. The court, the council, the —"
"I'm not asking about the court!" Her light flared, gold and unstable, reacting to her distress.
"I'm asking about you. About us. My father is dead, Hakan.
He is dead and I am drowning and I reach for you every single night and you're not there.
Even when your body is lying next to mine, you're not there. "
The words landed and I felt them hit — felt the impact somewhere deep beneath the fog that had been thickening in my skull for weeks.
She was right. Something was happening inside me, something pulling me away from her inch by inch, replacing love with logic and warmth with frigid efficiency, and I couldn't name it, couldn't stop it, couldn't even see its edges clearly enough to fight.
"I don't know how to explain what's happening to me," I said. "Something's wrong. I know something's wrong. But every time I try to look at it directly, it slips away. Like trying to see something in the dark that only exists in your peripheral vision."
"Then stop trying to see it alone." She stepped closer. "Let me in. Please. Whatever's happening, you don't have to carry it by yourself."
"What if letting you in makes it worse? What if this darkness infects you? I cannot bear it, Ada, if something happens to you."
"You're being dramatic. I'd rather burn with you than watch you freeze to death from the other side of a wall."