Chapter 49
She hadn’t expected death to be like this, but then again, she’d thought her soul would burn upon arrival at the eternal gates. Clearly there was something of her left if she could still think, wasn’t there?
She couldn’t see, and her mind was foggy but …
there was sound – murmurs and something more…
Panic, maybe? The sound came and went in waves, dragging her from the darkness to some sort of semi-consciousness before submerging her once more in the oblivion where there was nothing and where she didn’t dream.
She might have been dead then, in those long, uninterrupted episodes of nothingness where she wasn’t sure there was anything left of her.
She should have craved those brief moments of sound, should have clung to them with every morsel of herself but she found it all too exhausting. Those sounds hurt her head and her body, and whatever else she was made up of. The darkness was a reprieve when it swept her back under.
She had been in that darkness for hours and hours – or was it days? Was there such a thing as time in this place? Then she was wrenched from her peace by something sharp and burning in her side. It was gone as quickly as it had come, but that pain had left her suspended in this strange half-state.
And then she was … dreaming? Perhaps. There were flashes of pictures – memories, maybe.
She was somewhere dark and restricted, and she knew she couldn’t speak or move. There was shouting and banging, and through the crack of light streaming into the darkness she saw two bodies slump heavily. One of them had pale blonde curls that stretched down beyond the swell of the woman’s breasts.
The darkness pulled her under once more, and then there was nothing.
* * *
‘Dragonhart?’
A lapse in the nothingness, but she didn’t know what, or why, or if she was dreaming…
‘It’s time to come back, Dragonhart.’
She … she didn’t care to come back. She could lie in this darkness forever, floating in a painless, sleep-filled sanctuary of emptiness. She couldn’t remember a before or what it even meant to come back.
‘You’ve fought so hard, Dragonhart, but it’s time to come back.’
A phantom arm of warmth licked down her spine, and it was as though flames coursed beneath her skin in answer. There was light, somewhere, getting stronger as the flames in her blood roared louder and louder. Was this death? Where she was heading now, into this increasing tunnel of light?
More light.
More warmth.
More sounds, low and gentle this time, not the hurried, panicked noises from before.
She wished the darkness would come back. She wished it would swoop in and drag her back into the oblivion, where there was no colour and no noise, and where her body felt rested for the first time in forever.
But a low light was becoming clearer – or was it simply that this darkness was not as absolute as it had been before?
Her hands were a thing, now, and she could feel something soft and warm beneath them – not silk, but a cotton so soft it could have been the familiar sheets in her bed at Castle Grey.
Was that where she was now?
There was something illuminating the space she was in, and when her eyes became real, living things again, she blinked them slowly.
She was indeed lying on top of cotton sheets, a fur blanket draped over her. And it was dark in here, save for the open, night sky, peppered with millions of bright, silver stars. It was so beautiful that she thought the gods must have stitched diamonds into the darkness.
Her eyes moved slowly, exploring the sky above her but … but it couldn’t be open sky because it was so warm in here. It had been winter when she’d been running through Larkire Palace…
Not knowing if her body had returned with her hands and eyes yet, she launched herself upright, glad to find that her most prized possession responded with lethal grace.
‘Whoa, please, milady, be still.’
Arla’s head snapped to her right, where a pair of pale grey eyes looked back at her with a worrying amount of concern.
A scar on her jaw reflected the starlight from her face, and Arla felt her heart clench as Lilith – one of the maids that had served her during the days she had spent at Larkire – finished filling the glass of water she had been pouring from a jug so beautiful Arla wondered if, like the stars, it had been made from diamonds.
‘Lilith?’ she asked, her voice quiet and uncertain. She didn’t know where she was, but if Lilith was here, it meant Larkire, didn’t it?
‘Be still, milady. You don’t want to pull a stitch,’ the young woman said softly, closing the space between her and Arla and offering a gentle smile.
‘You’re safe. You lost a lot of blood, but you’ll be fine.’ Arla could only imagine the shock and confusion on her face as the maid smiled meekly at her.
‘What happened? Are we still in Kastonia?’ she asked, wincing slightly at the tight pull in her side. Lilith moved slowly, as though she didn’t dare make any sudden movements. Arla felt as though she’d been run through with a blade and every breath was exhausting.
‘We are … somewhere safe.’
Okay, then.
Arla pulled herself back against the headboard, exposing more of her body from underneath the blanket.
‘Who dressed me?’ she asked, the words too forceful for her battered state. She gritted her teeth against the ache of everything, and looked down at the silk slip covering her skin.
‘I did,’ a gentle voice said from the doorway, and Arla couldn’t believe it as Rheia entered the dark room, the glow of torches beyond the doorway illuminating her figure as she carried a basin and linen.
The twins looked at her with a respect she didn’t deserve, and Arla couldn’t form words to begin to question what was happening.
‘Hark, is he—?’
‘Unharmed. He asked for you to be well tended. We figured you would be more comfortable in this.’ Rheia gestured to the midnight-blue fabric barely covering Arla, and her heart squeezed at the notion.
‘I need to see him,’ she said, gingerly attempting to swing her legs over the edge of the bed and stand. The action sent the twins into a flurry of panic as they both attempted to assist her.
Arla knew she should be resting. She could feel the strain on her body as she asked her legs to hold her for the first time in …
how long? The twins clearly thought the same, not bothering to hide the tight smiles they exchanged when Arla finally let them support a fraction of her weight.
Was she so feared that nobody dared question her, even when she put the health and healing of her body in jeopardy?
‘I need my clothes,’ she ground out between clenched teeth, acclimatising to the strange feeling in her body and the alteration of balance required to accommodate the stitches she could feel pulling at her side.
‘Ah,’ Lilith began.
Oh gods, what now?
‘They, regrettably, were quite ruined by the time you arrived here.’ Why did her stomach ache at that? It was only a uniform.
Hadalyn’s uniform. King’s Assassin. Unique only to her.
‘The blood, and the rips, and—’
‘It’s fine, Lilith,’ Arla interrupted, trying to keep the bite from her voice as she pried herself from the maids’ arms whilst they fussed about the room finding her a cardigan and dark leggings that were so soft and warm that she felt sleep press into the edges of her consciousness again.
Had it not been for the gnawing need to find Hark and have him explain what had happened and where they were, she might have succumbed to the darkness where there was comforting emptiness.
Rheia combed through Arla’s hair, gently teasing the knots from the mane of curls so they lay around her shoulders like a golden cape.
Arla didn’t know how the maid was managing to get a comb through what she imagined had been a matted, bloody mess, but her hair smelt clean, so she imagined that somebody had taken the trouble to wash it.
In fact, everything in this starlit room was clean and lovely.
What she had thought was the open night sky was in fact panes of glass supported by thick, pale stone pillars and beautiful wooden beams. She’d never seen architecture like it.
Such an incredible marriage of stone, wood, and glass.
She felt free, and safe, and at peace in such a beautiful room that she was reluctant to leave it when Rheia combed the last knot from her head.
Straightening her weary body and wrapping the cardigan around her so that it nestled against her jaw, Arla breathed deeply, taking in the new smells of … wherever they were.
‘He won’t mind if you wish to rest a little longer,’ Rheia said softly, standing by her twin’s side so that Arla could only tell them apart by the scar on Lilith’s face.
Lilith held out a hand to Arla, a golden brooch in her palm.
Arla swallowed the tears threatening her as she accepted the dragonhart gently.
‘I can rest when I’m dead.’