Chapter 19
The last of the climb was the worst of it, a near vertical scramble through moss that came away wet in her hands and mist that closed behind them like a door. Lechuza pulled herself over the lip of stone, and the forest simply stopped.
The hollow opened in front of her. A rock face rose out of the green, dark and streaming, and a spring came from a cleft in it to gather in a pool so still it looked like poured glass.
The canopy laced shut overhead and let down only a soft, underwater light.
The air was cool and close and smelled of wet stone.
There was no sound but the water and, somewhere above, the dry shift of wings.
She knew it before she finished standing up.
She had never been here. She was as certain of that as she was of her own name, and she knew the place anyway, the cold coming off the pool, the way the light fell, the exact angle of the cleft where the water was born.
The knowing sat under her ribs, older than memory, and it frightened her worse than the climb had.
"I've been here." Flash's voice behind her, quiet and strange.
She turned. He stood at the edge of the hollow with his head tipped back, looking up through the gap in the canopy at the scrap of pale sky, his face open in a way she rarely saw it.
"I used to look at the stars from right here. I don't...that doesn't make any sense."
It made every kind of sense, and that was the problem.
Above them, the owls began to wake. Dozens of them, pale shapes she hadn't separated from the rock until they moved, white owls folded into the cliff with their faces turned toward her.
Most birds caught close to humans in a sudden appearance would have taken flight.
Instead, they watched her, a whole cliff of fierce round eyes fixed on her and nothing else, and the wrongness of it lifted the hair on her arms, because animals did not look at a stranger that way.
One of them dropped off the high rock on silent wings, swift and sure, hovering in front of her, wings beating slow and wide, close enough that the wash of air off them moved her hair.
She stopped breathing. The owl was the shape she wore in the deep places, the white owl she became when she crossed over, made small and silver, every feather edged like worked metal, its eyes the amber of a low sun.
In its talons it carried the totem. She understood with a certainty that it had been keeping this for her.
That it had been keeping it a very long time.
She lifted her hand.
The owl lowered the last few inches, opened its claws, and let the totem drop into her palm. Then it rose, folded back up the rock face, and was a pale shape among pale shapes again.
The effigy was warm. Warm the way nothing five centuries old had any right to be.
The moment her fingers closed around it, something closed around her.
The sense of a wing folding over her, of being held inside something vast, patient and on her side, something that had stood at her back so long it had become part of her.
She'd spent her whole life refusing to need anyone at her back.
Here was proof that something had been there the entire time, whether she allowed it or not.
Then the hollow filled, overlaying her present view with a past she couldn’t have known. The same pool, the same cliff, the same down-sifting light, and laid over all of it Quri’s sanctuary, alive with the only person allowed access.
The flat stone was still warm from the day's sun as she approached him, her bare feet silent on the warm, packed earth.
He sat there, a puzzling, dull metal object open across his knees, its surfaces catching the last of the light.
Her people worked gold and reddish bronze, metals that glowed once polished.
He tilted it upward, not at the fading horizon, but at the first stars pricking the deepening indigo of the sky.
His mouth was moving, shaping words that were just sound to her, a foreign cadence that flowed with the same rhythm as the water slipping by the stones.
That was what struck her first, under everything else, the profound strangeness of a man whose language meant nothing to her, but whose meaning she understood completely.
He turned his face toward her, and in the gathering dusk, she saw the same quiet awe in his eyes that mirrored her own.
He gestured to the object in his lap, then to the sky above.
His fingers moved over the intricate rings and markings, pointing out constellations she knew by other names.
She understood. He navigated by these lights.
She crouched at the water's edge, the cool dampness seeping into the hem of her tunic.
With one finger, she drew in the dirt, not the bright points of light, but the dark shapes between them, the sacred voids that formed the llama, the serpent, the fox.
Her people read the night in its shadows.
He leaned over, dousing the light falling across her hand, and went utterly still.
His wonder touched her then, a silent, resonant hum that matched the one in her own chest.
The rest of it came to her slowly, the change in the air right before a storm breaks.
It was in the set of his shoulders, the way his gaze would sometimes drift toward the valleys below, a shadow passing over his face.
He came from the men who burned with fire and steel, and he wasn’t the same man who had appeared on horseback.
The armor, the orders, and the brutality he was forced into is what cut his strings.
This love between them was impossible, a forbidden thing that could mean death for them both, yet she couldn’t stop wanting him.
He drew on her with a magnetic quality that was timeless, and a love that felt as boundless as the sky he showed her, until the only oath he had left was one he had never dared to speak aloud.
The last time he took her hand. His was calloused from rope and sword, but his touch was gentle, stirring everything in her heart and body.
He pressed something small and hard into her palm and closed her fingers over it.
When she opened them, a small bird carved from pale wood lay there.
It was clumsy, the wings too thick, the head a little wrong.
An owl. His attempt at one. He looked down at their joined hands, then back at her, and he said her name.
It was the only two words he had ever learned, and he said Quri Killa the way other men said their prayers, as if it were the most sacred thing he had ever held on his tongue.
Lechuza came out of the vision with her hand clenched, recognizing the worn grain, the too thick wings, the wrong head.
The owl on her nightstand, the pale wood she'd carried her whole life and never once been able to leave behind and never known why.
His. He'd carved it. She'd been holding his vow in the dark her entire life and her throat tightened.
She hadn't been alone in any of it. Flash had been there the whole way through, his love pouring down the bond with the Veil's strange current under it.
He'd stood in the vision as the man at the pool.
She'd stood in it as the woman in the dirt.
When she turned to him his face had gone the color of the stone.
"That wasn't an echo." Her voice didn't sound like hers. "The others felt like stories. Someone else's. This was my own skin." She looked at Fly. "Tell me these are memories. Tell me I'm not imagining it."
Fly's eyes moved over her, over Flash, over the owls on the cliff and the silver bird in her hand.
"I wish I could tell you with confidence what you want to know, Killa.
But there's not enough data yet for me to form an answer, and I won't guess.
I swear, the second I have something, you two will be the first to know. "
The heartbreak that had been building struck without warning.
The beauty of it broke over her all at once, two people who'd had nothing in common but the stars and found each other anyway.
Two people who'd loved across a war, a communication barrier, the whole width of the world and never gotten one ordinary day.
No years. No old age by a fire. He'd carved her a clumsy owl, said her name like a prayer, and then it had all gone to blood and dark.
She pressed her hand over her mouth and the sob tore out anyway, and then another, helpless and ugly, five centuries of grief spilling out.
Flash reached her before she folded. He didn't tell her it was all right, because it wasn't and he knew it.
He put himself around her the way the man at the pool had leaned over her hand.
This feels like us. The sensation of truth shimmered out of reach, traveling through their bond.
They stood in the humming hollow with the owls watching and carried the weight and the horror of it between them.
When it eased enough to let her speak, she pulled back, wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and made herself think like an operator again.
North. His sitrep had come through the night before, and it had been hope, real hope. Her own grin broke when the team's relief flooded the bond. But Twister had said, four days. Fewer now. Nathaniel Locklear was on borrowed time.
"We go for the bundle," she said. "Now. Today."
Fly's head came up. "Killa. You just lived a vision that's five centuries old, and you're still shaking. The bundle will be worse. I don't think either of you should put a hand on another artifact until you've slept and eaten, and I've had a day with this."