Chapter Eleven #2
Leaving Sol frowning after her, she ran up the stairs to their bedroom and closed the door behind her.
For several long chimes, she stood there, her back against the door, breathing deep and struggling for some sense of calm.
She reached up to her neck and lifted the gold-and-amber pendant Father Nivane had given her from its hiding place in her bodice.
Curling her fingers tight around the sun-shaped disc, she knelt beside her bed and began to pray.
In the deepest levels of Boura Fell, Elfeya lay naked in the arms of her mate on the dirt floor of his cage.
She had raised herself up on her elbows so she could look at his beloved face, searching the blessed lucidity of his green eyes.
He was still there with her, completely rational and whole for the moment. Thank the gods.
?The Great Sun rises in your eyes, beloved.
? His voice sounded in her mind, gentle, loving.
The phrase was an old Feyan euphemism for “I love you,” her mate’s favorite because it played on the golden color of her eyes.
Once, so many, many years ago, the woman would have smiled when her shei’tan said those words.
Now they made tears tremble on her lashes.
She blinked, and the tears fell like raindrops on the pale flesh of his chest, tiny pools of salty wetness that mingled with the saltier wetness of perspiration.
These last bells the Evil One had granted them had not gone to waste.
Even knowing that such beneficence was a prelude to horrors beyond imagining, once Elfeya had breached that first barrier of fear and given in to instinct and temptation, she and her mate had made no further attempt to deny themselves the slightest pleasure of their bond.
Despite the leering eyes of their guards, watching as Elden guards had always watched across the centuries, she and her mate had shared each touch, each caress, without shame.
There was little to live for but these brief flashes of pleasure in an eternity of darkness.
Perhaps that was why she wept.
Better to think it was that than memories of freedom and joyous love. Those memories only gave the Evil One a doorway to their souls.
She closed her eyes as her shei’tan’s hand cupped her cheek.
In a gesture Elfeya knew as well as she knew the beating of her own heart, he thumbed away her tears.
She brought her hand up, her slender fingers caressing the greater masculine strength of his.
Sensitive fingertips traced the slight roughness of his skin, the hard length of bone beneath the veil of flesh, the smoothness of nail beds with their ragged edges.
So strong, and yet so fragile. He was a creature of vast power, as was she, but they were both housed in delicate cages of living flesh and brittle bone that had been brought to the edge of death countless times over the last millennium.
Even now, despite these few bells of sanity, she knew he danced the razor’s edge of madness.
The vast power to which he’d been born had been made even vaster by the unholy experiments of the Evil One, but it had come at a terrible price.
Gods save the world if ever those sel’dor manacles came free.
Her fingers curved around his hand, fingertips roving lightly over his palm, over the rent flesh still bleeding from his attack on the barbed sel’dor bars of his cage. She turned her face to his palm and kissed the many small, deep wounds.
?If I am your sun, beloved, then you are my world.
But for you, I am a light shining with no purpose in the dark.
? They needed no Spirit woven between them to speak.
As bonded truemates, their souls and thoughts were one.
Sel’dor could not isolate them, though they had worked diligently to hide that fact.
Despite the countless secrets the Evil One had wrung from their screaming, tortured bodies, this was one of the handful of truths they had kept to themselves.
It was a small enough thing. Not nearly as important as the other secrets they had kept.
?Feel my light, shei’tan. Feel my love.?
She drew in a breath and went to that other place, the hazily distant place where she floated in a sea of numbness.
There, the pain of sel’dor was but a vague twinge, scarcely felt, as she wove invisible strands of healing Earth and sent them into her truemate’s damaged hands, softly stealing away his pain though she dared not heal his wounds.
The wounds on his hands were small enough that she knew she could heal them, but the Evil One would know she had.
They could still weave magic, though there were limits to what they could do before the pain became unbearable.
They had tested those limits many times over the last ten centuries, even expanded them, though only once had they managed to work significant magic.
Only that once had they managed to suppress the immutable shei’tanitsa instinct to ensure each other’s survival and brought themselves near the brink of death to spin their weaves.
The Evil One had suspected something, of course, when the child had disappeared. But not enough. Not the truth. He had been secure in his knowledge that shei’tanitsa bound them as securely as the sel’dor piercing their bodies. But that once they had managed to thwart him.
?Does she still live free, beloved?? She’d not asked the question in years, but he would know. He was bound to the child through threads of the Evil One’s blackest magic.
?Aiyah. She comes into her power.?
Though Elfeya had suspected as much since Vadim Maur’s visit to her bedchamber-prison, the cold hand of fear still clutched at her heart.
?How much has she revealed?? Once the Evil One discovered the child’s true abilities, nothing would save them from his fury.
Elfeya remembered in vivid, agonizing detail the years of torture she and her mate had been subjected to when the Elden servant, in whose mind they had implanted unalterable commands woven with Spirit, escaped the High Mage’s palace with her precious burden.
That agony would pale in comparison to what he would do when he discovered the full extent of their deception.
?Only a little, but with her even a little is more than enough.?
?How is that possible? Our weave should never have failed so soon.?
?Her power is vast, Elfeya. Even unbound, we could never have hoped to hold it back for long.?
She raised her head and looked into the beloved bright green depths of her truemate’s eyes.
Once, countless lifetimes ago, she had been the greatest healer in the Fading Lands, a shei’dalin without equal.
When she met him, he had been a legendary Fey warrior only one or two souls away from becoming dahl’reisen, a dark, dread lord whose steel had tasted the blood of millions, whose incredible soul had staggered and would have fallen beneath the weight of the hundreds of thousands of lives he had claimed had not her strength and her love brought him back from the edge of the abyss.
Together, they had been the strongest matepair seen since ancient times, representing the greatest concentration of power in all the Fading Lands, more powerful in their oneness than even a Tairen Soul, though without the ability to summon the Change.
And all that power, all that strength, had been captured in a single moment when the Elden Mages took her in an ambush.
A knife to her throat, a single slice into her vulnerable flesh, and the man who’d once been the Fading Lands’ greatest warrior surrendered his steel and walked willingly into captivity.
The High Mage had kept them alive because they were useful to him, strong and powerful creatures upon which to test his vile experiments. But when he realized exactly what they’d helped escape from his grasp, no amount of experimentation would make up for his loss.
?If he knows . . .? She could not even complete the thought.
?Then we die, Elfeya. If we’re lucky.?
There were far worse things than death, as both of them were now intimately aware, but still her eyes closed against a swell of fear and denial.
Though she could have embraced her own death freely, nothing in the world could make her willingly embrace his.
He was her shei’tan, her beloved, the half of her soul that she must protect at all costs.
She would suffer any torment to ensure his survival.
Elfeya guided her truemate’s hand to her breast and leaned down to kiss him. “Love me, Shan,” she whispered against his mouth. “As if it were the first time. As if it were the last.”
“Always,” he vowed.
She took Shan into her body as so long ago she had taken him into her soul.
Wholly and without reservation. As their bodies and souls entwined, the words of an ancient Fey warrior’s creed came to her mind.
Live well. Love deep. Tomorrow, we die. Never had she appreciated it more than at this moment.
She smiled into her beloved’s eyes and laughed as if they were free, because she knew it brought him joy.
They could not fight. They could not win. But with each moment left for them to live, they could love. That was the greatest gift the gods could ever give, and it was worth the price they would have to pay.
As the coach wound through the cobbled streets towards Celieria’s royal palace, Rain took Ellysetta’s hand and placed something in it that sent a tingle up her arm.
She glanced down and caught her breath. The rich golden light of the setting sun gleamed and sparkled like magic across the heavy, incredibly beautiful bracelet in her hand.