I’ll Not Take a Man’s Wings While He Sleeps
i’ll not take a man’s wings while he sleeps
—THERAEL
The chains feel heavier than they should be.
We walk toward the meadow with the spelled star-iron coiled over my forearm.
Damon walks a pace behind me, silent for once, his feathered jacket drawn tight against the winter chill.
Neither of us has spoken since we crossed back through the veil.
There’s nothing to say that the weight of the iron isn’t already saying.
We have it, I keep thinking. We have it now. Between Damon’s mark drawn over Sage’s heart and these chains, we can fight the pull of the curse. I never thought we’d have to travel three realms deep to find them. Every hour we were gone, I felt a wrongness gnawing at me.
I step out of the trees, and my mind simply refuses to believe what I’m seeing. The putrid scent of copper weaves through the sweet green of the meadow.
“No,” I hear myself say. “No, no, no—”
The chains slip from my forearm, clattering uselessly at my feet. The very thing we went three realms to find is meaningless.
I’m on my knees beside him, with no recollection of how I got here. I have seen battlefields, I have created winters that buried armies, and nothing has ever struck me like the sight of this boy laid open in the dark.
“Ashán.” My hands hover, terrified of what I’ll feel if I touch him. “Ashán, can you hear me?”
He barely stirs.
“RUNAK!” I scream into the sky. My magic snaps like a frozen branch.
A tempest swirls violently above the meadow, clouding the stars in a bruised, violet-black mass that churns so low it feels like the heavens are trying to crush the earth.
The wind turns into a scream. Frost claws its way up the grass, freezing the pools of blood into red crystal lakes.
“Brother, let’s get him inside,” Damon whispers. “We can see his wounds better in the light.”
The air in front of us distorts, tearing open.
The scent of something that has been waiting motionless in brackish water fills the eye of the storm.
Runak steps onto the frozen clover with his typical predatory stillness.
He is built like something the rivers made and never finished domesticating.
His face is concealed behind a pale bone mask, leaving only his eyes visible.
And those eyes are completely cold and flat, tracking the scene around us with the calculated efficiency of a soldier.
“Therael.” He nods. “Rein it in. I can’t work in a blizzard.”
I want to scream at him and ask where he’s been. Three weeks chasing that shaen? tower that will never let him reach it, while my boys bleed into the dirt. (Damned)
Damon curls his fingers around my shoulder, sending a gentle wave of his magic through my body.
Runak did not have to come, I remind myself. He felt my call across the realms, and left her—the only thing he wants in any world—to help. The blizzard fights me, settling one snowflake at a time. Eventually, the wind dulls to a low moan.
His heavy boots crunch on the grass, his movements shockingly quiet for a male of his size.
Devoid of any wasted emotion, he lowers himself onto one knee in the bloodied frost, his broad hand settling against Ashán’s spine, between his ruined shoulders.
Beneath the edge of the mask, his throat moves once.
A slow swallow. Damon’s eyes flick to mine and then away.
He has never once removed his mask in a place that smells like this.
I used to believe it was for the dying, so the last thing they see isn’t a predator’s jaws.
I know better now. The mask was never for them.
“Hm,” he hums.
“Runak.”
“Quiet,” he commands. “Secure his head.”
His eyes have gone somewhere inward, the leashed thing inside him stirring dangerously close beneath the surface. I have always been able to feel the hunger that comes with this half of his work, the apex he holds on a chain shorter than any of us could manage.
“He’s going into shock. Do you see that?” He points to a particularly mangled section of Ashán’s flesh. “That’s stalled clean at the threshold. Too far gone to mend itself, too bound in that curse to let go.” He lifts his hand. “I can close him—make the flesh obey and force the knit. He’ll live.”
The first breath of relief rushes into my chest.
“But hear me first. I close this, and I close it for good. The way it’s tearing him now, the way it keeps trying to grow back and failing—I put a stop to all of it.
” He holds my eyes, unblinking, making certain I understand.
“His wings may not come back, Therael. Ever. If I close this flesh, the boy probably never flies again.”
The meadow goes silent, and Ashán makes a small, broken sound beside us. My chest tightens.
Keep the wings, or stop the agony.
Runak waits patiently.
“It’s not my choice to make,” he says quietly. “It’s his. Theirs.” His flat gaze cuts to Ashán. “So somebody had best wake him up. Because I’ll not take a man’s wings while he sleeps.”
I sink lower to the ground, gathering him into my lap, running my fingers over his blood-soaked shadow hair. “Ashán, my son,” I whisper, my voice cracking. “I need to know what you want me to do.”
Damon’s grip on my shoulder tightens.
Ashán’s eyelids flutter, the black void of his eyes dull and lifeless. “What—ever… keeps h-her safe—”