Chapter 3 Ayden
Despite the unforgiving cave floor, I slept deeply. And in that space between rousing and the last moments of sleep, one final dream came into my mind.
Kingdom soldiers fanned out among the trees, arrows nocked, bows ready. Scouts stretched for miles in every direction, trudging slowly through the brush.
“Here!” a shout rang out.
The line collapsed as uniformed men encircled a prone form.
“Fire!” a man yelled.
Bowstrings twanged.
Arrows thwacked.
A man screamed, then his voice died on the wind. It sounded so familiar. I could almost . . .
Declan.
He threw off his blanket and staggered to his feet, then fell to his knees as arrows slammed into his shoulder, then his side, then his stomach.
He stared ahead, seeing but not, as blood poured from his wounds and leaked from his mouth.
Frantic, I searched for something, anything, I could do to help.
I wanted to run to him, to wrap my arms around him and block the blows that continued to fall.
But I wasn’t there.
I was an unseen observer, consigned to the trees where time and space did not exist. I was helpless as my love withered and died.
I screamed, “No! Declan! Spirits, help me, please!”
I jolted awake, scrambling from beneath the blanket and off the bedroll, gasping for air, as tears fell in bitter streams down my face. I stumbled across the cavern to where the water flowed and doused my face in its icy breath.
“Lordling?” Declan’s groggy voice followed me to the brook.
He was by my side before I could rise from my crouch. His arms wrapped around me, and his hand brushed my hair back like my mother so often had when I was a child.
“What is it, Ayden? What happened?”
An awkward laugh escaped. “I had a dream, a nightmare, that’s all. It startled me awake. I’m fine.”
Declan sat on the stone and pulled me into him, kissing my cheek and burying my head in his warmth. “I’ve got you, little lordling. You’re okay now.”
I laughed, a muffled sound with my mouth smothered by his chest.
“What now?” he asked.
“Lordling? Really? You’re never going to stop calling me that, are you?”
He smiled and smoothed my hair again. His touch granted more peace than any priest could muster. “You’re my little lordling.”
“Great. So that’s a yes? I’m stuck with that nickname?”
I was torn between kissing the cute smugness from his face and marveling at the stunning man sitting there, comforting me, wanting me.
Declan was so many things I would never be, and yet, he had spent much of his life doubting his own worth.
I wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him, shake sense into his thick skull, shout to the world how amazing and brilliant and wonderful he was.
But in that moment, all I could do was smile a goofy, boyish grin at the way his eyes sparkled—for me.
“Yep. Until you tire of me.”
I sat back and held his gaze. “I just won you over, and Spirits, that took a lifetime’s worth of work. Already thinking about a time when I’m gone?”
He lifted one brow. “You were quite the arse when we first met.”
I shoved him back and made to rise, but darkness suddenly clouded his eyes, and his head lowered.
“Dec, what is it?” I crossed my legs facing him and lifted his chin.
He blew out a sigh, then he sat silently so long I feared he might not answer.
“It’s this mission. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone . . . and we just . . . I just . . .”
I laughed.
His head cocked to the side.
“You’re not going to lose me over some mission. I’ll just go with you. You know they never send just one Ranger anywhere. Two are more likely to succeed, where one might be waylaid or killed. Was that not one of our first lessons?”
Declan nodded slowly, then spoke even more so. “It was, but . . . this is different.”
“How so?” I crossed my arms.
He sighed again. “Ayden, I want to tell you . . . to tell you everything, but this isn’t some trek through the forest to find a bandit hideout. The whole of Melucia could rest on . . .”
I waited for him to go on, to tell me what hung in the balance and how one man could stave off that disaster, but he only stared at hands that fidgeted in his lap.
“Talk to me, Dec. Let me help you. You know you can trust me.”
He looked up, and whatever haunted his eyes stilled my tongue.
“Ayden, this is beyond you and me. I don’t know . . . There’s no way I’ll be enough to do . . . whatever it is they want me to. I’m not even sure where I’m going or how all this will work, but I swore . . . I swore to Atikus and the Arch Mage—”
“The Arch Mage?” My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. “As in the Arch Mage? The high man of magic himself? When have you talked to him? We’ve been on this damn mountain.”
“Atikus . . . he and . . . shit, I don’t know. This all happened so fast and . . . Ayden . . . the last thing I want is to leave you right when . . . when we’re just starting to . . . fuck. I have to do this. I just have to.”
I watched him struggle, his fingers a blur of movement and his eyes darting around, never settling on anything nearby—and not on me. When it was clear he wasn’t going to say more, I spoke.
“You still haven’t given me a reason why I can’t go with you. Do you not want—”
Declan’s hands shot forward and grabbed me by my shoulders. “I want you with me, now and always. Can you not see that? But you can’t go where I’m going. I’m not even allowed to tell you where it is. Hells, I don’t even know myself.”
This made no sense. How could he go on a mission to a location he didn’t know to accomplish a task he was unsure he even understood? Missions required clarity and definition. They needed an objective even the simplest mind could grasp.
This—blundering forward with a blindfold—this was insanity.
“I know this sounds nuts,” he said, reading my mind. “But I have to try. I need you to trust me.”
“Spirits, Dec, I do trust you, more than anyone, but this mission is reckless. It’s like diving off a boat into the middle of the ocean to find the bottom. You’re just going to drown.”
I stood and began pacing by the brook. I was so exasperated by this obtuse mission—and by his refusal to tell me what was going on—that I wanted to throw something or shout.
“Maybe,” he said so quietly I had to stop pacing to hear. “Maybe you could come with me, just to this next, um, waypoint.”
I dropped to my knees and locked eyes with him.
“You have to swear to never tell anyone about this place or the, um, thing you see there,” he told me.
I scrunched my brow. “Thing? Can you be more specific?”
“Not really, but not because I don’t want to be. I just . . . I don’t even know what to expect. It’s a . . . magical thing.”
“Magic.” I let my head fall into my hands. “Always fucking magic.”
His hand found my shoulder and squeezed.
“What do they expect you to do with magic?” I hadn’t meant to sound harsh, but there it was. “You’re Mute, Dec, just like me. We can’t see magic, sense it, feel it, or use it. Magic may as well not exist, because to us, it doesn’t. Please tell me they’re not sending you on some mission to—”
“I can’t tell you about the mission.”
He’d opened the door to escorting him further but slammed it shut on anything more.
“Fine. Just great.” Now I was the one sighing. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be—”
“A lordling?”
His mouth twisted somewhere between a smirk and triumphant grin.
“I fucking hate you, Declan Rea,” I said, dropping down, grabbing him roughly, and planting a kiss on his lips.
He laughed through the kiss.
When we pulled apart, his smile was a brilliant full moon on a cloudless night.
“Hate you, too, little lordling.”
“I’m guessing we’re about an hour away,” Declan said, peering down at the Mage’s map.
“You still haven’t told me where we’re going, or what’s waiting for us when we get there.”
Wind whistled through the trees, as naked branches bowed to winter’s rule. The forest canopy was little more than a bramble above our heads, revealing a cloudy gray sky pregnant with far worse than a stiff breeze.
Still, the air was crisp and clean, and I breathed deeply, enjoying a moment of rest.
Declan stared at the parchment a moment longer, then carefully folded it and stuffed it back into his cloak.
Slowly, his head lifted. In that emerald gaze, I saw a man straining beneath some unseen burden.
Sadness wafting off him churned my gut, and I longed to cradle him in my arms until it all passed.
But it would not pass.
“I made a vow,” he said quietly. “If I tell you . . . if you know . . . I can’t stand the idea of putting you in danger. That’s what’s killing me right now, Ayden.”
I tried to smile. “We’re sitting on a mountain in the center of two nations likely to be at war once spring comes. There are scouts everywhere, and none of that accounts for the forest’s usual welcome for outsiders. Dec, we’re already in danger. What’s a little more?”
I’d meant it all as a jest, a way to lighten the mood or break whatever tension had welled between us, but Declan’s face was granite, his eyes stone.
“This is different,” he said, and his voice chilled the marrow in my bones.
“This is Mage business, something neither of us has any right—or sound reason—to be involved with; but the Arch Mage tasked Atikus with a mission he couldn’t fulfill, and he passed it on to me. My oath is to magic itself, to the Phoenix herself.”
I blinked a few times, struggling to grasp the superstitious nonsense now flowing out of Declan’s mouth.
I knew he didn’t believe in the legend of the Phoenix.
Sure, we all recognized the power of Gifts, but to say they came from some long-dead bird?
It was all religious rubbish, and we both knew it.
But Declan did not waver.
His jaw was set.
His eyes remained fixed.
“You’re serious,” I said, unsure how to respond.
He nodded slowly. “Melucia can’t win a war, not with the Kingdom. You know as well as I do, their military outnumbers us at least ten to one.”
“We have never needed a military. We are the world’s bankers and shopkeepers. Without us, nations starve. Why would they attack?”