Chapter 53
My consciousness lands softly back in the waking world. My head is still cradled in Kaelis’s lap. He is slumped over me, his hands resting on my chest where he placed the Hanged Man. I’ve a second to appreciate his long, full lashes as they rest against his high cheeks before his eyes flutter open.
My love. The words he said in the vision echo back to me. They are there in his gaze.
An overwhelmingly delightful sensation crashes over me. But it quickly vanishes as cold realization settles in. Nausea overwhelms me, and I scramble upright, bringing a hand to my mouth.
“That life…” It should have been mine. I look to Kaelis, who wears a somber expression, as if he, too, has been sick over the idea of all that was taken from us. “I should’ve been with you—you should’ve been my first love, not Liam. Your jealousy from my own Chalice trial…”
“I was faced with the man who stole you from me. The stand-in for where I should have been.” There is gravel to his words.
A slight snarl in the back of his throat.
He swings his legs off the side of the bed and stands, walking to the window.
Even though hours passed in the vision, it was a fraction of the time in reality.
The last vestiges of light still hang on the horizon, as golden as the magic of the World.
I can see his faded reflection in the glass as it grows serious and somber.
“I’ve spent years chasing the World. Even before I knew what it was, it called to me.
This place called to me. I fought, and I told myself I did it for answers, then for power, or for revenge. But I think it was always for you.”
The words strike me so hard that I nearly topple back onto the bed.
I close my eyes to try to steel myself, but it’s pointless; he’s there, too.
His memories are now my own, dancing behind my lids.
The life we could’ve had…the kingdom we could build and all the good we could do with it…
the love that should have been as easy as breathing.
As effortless as the first meeting we were denied.
I take a timid step forward, immediately stopping. There’s a tether that yanks me away from him, almost violently. It’s directly opposite of a pull toward him, of that phantom string that was severed years ago.
“You think I am your destiny?” I whisper.
Kaelis turns and meets my eyes. Is he shocked that I would doubt?
“You are my destiny and my desire. Even the power of an ancient relic couldn’t keep us apart, for here we are.” He speaks without hesitation. There is no false pretense or show of arrogance. This is Kaelis, as unvarnished and vulnerable as I’ve ever seen him.
“What if you’re wrong?” I whisper. “What if this isn’t fate?
What if the Chalice itself was our fate, and you’re nothing more than obsessed with the idea of something that might have been—possessed by the notion that you have been wronged or cheated from something that should never have been yours? ”
“It should have been mine.” His voice rises a fraction, sharpening. Kaelis looks away, hands balling into fists before relaxing. “I was born to sit on the throne. I was born to have this kingdom. But it was all taken from me…just like you were taken from me.”
“What if I don’t want this? What if I don’t want you?” The words are panicked and hasty, like a dagger clumsily wielded by a woman backed into a corner.
Kaelis doesn’t flinch. He’s not afraid of me, or my anger; he never has been.
“That fear has kept me up at night when I lie awake, alone. But then I see you and I know.” He takes a step toward me, then another, voice softening with each movement.
“I don’t blame you for doubting me—or doubting yourself.
The Chalice doesn’t just take what could have been, it poisons what’s left.
We are all moving within the void created by sundering ourselves from our fate. Aimless. Pointless.”
A shiver runs through me, and I wrap my arms around myself, thinking it might steady me. But it doesn’t.
I can’t look at him when I speak next, as though I’m betraying us both. “Am I even myself? Am I real at all?”
“Clara—”
“You said the World remakes people, too. What if I was somehow remade for you?”
“Clara.” My name is firmer.
“Or what if your obsession with this ‘destiny’ is what brought us together?” I look back to him, eyes stinging, every rib in knots.
“Do I…” I can’t bring myself to say love.
Not when my feelings hardly feel like my own.
“Do I care for you at all? Or am I simply possessed to? Told by fate? Is any choice really my own?”
“Clara, stop.” His hands land on my shoulders, and Kaelis ducks slightly to look me right in the eyes.
“These questions are ones that the sages and prophets and so-called holy seers have been asking of the tarot for years. Maybe all we are is our destiny. Or maybe we mold destiny to our will with every shuffle of the deck. Either way, we’re still us.
As long as we breathe, I believe that the truth of who we are is an immutable force. ”
“What truth is that?” I laugh, hollow and haunted.
“I’ve spent my entire life hating you—thinking you were the bane of my existence.
All because the Chalice deemed it so? Because it removed the path where you and I met and fell in love?
Did it make me loathe you so I wouldn’t love you? What choice did we really have?”
His silence is deafening, as heavy as the visions in the forefront of my mind. For a moment, I think he might release me in frustration or disappointment. But he only holds me tighter, hands quivering as if actively fighting to refrain from pulling me to him.
“I have asked myself the same thing, over and over, but the only path we have is forward. The only guiding light we have is our belief in what we are destined for. And when my doubt is at its greatest, I remember the look on your face when we first met. How defiant you were. The fire in your eyes every time you stood up to me. The way you refused to bend for me that only made me want you all the more. That is undeniable. That is you.”
I want to believe him. But the longer I think about everything he showed me and all the implications of it, the more I am thrown off-balance.
The room is suddenly too small, the air too thick.
For the first time, I think that maybe the power of the World isn’t meant for mortal hands. It all seems like too much.
“Why didn’t you tell me all this sooner?”
“Would you have believed me?” We both know the answer to that.
“Would you have allowed me to show you?” Also an obvious answer.
“I told you the truth—as much as I was able and thought you could handle, that wouldn’t push you further from me—from the very beginning.
I told you my intention for the World and the wish I would make.
Which was never a lie. I want to make things better for us all, and the only way I can do that is by reclaiming the future that was stolen from me.
From us.” A pause. A breath slowly sucked in through quivering lips.
“But I cannot be the one to make that wish.”
Every muscle in me goes slack when I realize what he’s saying. The second card he sacrificed—the vision of him getting the World and making the wish: He destroyed that future.
“You can’t be serious,” I breathe.
“You.” The single word has desperation and hope wrapped within it.
The way he looks at me is as though I am the World.
“It must be you, Clara. My father has never been afraid of me handling the golden cards, of my ambitions for the throne, because he thinks that I am helpless to change my fate. I know what I gave up in my bones, and I told him as much. But you can still make the wish.”
I can’t stop myself from laughing. Kaelis leans away, brow furrowing.
“All this time…I’ve been plotting, and scheming, and planning.
I’ve been calculating alternatives and thinking of what I might need to do—just in case you are not the man I thought you were.
I was unsure if I could ever bear to put the World in your hands.
Debating if I wanted to take it for myself. And for what?”
“Fate has quite the sense of humor.” He wears a wry smile, but it is twinged with pain at the confession. Though there is an understanding in his eyes. I haven’t hidden, at any moment, the doubt I felt in him.
“So what do you want from me? To make your wish for you? To turn myself back into the version of me you saw in your previous futures?”
He shakes his head, hands relaxing their grip on my shoulders. One trails down my arm while the other rises to my cheek. He brushes his knuckles gently over my skin, leaving a warm flush in their wake. Kaelis’s expression softens into something mournful.
“I wish I could say yes,” he whispers. “Because it is what a part of me wants, more than anything. But to say yes would be to deny everything I love about you. Your tenacity. Your rebellious spirit. All I want for you, Clara, is to have a choice. The one the Chalice denied me but that is still within your reach. The choice to be whomever you want—to make whatever future you desire. All I hope is that when you make that choice, it is the best one you can, with all the information possible. And, selfishly, that I might still find a place at your side in that future.”
For a moment, the anger falters. The choice—the opportunity to build my own future is something I’ve been chasing my whole life but that has always been just beyond my grasp.
Every step I’ve taken, every decision made, has been shaped by forces beyond me.
Forces as inexorable as the rising of the sun or the changing of the moon.
“If you believe one thing, believe this: It has never been about me, Clara; this has always been about you.”
My breath catches in my throat, and I nearly choke on everything I want to say.
Everything I can’t say. Something inside me snaps, almost audibly, and I finally break.
Every wall shatters. Everything I’ve ever denied, or pretended didn’t exist, is gone.
I close the distance between us in a blur, take his face with both hands, and pull it toward me.
Kaelis tenses initially in surprise under my touch.
I’m not sure if he even has time to close his eyes before our mouths meet.
But he recovers quickly, one arm wrapping around my waist, the other bracing between my shoulder blades and reaching up into my hair.
He clutches me to him with breathless desperation.
The kiss is a confession and a question. An admission and a denial. Our bodies were made to fit together, mouths made like puzzle pieces, tongues made to dance. It is raw. It is real. It is fragile and yet stronger than the pull of the moon on the tides.
When I finally break away, he sucks in a shuddering breath. Kaelis stares, eyes filled with something I’m too afraid to name.