Chapter 23 #2
‘You tried,’ Ezer breathed, and suddenly she understood why he’d spoken those hurtful words to her the other night. They weren’t about her at all. Not really.
Because when he looked at Ezer … he saw the ghost of Soraya.
It hurt her more than she cared to admit. Was that why, all this time, he’d been drawn to her? Why he’d given her the speaking stone, why he’d tried to train her to fight and wield?
Was she a way for him to fix his mistakes?
She wrapped her arms even tighter around herself, wishing she could fade into the steam.
But that would require walking away from him. To leave him standing here, alone and broken … and she didn’t know if she had the strength to do it.
‘I didn’t try hard enough,’ he said.
She remembered the words he’d uttered to her in the woods, when he’d first empathized with her about losing her uncle. About her own grief. And so she echoed those words back to him now.
‘I understand that to mourn … is to feel half dead yourself.’
His lips parted, like he remembered, too.
‘My magic – my connection to the gods – it has struggled since losing Soraya. She is why I’m not in battle, Ezer.
She is why I’m too weak to fight, a liability if I go to war before it returns.
We grew up together. I had hoped …’ His cheeks reddened.
‘… that maybe she and I would be matched. She made me feel things I didn’t know were possible in this life. She made me feel free.’
Ezer could see the light leave his eyes when he spoke of freedom. It was something the Sacred did not have … and for him, it had died with Soraya.
‘I never told her how I felt. And thank the gods, because they chose Kinlear for her instead.’
A terrible turn of fates.
She imagined it would have been worse than heartbreak, to love someone … and see them end up in the arms of your twin brother.
‘Why did she run?’ Ezer asked. ‘If she was betrothed to Kinlear, wouldn’t she want to stay with him? To be with him, when …’
He locked eyes with her, his gaze searching. ‘He told you, then?’
She nodded.
‘She tried to defect because of Kinlear.’ He spat his brother’s name like a poison.
‘When he finally told her about the illness … Soraya changed. She’d fallen in love with him by then, and she became desperate to save him.
She thought she could find the Acolyte. That she could somehow reason with him, beg him to heal Kinlear with the same power he’d used to bring back the others on the battlefield.
She was distracted. She stopped praying on Allgodsday, stopped showing up for training.
He didn’t see it, for he loved her too much to find fault.
But I knew her inside and out.’ His hands clenched into fists.
‘Soraya had changed. By the time I got to her, I think she’d already chosen to lay down her belief in the gods.
I think … in her heart of hearts, the Soraya I knew and loved was already gone.
She was a talented rider. The best I’ve ever known.
But I think she wanted to fall in battle, to get so close to death that the darksouls would come for her and take her to the Acolyte. ’
He was breathing harder now, lost in his memories of that night.
‘She wouldn’t let me save her. I begged her. I thought she wasn’t thinking clearly, maybe her head had been hit in the fall, but when I tried to haul her away … she did this to me.’ He looked down at his enormous scar.
And suddenly it seemed a thousand times worse, knowing the woman he’d loved had done that to him.
She’d broken him.
‘The wolves closed in when they smelled my blood. My eagle took the brunt of the attacks for me, but there were far too many of them, so … I flew away. Like a coward, I left Soraya behind.’ He released a shaking breath.
‘My eagle passed from her wounds shortly after. And my magic hasn’t been the same since. ’
Gods.
It was too much for anyone to bear.
‘I’m so sorry, Arawn,’ Ezer said. ‘Truly.’
She reached out as if to place a hand on his arm, because no one should have to look so broken. No one should have to suffer heartbreak alone.
But her towel nearly slipped, and she paused, making sure to squeeze it tight around her, not missing how his eyes slid down, then back up to her face again.
She swallowed, despite the dryness in her throat. ‘If you ask me, the gods are fools not to grant your invocations. You did the best you could. It isn’t your fault, what she decided in her heart. What she chose. That fate is hers alone, Arawn.’
‘Sometimes I think they’re punishing me. For not seeing it sooner with Soraya. For not stopping her. I don’t even know how the darkness leached into her soul.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what she came across, who she might have spoken to …’
It was a mystery why people disappeared.
Why even a Sacred, created by the gods, would turn to the shadows. But Ezer had seen it with Zey. Subtle signs at first, and even the night before she fled, with how strange she’d been acting …
Ezer still would not have guessed the Eagleminder would be gone by sunrise.
‘You have to forgive yourself,’ she said, meeting Arawn’s eyes.
He looked pained. ‘I can’t.’
‘Not today,’ Ezer said. ‘Not tomorrow. But at some point, you have to try.’
She knew she wasn’t the first to say it, but maybe she would be a part in his healing. A path to someplace better and brighter.
‘For what it’s worth, you’re a fine man, Arawn Laroux. Soraya was lucky to have your heart for the time that she did.’
He blinked in surprise. And then a hint of relief softened his features as he smiled. ‘Was … was that —’
‘A compliment,’ she said. ‘And one I won’t offer again.’ She sighed. ‘Ervos was always good at giving them. Me, not so much.’
Something flashed behind his eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘That you did not get to reunite with him as you’d hoped.’
‘Hope is a fleeting thing,’ Ezer said. ‘It’s my own fault for thinking I could hold onto it as long as I did.
’ She looked down at the ring on her thumb and added, ‘Sometimes, it’s easier to think about what I could have done to stop him from leaving.
But in the end … fate had its way with him.
And there is nothing I could have done to change that. ’
They fell silent, but for the first time it was not an uncomfortable silence.
And with their backs turned to one another, they agreed to sink into neighboring pools.
The steam rolled between them. She was painfully aware of their discarded towels, the heat in her body that was not entirely from the water temperature. The sound of his sigh as he sank into the pool just behind her.
This is dangerous, Ezer thought to herself, as she leaned back and stared at the steam. Just like your dreams.
He was clearly still in love with Soraya.
And she was clearly a replacement, a project to fill the void of him missing her.
She suddenly felt the urge to fill the silence with something, anything.
‘Six chose me to be her Rider,’ Ezer blurted. ‘She chose me to be the one to carry Kinlear to the Sawteeth.’
‘I know,’ he said, and she could sense the change in his voice. The anger boiling beneath the surface. ‘Kinlear told me.’ A pause, and he added, ‘You’re afraid.’
She huffed out a laugh. ‘Of course I’m afraid. I won’t do it. I can’t.’
He was the only one who truly understood why. He’d guessed her fear of heights long ago, but beyond that … it was more than the heights. It was the promise of dying – terribly – that came with it.
It was entering the Ehver and discovering that no one would be there waiting for her.
That love did not stretch beyond the grave, that her mother and father wouldn’t find her in the Ehver, and she would never know who she was.
She would die a stranger to herself.
The water trickled behind her as he shifted in his own pool. ‘Are you going to run?’
She’d considered it.
But for some reason … she couldn’t imagine walking away from Six.
‘Would you stop me?’
‘No,’ he said, and that surprised her. Some part of it pained her, deep in her gut. ‘I owe you a life debt still, remember?’
She smiled, her chest lightening. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘The life debt.’
‘You’re capable, Minder. I know you are. And I’m grateful.’
‘For what?’ Ezer breathed.
The steam was even thicker now. The heat, too strong.
And his voice had softened even more, so that it made her heart feel strange and heavy, and …
She turned, and he turned at the same time, and they locked eyes through the steam as he said, ‘Thank you for seeing me. For telling me that I am more than my pain. More than my mistakes. And for what it’s worth …
I think you’d make a fine raphon Rider. I think you’d make it to the other side.
And I think hell itself couldn’t hold you down from making it back. ’
She smiled. And then he cleared his throat as the servant arrived again, saw them seated there with locked gazes and quickly turned right back around.