Chapter 40 The Captain’s Cabin #2
“Tell Dev to bring the ironmages but please be wary,” he said. “They may be weak, but they are still powerful and they still serve the king. They cannot be trusted. They can never be trusted.”
He slipped his good hand into his waistcoat pocket and slid out the pendant that usually hung around his neck. I looked down at the small, wooden figure carved in the shape of a bird.
“Your hawk,” I said softly.
“Not a hawk,” he said. “A raven.”
I gasped.
The House WoodRaven.
Suns. The days when my heart did not break.
“It may help tomorrow,” he said. “Though I am not sure of anything anymore.”
My eyes stung as, with one hand, he slipped it over my head.
“Thank you, Aro’el,” he said. “For believing I was a better man. Perhaps, in some other life, I could have been.”
He drew his hand from the nape of my neck, but I caught it and pressed it onto my cheek. Skin against skin, the Aro’el scar sizzled with power, heat crackling between us. My heart hammered. Broken and racing all at once.
“I cannot be what you want,” he said.
“Be what you are.”
“I do not know what I am.” His voice was low, raw. “I cannot even fly as I should. The bones are gone.”
He lifted his wrist, the bandage wrapped tight where his hand had once been. My chest ached. He had suffered this, had not fled, because I had disobeyed him. Because I had put myself in Ilvalour’s sights. Because of me.
“You’re still you,” I said.
His eyes burned. “What is a hawk without a wing?”
“Still a hawk,” I said.
I laid my hand across the stump. He gasped—pain, surprise, maybe both. The sound pierced me deeper than any blade. Chimeric flared under my fingers, a hiss of light and heat, and I searched his face, desperate for permission, pleading for hope.
“I can knit this,” I whispered, my voice as wild and reckless as my heart. My eyes begged his. “Please. Let me try.”
“It is not possible,” he said. “Not even for me, else I would have done it by now.”
“I spent my childhood watching my mother split tendon from bone. I know how they knit and how they connect. Please let me try.”
“You cannot do this,” he said, but his eyes were brimming. “No one can.”
“What if I can? What if we can? We’re runechasers both. We brought Dev back from the Old Sand. Who knows what’s possible for us?”
He was undone. This man, the last Priestlord of Lindurithain, wanmage become mirror become Dread, lord of all the runes in erthe, sea, and sky, was broken and desolate, and I had just offered him hope.
“May I? Please? Let me try.”
A lifetime passed, and then he nodded.
I cradled his wrist with both hands, unwinding the bandage with care, feeling the tissue cold and sticky beneath my palm.
He stumbled back into the wall as I sent chimeric in wave after wave, up his arm and into his flesh.
He hissed with the pain but didn’t flinch.
Rather, he leaned into it, eyes closed, mouth grim, concentrating on the sensations and the runes.
Chimeric would destroy what it was sent to destroy, but it would bind what it was sent to bind, and I would be damned if I didn’t bind this lost and broken man.
No. Not merely bind.
Remake.
Tecton Circulaia, Auctorus Permeatus.
Tecton Circulaia, Auctorus Permeatus.
Ferous Vivithari,
Laethe mira, laethe.
With my own eyes closed tight, I wove the spells, some in Overland, some in Rhi’Ahr, and I could feel the chimeric spinning his bones, creating them out of fragments of what was left.
I could see it forming in my mind’s eye, the patterns lining and aligning as flesh begat tendon and blood became bone.
His breaths were fast and shallow, and he grabbed the back of my head, pulled me to his chest, his fingers tightening in my dark hair.
I understood. The night of the Auctorus Circulaia, I channeled the ship through the very soles of my feet.
We needed more contact to channel this now.
I pressed into him as if I could wrap my entire body around his bloody arm, and I felt the ship curve into his back.
The three of us. Connected. I saw the runes gleaming in the web that was Kier Gavriel Thanavar, the Touchstone, the island, the whispers of a Tree.
In that moment, I saw it all. I saw the Cloudgate and the abandoned monastery. I saw a well of chimeric ringed with stones, its heady vapors drifting out of the pit to rise on the heavy breeze. I saw it, and it saw me.
And so I called. And it came.
Oh, it came, rushing across the waters and spilling through the boards.
It filled me then like cutting glass, burning and raging and weaving, and my runescars beamed like lanterns in the dark.
I pulled him to me, my fingers digging into his skin as I drummed the patterns the ancient chimeric wove.
His voice joined with mine as together we cast the incants deep.
Archaic and wylde, Sister Moons and suns.
No spells, just instinct, laying and overlaying the framework that would knit, bind, build, and create.
He rocked back against the cabin wall, threw his head against the boards.
I felt rather than heard the cry that was torn from his lips.
It shook the walls and the Touchstone’s battered boards.
It thundered through her sheets and rattled the cannons between the decks.
It echoed across the moonslit bay, shattering both glass and ice in its wake. And then, there was silence.
Silence and breaths. My pulse. His heart.
I leaned back, trying to quiet the trembles that shook my body. My muscles were tight, twitching from the exertion, and I gazed up at him. His eyes were shut, and I knew he was afraid to open them, lest he discover we had failed and he was still a hawk with one wing.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he opened them. Hels, I could slay him with a word.
I stepped away as he raised his hands to the moonslight.
He released a breath, and then another, flexing the fire-new fingers and twisting the virgin wrist. It glowed with chimeric, and runescars glittered along his new flesh like mine.
And seared in the heart of his palm, the Aro’el rune.
He turned his face and stared at me, sea-deep eyes bright with wonder and life. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. I had spun a hand out of nothing, and I smiled at him, tears welling behind my lashes.
The corridor echoed with the stomping of boots, and I saw swabs rushing toward the cabin, called by their captain’s cry. But with eyes fixed on me, he flicked his wrist, and a new door was formed, shutting them out and us in.
“Aro’el,” he said.
He strode forward, catching me and taking me back, crossing the cabin until my shoulders hit the shattered wall. He reached up with both hands and clasped my face, brought his own in so very close that I could breathe his very rune.
“Aro’el,” he said again.
“Kier Gavriel,” I gasped. My body trembled in utter exhaustion, but my heart leaped like a newborn lamb.
He kissed me. Not gentle, not searching—rough, raw, claiming. Heat crashed through me, as wild as storm surge. Magik sparked in my veins, his need pouring into mine, filling every hollow, every fracture. Where I had been empty, he made me whole.
I flung my arms around his neck and met him with kisses of my own.
I was fierce and hungry and reckless with need, and I filled my mouth with him as if I could swallow him whole.
I was starving for him, dying of thirst, and he had just consented to the feast. My fingers lost themselves in his midnight hair, smooth like water under my palms. My nails dug into his skull, his neck, his temples.
I was trembling with anticipation and giddy with pride, my body a stormshear of conflicting sensations, my head a whirlpool of desire and dread.
He slid a hand under my tunic but paused, searching my eyes for a sign.
“Offer accepted,” I panted, and he smiled.
I pulled him in again, devouring him with my lips, savoring his salty skin, and I arched my back, sucking the breath out of his lungs as he clasped my breast under his palm.
His body pushed hard against mine, his palm kneading, and my runescars danced at the touch of his tongue.
I closed my eyes, relishing the fire of his mouth at my throat, my jaw, my breastbone.
My hands were loose and running wild under his shirt and across his ribs, clawing the skin along his spine. I wanted him closer, under my skin.
For an incredible moment, we were a tangle of arms and legs, hands and breath, and I twisted his hair in my fist, pulling his head back. He gasped at the sensations of pleasure and pain.
And then, like a cat, he grinned.
He leaned in now, forehead against mine, and pressed me up into the curve of the boards.
Oh suns, he was strong, and I whimpered as his hand slid down my belly to the little dip and the curls below.
I gasped now and leaned my head back as his fingers slipped in, eyes closed tight as he worked me.
His hand was magik, sending me higher, sending me far. Colors, lights, stars, and moons.
My own breaths were coming fast now, and little sounds hummed in my throat.
He covered my mouth with his, his tongue deep like a riptide, lips moving like the waves.
His hand was the rudder, the tiller, the keel, and I was the ocean, dangerous and deep.
I would have crested just like that, but he withdrew and slid both hands around my waist, then lower to cup my arse and lift me against the wall.
Oh suns, I had waited. Oh moons, I’d been good.
I cupped his face in my trembling hands, and I wrapped my legs around him, trapping his hips against mine and feeling him rise beneath.
“Kier Gavriel.”
He said something in Rhi’Ahr. I didn’t know what it was. It sounded lovely, like all of their words, and I pressed my lips against his brow, first one, then the other, then his cheeks, gaunt and grim and currently mine.
Mine.
“Runechaser,” I whispered.