Chapter Thirty The Crimson Dagger
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE CRIMSON DAGGER
Another storm rolled in from the north, frothing the Boreal Sea and sending it thrashing against the sea stacks that dotted Rhiterra’s northern shore like teeth.
After hiking to Old Deming, a small fishing village, to resupply, they’d spent the whole of the day at a full gallop.
Her thighs ached from the strain of gripping the saddle, her bay mare tearing up sand and seafoam in a race against the tide.
Caelan screeched in raven form overhead.
The three horses they’d found in the village hadn’t exactly been for sale, and had cost them no small amount of intimidation and coin. Reya’s mount, Elspeth, was strong, and ran like she was glad to be free of the ornery old man who’d sold her.
When lightning flashed across the sky, Reya, Omira, and Thance slowed and abandoned the beach for the cover of the evergreen coastline. Caelan appeared in the saddle behind her with a flash of red.
Rain drizzled through the layer of thick vegetation overhead, and Elspeth shook the droplets from her dark brown mane as Reya crooned praises, stroking her neck.
“There are tracks here,” Omira called out to them from ahead, her roan mare shifting beneath her. “Old ones. But they’re large enough to be Dread Wolf. It’s going to be dark soon, and I don’t want anything surprising us in the night. I’ll ride ahead and see if I can catch a scent trail.”
“Thance,” Caelan said, “go with her.”
“Good to have you back, General,” Thance said, giving Reya a beaming smile.
“Don’t worry, Reya, we’ll make it to Edris in time.
” With that, he clicked his tongue and rode off with his sister.
They would be riding all night and needed to find a place for their horses to drink.
Reya led Elspeth deeper into the woods at an easy walk, giving her the breather she’d earned.
Caelan didn’t wait for Reya to lean back into his heat. The arm on her waist simply tightened, pulling her against him.
“Do you need to sleep?” he asked.
Reya would have sworn there was a tiny person in her stomach doing backflips.
“I’m fine.” The last two weeks they’d spent sparring together on the Acadia had been grueling, and there wasn’t an inch of her that wasn’t sore.
With the full breadth of Caelan’s magic returned, he was a force of nature, and the better she became, the less he held back.
Their sessions had become gloriously varied.
They fought with steel and magic, often both, and Reya was surprised by how much she’d improved, though she would probably never be as good as Caelan.
Even Thance had engaged her in training.
He was just as much of an artist with a sword as Caelan was, and his gifts made him unbeatable. “My stamina is better than you think.”
She still saw things she didn’t want to see when she let down the floodgate, but it no longer made her panic.
Mostly because Caelan was right there with her, pulling her back from her grief and driving her mad with teasing touches and dry commentary.
More and more their training felt like their own kind of violent foreplay.
“Your stamina has hardly been tested, thief.”
She snorted. “So you think.”
He pressed his mouth to her ear. “Careful,” he warned. Her toes curled in her boots. They were not talking about training anymore. “I’ve killed more men over the last five hundred years than I care to count. I’d hate to add to the list.”
Reya shouldn’t have liked that as much as she did. She enjoyed needling him. Enjoyed his responses even more. This was who they were. But at the same time, it was starting to pain her. It was quickly becoming clear that what they had now wasn’t enough for her anymore, and that scared her.
She was leaving, and he wasn’t coming after her. They were on borrowed time, and when it was spent, she would be left with the broken pieces of something that had never really been hers.
“Don’t tell me that,” she whispered, and he stilled his touch.
Always so careful to listen and heed her responses.
She wished he were a lesser male. Wished she could hate him.
She forced the words out: “Tell me that I’m just a thief.
Tell me you don’t care what happens to me.
Tell me you will be able to walk away from me in Edris and never think of me again.
Tell me something that will make it easier to forget you, and make me believe it. ”
His body went rigid against hers, and he was quiet for long moments before he murmured softly against her hair, “You would feel the lie.”
Reya shut her eyes. Did he delight in torturing her? She needed space, and opened her mouth to tell him to fly ahead when he reached into his tunic and held his Earth Star ring out in the rain. Drops beaded and ran off the reflective surface of the stone.
“It was my mother’s.” His words were laced with a familiar heartache she wanted to steal away.
“Sages don’t do marriage. And most never mate for life.
Our lives are long, and things change. People change.
But for those who choose it, like my parents, the equivalent of a marriage for us is a forging.
” He explained, “Sages have the ability to bind their lives, so that when one dies, so does the other.”
Reya tensed, sensing by the tone of his voice that this story didn’t end well. And she was right.
“My father died first.” He cleared his throat. “I was with my mother when it happened. One minute we were arguing, and the next, she was gone.”
Reya laid a hand atop his. She knew the ache of losing both of her parents, albeit in a different way, and she couldn’t help but think of what Gwendolyn and Hector might have chosen if given the option not to live without each other.
Beneath her palm, his thumb stroked her ribcage.
“My parents were almost nauseating in their affection for each other, though they riled each other constantly.” She could hear the smile in his voice, though it quickly faded.
“My father hated that I wanted to join the army. He was a healer, and he abhorred violence. Everyone told my parents it would be selfish to stop me from pursuing what the All-Gods had clearly intended to be my destiny. I was young and untried and thought I could find all the answers at the end of a blade. My mother forced me to take her ring when I left home.”
Elspeth nickered as they at last waded into a shallow stream, and she dipped her head to drink.
Caelan had never been so open with her, never revealed so much of himself, and she had a thousand follow-up questions.
But she was afraid that he would stop, and so all she said was, “You never would have traded the ring for Kraken blood.”
“No.”
She wouldn’t trade the sword, either, not even for her own life.
Reya felt Caelan’s eyes on the back of her neck, the heat of his fingers on her damp skin as he brushed back the wisps of hair that had come free from her braid.
“For a long time, I hated them for what they chose to do. To lose one parent is bad enough, but to lose both, and in the same breath… The idea that without each other this wasn’t a world worth living in, even with all they had yet to live for—I couldn’t comprehend it then.
But I’m starting to. So long as there are people relying on me, I can never put myself in a position where I might be tempted to make that choice.
Especially not when it’s becoming alarmingly clear what my choice would be. ”
Reya’s eyes glittered at the admission, and she swallowed the swell of emotion in her throat. She knew he’d intended the words to put distance between them, but all she could think about in that moment was how much her father would have begrudgingly loved Caelan.
I suppose he’ll do, Renny, she could practically hear him mutter.
“I never knew my birth parents,” Reya said, offering a scar of her own in exchange for the one he’d given to her.
She would never know if her eyes had come from her mother or father, or if she sounded like either of them, or if they were still alive.
If the story the Blood Watcher had told the night they came to Alder Hollow and destroyed everything she knew and loved was to be believed, then her birth father had kidnapped her mother, gotten her pregnant, and left her to die in childbirth.
It should have summoned some emotion in her, some hatred for a man who could do something so vile, but it was hard to hate someone she’d never known, someone who’d never existed for her beyond a story.
And Blood Watchers were not exactly the most reliable source of information.
“How did an Etellinian girl end up in Edris?” he asked.
She’d never told anyone that story. Her story. Not even Lennox. But for the first time in her life, she wanted to share it, if for no other reason than Caelan would know.
“You asked me what I see when I let down the floodgate.” Somehow it was easier to say when she wasn’t looking him in the eye.
His thumb slid along her ribcage. “When I was eleven, my father took me with him to the moorlands on a delivery. I’d hardly left the mountain, my mother was so scared of my being discovered, but he finally convinced her to let me come along.
Said I needed to learn that side of the business, too. ”