35. The Children in the Sunlight
Chapter thirty-five
The Children in the Sunlight
Rerdas lay in absolute darkness. He opened his eyes.
Peered around, but there was nothing. But he knew he needed to move.
The thing was coming after him. With groping hands, he followed the wall he could not see beside him.
It crumbled beneath his fingertips, earth showering loose, little roots slimy beneath his trembling touch.
Felt like soil, but smelled like copper.
He stumbled onward, blind. A blistering crack echoed somewhere in the dark behind him, and he ran. The whip’s crackle sounded behind him again. He fell, scrabbled over the dirt, but there were metal ridges in it now. A slick, cold pattern. A grate.
“No.” He wept as he scrambled forward, hands sweeping through icy black, trying to find a place to hide. Anywhere that was not the grate. “No, no, please—”
Something grabbed him, and he opened his mouth to scream, but the soil poured in and wormed down his throat.
He sat up with a choking gasp, pain thundering in his shoulder where he’d knocked it into the wall. A normal wall, spotty plaster streaked with midday sunlight.
“It’s alright,” Etiana soothed. “We’re alright.” She sat on the edge of the bed in the cramped attic room they’d rented, gripping his good arm.
“Sorry,” he said shakily. “Did I yell again?” This had to be the third time the same nightmare had crept up on him.
“No,” Etiana said quietly. “But you don’t look well.”
He attempted a smile. “Rude of you to say.”
Etiana laughed, although it didn’t entirely banish the worry from her expression.
She lifted a sack onto the bed and began removing jars and thick glass bottles, lining them across the bedspread.
Sunlight from the sole window filtered through the glassware, splashing green and blue around the tiny room.
It was wide enough for the bed and nothing else.
“I found most of the things you asked for.”
They’d decided against seeing the medic. Easy decision, once they realized they didn’t have enough onyx. Hassindra’s purse had gotten them this little room, a trip to the apothecary for basic medicinals, and a loaf of bread they were rationing as best they could.
It wasn’t promising preparation for a venture into the jungles that lay south of Nishali.
He tried not to dwell on that and set himself to preparing the poultice for his shoulder.
The places where the clamp had punctured skin weren’t oozing, but they weren’t fully scabbed over yet either.
He didn’t know what to do about the lightning strikes of pain that shot up toward his neck with every wrong move.
“How’s your ankle?” He sniffed a tin of arnica and passed it to Etiana. He’d fashioned something of a brace for her out of part of the crutch, and she bobbed around happily enough, but her skin still looked puffy and badly bruised.
“Improving.” She slathered on the balm, eyeing him. “How’s the shoulder pain?”
“Bearable.”
“And… did you manage any good sleep?”
He couldn’t help the telltale stillness that came over him. Talking about the nightmare made it feel more like a close memory, like something that had really happened. “Not so much,” he muttered.
He didn’t want to talk about the Wishing Well, or the way he couldn’t get Hize out of his head, or the overwhelming panic that kept tearing at his guts. But there was one part that was burning like an ember through his tongue.
“Eti,” he began quietly, “I’m so sorry. For telling them. I was… I couldn’t let them take you away to hurt you, and I didn’t think at all about what they could do with—”
“Don’t be ridiculous; no one would have been thinking clearly in a moment like that.” She softened and tapped his knee until he raised his gaze to hers. “I’d have done the exact same thing if I’d been where you were.”
He wasn’t sure she would have. “I wish I’d been stronger,” he said bitterly. He bit the inside of his lip, but it didn’t stop his next words. “Imalroc wouldn’t have surrendered anything but insults.”
“You didn’t surrender.” She went on over his protest. “And that battleboxer isn’t so fearless as you think him.”
Rerdas rolled a serum bottle between his palms, prickling at the judgement in Etiana’s voice. “He’s braver than you or I can possibly know.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t brave. But that rage he has, I’d bet there’s all sorts of fear underneath it. And I don’t fault him for it.”
“So generous,” he muttered.
Etiana tossed the arnica tin aside and shifted to face him fully. “Eternals, I’m not insulting him! I’m saying that you’re not any less than him just because your fear is easier to see.”
He dropped his glare, but the tense silence did not ease.
Eventually, Etiana blew out a breath. “Look, I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I know I mistreated him—”
“We,” Rerdas interrupted. “We mistreated him. Maybe unforgivably.”
She tilted her head. “When we reach Sol Serene, are you going to try to find him?”
“Yes,” he said. “Although I don’t expect—I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t want to speak to me.”
“But if he does speak to you, what are you planning to say?”
“I don’t know. I…. Before he left, I asked him to stay with me, even after he was free. I wanted him with us,” he confessed.
Etiana’s eyebrows rose. “What did he say to that?”
He turned the memory over in his mind. It had been too painful for him to think about that last night, that last conversation.
He couldn’t look at it. But he did now and remembered Imalroc’s careful words with a sinking stomach.
“He thought I just wanted to hide. And he said he didn’t know what it would be like to be safe. ”
Or he meant he’d rather not cower in the north with Rerdas, running from a fight. That was a horrible thought. He looked back at the bottle in his hands, spinning it faster.
Etiana was glaring out the window over his head. “He could’ve stayed and talked with you about it.”
Rerdas closed his eyes. “Eti, he did exactly what he should have done, and found a way to be free.”
“And left you without a word!”
He kept his eyes closed so she couldn’t see them watering.
But he couldn’t keep from asking, “And did he just… walk away? He saw the Southerners and went?” They’d never talked about it in detail.
He didn’t think he could bear the image of Imalroc running with open arms into the night, although neither could he blame him if he had.
There was no answer for so long that another wave of dread crashed over him. He peeked at Etiana, bracing for pity.
“No,” she muttered. “He stood in the doorway, white as a sheet and looking like someone had cut his heart out.”
Gods, he was so tired of weeping, but this time the hot tracks trickling down his cheek felt almost good. He mopped them away with his sleeve and smiled at Etiana. “I’m sorry I’ve spent so much time crying to you over men.”
She flopped back with a startled little snort. “At least he isn’t an entitled, self-centered shit like Lokano.”
“Or a lying traitor like Umber.”
“Ugh.” She slapped her foot on the bed. “I can’t talk about that asshat yet.”
After a beat, she rolled back up onto her elbow beside him. “You never talked about him to me that much.” She picked at the bedspread. “You used to chatter at me all the time when you really liked them.”
Rerdas grimaced. “I’m not sure I ever truly enjoyed Umber.”
“No, not him.” She looked up, hesitating. “Imalroc.”
It was true. She hadn’t felt like his old confidante in such a long time. “I didn’t think you’d want to hear about him,” he said softly, knowing it would hurt to hear.
“Sorry,” she muttered. Etiana was not particularly good at apologies, and never had been.
But he’d realized over the years that this was partly because she was convinced that anything that required an apology wouldn’t be fixed by words, and until she had some sort of plan of restitution, she said nothing.
“You can tell me about him if you like. I’d like to know. ”
Rerdas leaned back into the thin pillow propped at his back.
“I wish you’d gotten to know him properly, Eti.
He’s extraordinary. Strong and clever and honorable, and I know you saw only the walls he keeps around himself, but sometimes he let me past them.
” He swallowed again. “He might be the best man I’ve ever met. ”
“Well. If we find him… I’ll apologize. I don’t know that it’ll help at all, but I’d rather not be a reason he feels he needs to stay away.”
“I don’t know if he’ll accept your apology or mine, but I’d be grateful if you tried.
” He curled a hand around her wrist. “You’re both important to me.
” A hopeful new thought broke through the dust in his heart.
There was the possibility of a future where he had his small family with him and safe, and the chance to bring Imalroc into it.
He poked Etiana, trying to break her contemplative frown. “I could go on talking about him all night, you know. You might not like what you’ve unleashed.”
“Noticed you haven’t mentioned if he’s any good in bed.”
Rerdas grinned.
Etiana rolled her eyes. “And that’s all I care to hear about that,” she declared.
“You brought it up!”
“Well, I thought you were going to say something appropriately discreet, not look like you’ve been ravaged by the god of multiple orgasms—”
“Eti,” Rerdas sputtered in the midst of his laughter. “How did you know that he—”
“Stop right there.”
“But it was magical and—”
“Absolutely not.”
“—made me believe in the earthbound gods—”
“They’d also prefer it if you’d stop talking.”
“And I haven’t even told you what he could do with his—”
“Fair night!” Etiana shouted, trying and failing to bury her head in the blankets without moving her leg. The room warmed with their laughter, beating back every dark thought in the room. They were the children in the sunlight again.
When her giggles subsided, Etiana yawned. “We should try to get some rest. Leave at dawn.”
He made a noise of agreement and didn’t tell her about his creeping dread of slipping back into the nightmare. It fell like a long evening shadow over him. He refused to focus on it, but he felt its chill all the same.
His cousin fell asleep easily, snuggled against his good shoulder. Rerdas listened to her even breath and tried to match it. He’d be useless in the morning if he hadn’t slept at all.
He gazed at the ceiling, examining the damp stains in the plaster as if they could show him his future.
In his mind’s eye, he replaced the stained white with clear blue sky, turned the shadows growing at the edges of the room to the dark, slim tines of a pine forest, and imagined the sound of water skipping over pebbles.
When he closed his eyes again, he lay in the sunlight, the sweet smell of meadow grass and wildflowers perfuming the air. Strong arms curled around him, gently pulling him in to rest against Imalroc’s body, close to his heart, the safest place he could possibly be.
He let his heavy eyelids slowly close. Here, he was treasured and guarded, and could rest.