Chapter 33 Astraea
Astraea
I sat on the edge of Nyte’s bed, changing the cool cloth on his forehead.
His fever had been passing over the day he’d been lying here after the healers did all they could yesterday.
His torso was bare and bandaged. The slash would have to heal naturally from now, but they were confident he’d be well enough for travel in a few days.
Drystan lingered by the door to the closet, staring intently at the frame. His fingers lifted, brushing down the wood. Curiosity caused me to stand when I finished checking Nyte over, and I drifted carefully when it was like Drystan wasn’t present; he stood in a past time.
I understood when I saw the scores in the wood; next to each one were single initials: D or N.
My smile bloomed with a tender skip in my chest at the markers of Nyte and Drystan’s physical height growth over the years they grew up here.
“I didn’t know these were his old rooms,” I said quietly.
Drystan’s touch dropped, and he took a long breath, reeling back.
“They weren’t. They were mine.” Drystan huffed a laugh as he reflected on the markers. “I was so determined to catch up to his height, as if I had any control over it. I made him come here every year for decades.”
I laughed too, picturing the moment they got to be ordinary, free from their father’s cold ways, in each other’s company.
“You almost did,” I mused, skimming my fingers just past my own height.
They were both many inches taller now, at their full, permanent height. Sorrow dropped my hand from the highest scores, the last time Drystan made them document their height.
“Bastard still has around two inches on me in the end.”
“That’s one race that always had a predetermined outcome,” I said, feeling the weight of those words. How many other things did we compete for and chase in life that were never our destiny to triumph against?
“True, but I think there’s something to be said for the stubbornness of hoping anyway.”
Drystan’s eyes slipped to me as mine did to him. In this moment I wanted to embrace him, and I thought he might break our tension at last too …
“This is one room I hoped to never be in again,” Nyte said, his voice thick and pained.
We both whirled to him, and I was by his side before Nyte finished pushing himself up, helping him to sit back against the headboard.
“Better than a cell, however. You two are hopeless without me, getting yourselves caught,” Drystan said.
I ignored him, asking Nyte, “How are you feeling?”
“Miserable. This trial wound is a damn hindrance.” He cast a glowering look at his brother.
Drystan rolled his eyes, heading for the door.
“Where are you going?” I called.
“To see if Lionel is willing to indulge again.”
“He’s off limits,” I warned.
Drystan smirked at me from the open door. “That’s for him to decide.”
I glared at the ghost of him.
“I have clearly missed a few things,” Nyte said, accompanied by his touch on my back. “Want to fill me in, beginning with how I’m not, as Drystan points out, in a cell, given who ambushed us?”
I shifted deeper onto the bed to be close to him and told him everything that had happened over the last two days.
Nyte idly played with my hair as I talked, taking everything in and making his own queries.
“We have to get moving again.” Nyte tried to shift off the bed, doing a commendable job of hiding his pain.
“You have a task to do here first,” I reminded him.
He’d agreed to try all he could to help Gweneth’s mother, like I knew he would.
“I’m well enough. Let’s go there.”
As much as I wanted to protest and stretch out his time to simply rest and heal, too many parts of the war were charging forward, and we couldn’t afford to be still for long.
“I’m not leaving you again. Even a courtyard of distance is too much,” I said.
“The key piece wasn’t real,” he told me as he dressed.
“I know. I found it in your jacket.”
He sighed in defeat. “If one or more of us gets injured like this again … it makes all of us vulnerable.”
Since Nyte was gravely wounded my antsy concern for our friends facing the same brutal trials, crafted to test them all individually, had risen.
“Your trial … what did you have to do that ended with this?” I asked carefully as Nyte pulled his shirt over the bandages.
“We saw memories. Of us and father in this keep. We were young at first. Memories of times we’d betrayed each other. For the final one, our father made us duel, and it took some convincing to snap Drystan out of the illusion.”
My heart ached for the brothers who’d had to relive such cold parts of the past.
“He seems in his usual spirits,” I said.
“He’s not the one who suffered the slice of a blade.”
“You let him.”
“I had to. You were my anchor to snap out of the illusion and know it wasn’t real. I realized during that trial he had nothing to bring him back. But once it might have been me, so I let him land his centuries-long resentment toward me in that blow.”
My brow crumpled when I heard that. Thinking back to the temple, I realized I never had the chance to tell him …
“I saw Dawn.”
Nyte’s gold eyes snapped to me, flaring a shade darker, as if the goddess would be here for him to target.
“How did you escape her?”
“She … let me go. I can’t be certain she wasn’t just an illusion to taunt me. I thought she was taking me back to the stars when my flesh … it became stardust before my very eyes, and I thought—”
Nyte took my face in his hands, and I hadn’t realized I’d been staring at mine, reliving the sensation of losing the body I wanted to keep, to stay here as a mortal, as long as Nyte would be.
“They don’t get to take you back. Not ever again. You’re mine, and I’m going to wipe the names of Dusk and Dawn from existence to keep you.”
I fell into him, letting his warmth and scent soothe away my burst of panic.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t save your friend,” Nyte said mournfully.
“Dawn taunted me with Katerina’s life. She’s still alive, but the longer Dawn inhabits her body the weaker she becomes. If Dawn kills me swiftly and leaves, Katerina will live. If I kill Dawn … what if that means I kill Katerina?”
“She’s manipulating you. It’s not possible for two people’s consciousness to exist in the same brain. Trust me, I know it isn’t.”
Nyte was a master of the mind, and he locked my eyes with such certainty I believed him. Which meant there was no saving Katerina; she really was gone, and I had to take the news to Zephyr soon. Had he been looking for her?
I said, “We need the true name of Dawn to be able to kill her.”
“I’ll be with you next time she shows herself. I’ll find it in her mind.”
Recalling my walk with Death in His realm, the warning he gave ran a chill through me.
Beware, the mind of a god is no easy passage. It is not ventured without consequence.
“It could hurt you gravely,” I said with a spike of worry.
“Are you doubting me, Starlight?” Nyte said it like a tease, squeezing my waist, but I couldn’t muster a smile.
“I mean it. Promise me you won’t ever push past your limits.”
Nyte kissed me softly. “I promise. Not if it means losing you.”
In the abandoned theatre, I’d never seen Nyte this gentle and tentative with another person. We all stood on the stage, but Gweneth and I hung back, letting Nyte approach the elderly woman, who was once again searching through the broken and discarded instruments.
He followed her, watching her; occasionally he spoke to her and she spoke back.
We couldn’t hear their words, but it was tender to witness.
I figured Nyte must be searching her thoughts at times, trying to find what could have been severed for a life full of love and experiences to have drowned within her own mind.
“This is the most she’s spoken to anyone in months,” Gweneth said to me, quiet so as not to disturb them.
“Nyte has his ways,” I said tenderly. Even without his ability, when Nyte wanted to give it, his devoted attention had a compelling property.
After a few minutes, Nyte joined in on her search. The clamor of instruments and occasional ping of breaking strings amplified.
He found a case buried deep. Flicking open the latches revealed a violin, untouched by the wreckage he plucked it from. I thought he’d found the working instrument to give to the elder woman, perhaps discovering it was what she’d been looking for all this time.
To my surprise, Nyte lifted the instrument until his chin rested in position and his other hand angled the bow against the strings.
He tested a few notes at first, adjusting the pegs until the notes started to sound like beautiful potential.
I wanted him to play so badly my soul ached for it.
I hadn’t known, even in my past life, that Nyte could play the violin, but it was obvious from how he handled the instrument.
“Oh yes!” Gweneth’s mother exclaimed, clapping her hands together while she watched Nyte with the violin. The pure joy on her face lit up my own.
“This is what she has been wanting from this place?” Gweneth asked.
Nyte played a few notes, not a song yet, keeping her mother entranced while his gaze slipped to us across the side of the stage.
“There are those who say music is magick itself. That it invokes feelings that touch the soul deeper than anything else can. Your mother, Gweneth, used to play a long time ago. I think her subconscious is searching for a certain feeling, which may spark her memory.”
Nyte spoke on a personal level and my heart could hardly contain itself at the breathtaking sight of him with the violin in his hands.
How he slowly lost himself in the notes that started to weave together.
Then Nyte played, boldly and brilliantly.
I didn’t think I could feel any closer to him, but this … how Nyte could sing me his soul forged a new tie around mine.
Gweneth had floated closer to her mother until her hand reached around her hunched shoulders. As Nyte’s short melody finished, the elderly woman stared, as starstruck as I was.
The final note carried even in the silence. Then Gweneth’s mother spoke, her words rhyming into a poem.
“Beneath the sky where starlight glows,
Through silver mists, the cold wind blows.
A dawn awaits where beauty shows,
The tender light of the Goddess Eos.”
Nyte’s shock slammed into mine; our eyes clashed into each other at the same time.
“Eos,” I repeated through our bond.
Had we just learned the true name of the Goddess of Dawn?
“Gweneth?” the elderly woman croaked.
“Mother?”
Watching the recognition light up on her mother’s face, and in turn the relief and joy on Gweneth’s, touched my heart.
“I don’t know how permanent it will be. The mind is a very complicated and intricate system. I can keep trying to fuse together threads that have frayed, but I have to warn there’s a risk that it carries that could cause her to lose far more of her mind.”
“This is enough,” Gweneth said, cupping her mother’s cheek.
“You’ve grown,” her mother said, scanning her head to toe. Her aged face pinched in guilt as if she’d missed her daughter growing up. “You’re so beautiful, my Gwen.”
The resemblance between them still showed in the shape of their noses and color of their eyes. It made me think they once shared the same vibrant red hair too.
Nyte said, “This isn’t the only instrument that might help bring her back for a while. Music in many forms lingers strong in her mind.”
“Thank you,” Gweneth said, embracing her mother, whose head tucked under her daughter’s chin.
The look she bore on Nyte filled my chest warmly. Nyte would always harbor the capacity to be the realm’s nightmare; that would never change, and I didn’t want him to. But it was the light in Gweneth’s eyes as she looked at him now that proved Nyte could heal as much as he could hurt.
Gweneth left happily with her mother. Nyte wrapped an arm around me as we watched them leave.
“You didn’t tell me you could play,” I said, my voice choked and shallow.
“This place was in operation for a while when I lived here. I was only a novice at the violin. It’s the instrument I was most drawn to.”
“Why did you stop playing?”
A muscle in his jaw worked. Nyte sat, letting his legs dance over the ledge and the violin rest on his lap. I dropped down beside him, looking over the expanses of seats over both levels.
Nyte said, “The first person I ever let in—considered a friend despite me being an immortal child and him an elderly human man—was the lead violinist who played on that stage every second day. I was so taken by the music, by his instrument in particular, that I had forgotten to erase myself from his mind, and he caught me where I shouldn’t be.
He wasn’t mad; he didn’t even ask why I was there.
All he did was hand me his violin, and from that day I kept coming back.
He taught me a couple of songs, and I learned a few of my own, but I was nowhere close to his masterful skill with it.
Anyone can learn a sequence of notes, but there’s a unique tone to every player. ”
Tears were already gathering in my eyes, as I knew there was no happy ending to this tale.
Nyte’s voice reduced a little more to continue.
“One night I came and the theatre was shut off. Vampires warded outside, and I learned the entire orchestra had been slaughtered. From then on, the theatre was declared closed indefinitely. My father never confronted me about my time here, but I knew he had ordered the massacre.”
I didn’t think there was anything monstrous I could learn about Nyte’s father that would shock me, but this was at the top of the worst. Taking away a token of freedom Nyte had found in music.
Shattering an innocent dream before it had the chance to become a mastered passion.
Robbing him of something precious that saved him within while the world tore him apart.
Sitting here as the focus of an imaginary audience that filled the empty seats in my mind, Cassia’s spirit came back to me in one of the last memories we shared together.
I like to dance, I’d said to Cassia. I don’t think I’ve ever told you.
I can’t wait to see you dance, she’d replied. So confident and sure even though she knew she was dying and I’d been so oblivious to that dark countdown. On a stage someday.
“How magnificent you would look,” Nyte said quietly, catching the edge of my thoughts I left open to him.
“Never thought I’d see one of those in your hands again.” Drystan’s voice echoed to us from the top level. Nyte set the violin aside. “We’ve wasted enough time. I’ve called Athebyne back and Eltanin came too.”
“It wasn’t wasted time,” I said.
Nyte slipped off the stage and braced his hands on my waist to help me down too. He gave me a squeeze, knowing I meant that our time spent here was worth getting to help Gweneth’s mother and secure an alliance with Astrinus, which was willing to fight on our side if it came to that.
I told Drystan, “We have the true name of the Goddess of Dawn.”