38. Fen
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
FEN
Air came back, and I knew what she’d done.
She’d broken something to get it. I’d felt the muffled crack through the water, watched her drive a dead woman’s blade down multiple times. And then she’d crossed the graveyard and put the only air in this drowned world into my mouth and kept none of it for herself.
Again. She’d done the same thing in a dozen smaller ways I hadn’t understood until now. Given away the last of whatever she had, only wishing she had more to give.
The lungs I breathed with pulled in less air than mine. Her hands hung in the water in front of me, the red lines dark across the palms. A healer’s hands. A thief’s. A woman’s.
Her memories became mine—just as mine were probably becoming hers.
This trial was going to rip us apart and then leave us to gather the pieces and try to make them fit back together again.
I saw a boy with charcoal on his fingers and a rattle in his chest, painting suns on cups. He couldn’t climb the quarry wall anymore. Couldn’t jump off or swim.
Tolross.
This boy was the reason she’d walked into a race built to kill her.
A father with broad shoulders bent under a miner’s load, his hands rough and work-worn, his face craggy with the pain of knowing he was giving his all, but it would never be enough.
A woman who vaguely looked like Eradin, but older, coughing pink, then red, then something worse, drowning on dry land over months while Eradin held her hand and the magic she was born with did nothing.
This felt like the same sickness that was eating the brother now.
She’d watched it take one of them already, and she’d walked into this death race to win the wish that might stop death from claiming what was left of her heart.
Pain lanced through my temples.
Her mother’s death became my failure. My complicity became her rage. I was drowning in her emotions, and there was no way to break free.
This trial was pure torture.
Elite was the enemy. They hurt us. Took from us. They didn’t see us as more than insects to be ground into the dirt.
Under all of it ran a bond with a dragon unlike anything I’d seen or heard of before.
I felt it as she did, and it sucked the air right back out of me.
Selira roaring down the line between them, choosing Eradin with nothing forcing the choice. Two creatures who’d looked at each other and decided.
I’d never had that. What I’d had with Aristus was obedience, and I’d called it love because no one had ever shown me the difference.
And then, buried deep, I found one last thing.
She wanted me, though not for my wealth or status or even a way out of Shaleside.
She wanted me. Fenian. Fen. The man who ignored her for all of her life, only seeing her finally when she teased him after spilling water on his boots.
In every encounter, she’d issued a challenge.
Is peace what you felt when you bonded with Aristus?
No, it was not.
Wanting her had lived in me since before I knew the word for it. To learn she’d been drowning in the same feeling didn’t feel like winning.
This felt like theft.
I’d been handed something I hadn’t earned and couldn’t give back.
The bead sat on my tongue, shrinking, and I understood it now. Air bound into a pearl, enough for one. You breathed it or you gave it to the other. You couldn’t do both.
My own body had gone slack, the last of what she’d spent bleeding out. She’d given me the breath and kept the drowning.
I’d held onto things my whole life. It had made me a weapon and a stranger in every room I walked into.
I pushed off the lake bed and swam to my slack, sinking body and pressed this mouth to my own and pushed the pearl inside.
Her eyelids snapped open, and she breathed.
While I embraced drowning again.
For the first time I could remember, I’d given a thing away and wanted nothing in exchange.