Chapter 7
#301
Wryn,
Is that number right? I checked and rechecked the last work of art you sent to make sure, but 301 feels wrong…right? Are we sure we’ve sent 300 letters already?
We should enter some kind of contest, because truly, I think we may have set a record for most letters sent in the shortest amount of time. Although, I’m not sharing the prize with you. You can enjoy it from afar, way over there in your cozy corner of Ravaryn.
Speaking of, don’t forget the paints and canvases, but know I am being utterly serious when I say no laughing. Under any circumstances. Are we clear?
My hands are skilled in the kitchen, all right? You can laugh at me when I see you bake a perfect cinnamon roll.
No.Laughing.
See you soon,
Elora
PS. Is it odd that you’re my closest friend, even from hundreds of miles away? Odd or interesting? Don’t answer that. I’m choosing the latter.
PPS. Don’t ever tell Alivia I called you my closest friend. She’ll have both of our heads on spikes. Separated. The horror.
Ifidgeted with the basket in the crook of my elbow, running my other hand over my hair for the hundredth time, the butterflies in my stomach growing stronger with each step closer to the orchard.
Wryn would be there. He’d be waiting, and I was taking my sweet time, feigning interest in my surroundings when my mind swirled around one thing—one person. At some point, I had paused to smell a patch of flowers, feeling a tad ridiculous. I had actually stopped to smell the damn roses.
The orchard was just over that hill, but my feet had slowed until they stopped entirely, still on the path that would lead to Wryn.
Biting my lip, I adjusted the basket again and rolled my shoulders back. With a swirling pit in my stomach, I nodded and took a step forward, then another and another. When I crested the hill, my heart hammered so hard, I thought I might take flight—or faint, whichever came first.
But the breeze blew then, rolling the clouds away from the sun so its warmth kissed my skin, along with the orchard below, and I saw him.
He stood at the gate, leaning back on the small picket fence, tossing an apple in the air. He looked to the forests, his gaze slowly scanning over the trees, moving toward me. I remained where I was, my heart beating harder with each passing second. My chest rose and fell faster as his gaze inched closer, but I couldn’t move. I could do nothing but wait for him to find me.
Then he did.
The apple paused in his hand, a broad grin stretching across his face, bright and brilliant and…Wryn’s.
The nerves left my body in an instant, and I suddenly couldn’t remember why they were there in the first place. A smile of my own pulled at my lips as we locked eyes for a moment before I dropped the basket, grabbed my skirts, and ran down the hill. His mouth opened in a laugh I couldn’t quite hear, and he tossed the apple behind him, turning to me with open arms. My feet didn’t slow until I reached him, throwing my arms around his neck like he was my oldest friend.
His warm chest vibrated with a hum as he wound his arms around my waist and lifted me, my feet dangling. His voice was as soothing as I remembered when he said, “Hello, sun ray.”
He sat me back on my feet, and I released him, stepping back to look upon his face—so familiar, yet I’d only seen it once before. “Hello, Wryn.”
Elora was lost in her work when I chuckled into my hand, peeking over her shoulder.
“I said no laughing!” She elbowed me in the gut, and I released a gruff laugh. “I told you I wasn’t very good.”
Standing straighter, I tilted my head and stepped closer. “Art can’t be ‘not good.’ It’s all subjective.” My arm reached around her to slip a hand over her paintbrush. I pretended not to notice the way her breath hitched as I moved her hand, still holding the brush over the canvas, and layered dark green to shadow the lighter leaves she’d already painted.
She glanced up at me, not even bothering to watch the small strokes we added to her canvas with her own hand. I stifled a laugh, feeling her lingering gaze before I finally looked down to find her pale, freckled cheeks flushed, her soft lips redder than normal.
I wanted to bite them, to break the skin and taste her.
Mine,a faint voice whispered from the back of my mind.
I tore my eyes from her and stepped back.
My friend, yes, but not mine. Not in that way.
She smiled, turning back to her canvas. She cocked her head to the side, bringing the wooden end of the paintbrush to her lips. “That does look better. More…”
“Dimensional?”
“Yes!” She swiveled around and pointed her brush at me, her forearms and cheeks smudged in various shades of green. “Dimensional. That’s it.”
I tilted my head, looking over her shoulder as she turned back to her canvas. “I just helped you add a little shadow.”
“Hmm,” she said, the end of the brush back between her lips. “I guess shadows are important, then, because it was a green mess before.”
“Shadows are always important. Shadows tell us we’re here, that we exist, that everything around us exists. If there were no shadows, it would mean there was no light, and what kind of world would that be?”
When she didn’t answer, I pulled my eyes from the canvas to find her mouth had fallen open in a slight smile, her eyebrows raised.
“Do you just…think like all the time?” she asked.
“Like what?” I arched a brow of my own.
“Like a poet.”
My cheeks flushed, and I looked back at the canvas. “Not always.”
She was still staring. I could feel her gaze, studying, gauging, reading. It felt as though she saw straight into my mind, my soul. Maybe she did.
“I don’t know if I believe that.” She tapped her brush on her lips again. “I think… I think you see everything through an artist’s eye, and so everything becomes…more, somehow. You’re an artist, Wryn, through and through.”
Warmth spread through my chest, and I inhaled slowly, her soft cinnamon scent filling my lungs before I released a breathy laugh. “I am an artist.”
“You are, but there are those who make art as a hobby, as a stress reliever, or just because they like it… And then, there are those who create because they must. Because not painting or sketching or writing would be like asking the rain not to fall or the sun not to rise. They do it because it’s a necessity of their existence, and you, Wryn, are the latter. You paint like you breathe, like you sleep and eat. You paint because you have to. You paint because if you did not, you might not exist.”
I didn’t know when my eyes fell to her lips to physically watch the words leave her mouth, but I couldn’t look away, not even when they ceased talking and curved into a soft smile, the delicate kind she bore so often.
No one had ever articulated the feeling so exactly.
To everyone else, I was not an artist. I was a ruler, a king. When one held such a role as that, there wasn’t enough room to be anything else in the eyes of the world. It became them, swallowing whoever they were before.
But shesaw me.
I couldn’t stop the words that left my mouth, barely a whisper, albeit an urgent one. “Are you an artist, Elora?”
She had to be. How else would she know the feeling?
Her eyes warmed, the blue in her irises a comfort I hadn’t realized I’d missed until this very moment.
Iaso’s tonic must be wearing off.
This was the mate bond doing what it did, drawing me to her, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Not right now. Not as she leaned in closer to place a small hand on the center of my chest and whisper back, “No, but I know one.”
I couldn’t answer her. There wasn’t a single thought in my brain to relay to her. For the first time I could ever recall, I was rendered speechless. All I could do was stare—until she patted my chest and started to pull away, and I caught her hand. Her smile faltered, her eyes locked on where my hand held hers.
Hesitantly, she lifted her gaze to mine.
“If I’m an artist, you’re one of the Goddess’ soldiers.”
A scoff escaped her. “Oh, shut up, Wryn.”
She pulled her hand, and I let her go. As she turned back to her canvas, tapping that damned paintbrush on her lips again, I leaned on the nearest tree trunk and crossed my arms. “Her soldiers are not those who wield swords and spill blood. They do not fight or search for glory or vengeance.”
She peeked over, her blue eyes catching in the sunlight, her brow cocked, and lips tilted up in a teasing smile.
“Our Goddess is one of love. She created everything under her stars and moon—us, the realm, the land and seas and trees and creatures—every single thing made with her love, in the hope of creating a world that bathed in it, thrived in it.” Her smirk fell, the paintbrush pausing its infernal movement. “And you, Elora, love. That is what you do. Despite every dark and painful thing this life holds, you wear the most fragile part of you, your heart, right on your sleeve for the world to see, because you’rebrave—brave and selfless enough to truly accept people into your soul, to feel things deeply and wholly without fear or hesitation. You’re a lover, Elora, and that makes you her most valiant soldier.”
She was still as stone, her eyes round. She didn’t move for a few moments, left as speechless as I was, before the color in her cheeks deepened, spreading down to her chest. She blinked rapidly and cleared her throat.
“Poet,” she muttered with a shaky laugh, turning back to her canvas like nothing had happened.
I felt her eyes, though, peeking over at me as I did the same, lifting my own brush to dip the bristles in burnt orange. “Soldier.”
Then, like some strange stamp of approval from the Goddess herself, the wind blew, and a shower of apple blossom petals fell around us, swirling and dancing along the breeze. Elora closed her eyes and tilted her face to the sky, a few pink petals snagging in her hair as it blew around her form. When the strands stuck to the wet paint on her canvas, a soft giggle poured from her, mingling with the sounds of nature. She carefully pulled the stuck hair and lifted the ends to find them painted green.
I stilled, an ache forming in the back of my throat. The smile slipped from my lips, pulled down by the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
She might be brave, but I was not.
She shifted her gaze to me, her face still smudged with color, her hair messy and wind-blown, now tipped with emerald and flecked with pink, but her smile… Her smile was so damned happy, so at ease, so genuine, that my chest physically hurt.
Because that smile, that sweet, sweet smile, was directed at me.
Being her friend is the most reckless thing I’ve ever done.