Chapter 12 #2
He matched the expression. “I can fly. I can do a lot of things.”
Gods-touched. There was so much to say, so much to tell him. So much he needed to tell me. “How?”
“Before we left Speth”—the link grew cold—“I discovered it before I left Speth. But Nym . . .” His voice, his gaze, pleaded for answers.
“When I went back to Fount,” I started, “one of our beehives had lost its queen. Without a queen, the bees don’t understand their purpose. There’s no order, no directive.”
He nodded hesitantly, likely wondering why I’d started talking about bees.
“I realized it was a lot like you. Your lumis,” I went on. “No order. No matter how much I repaired it, it kept falling apart. I realized you needed a new queen.”
His thumb ran over my knuckles. “I’m not following.”
I chewed the inside of my lip, debating how to best approach this. “You’ve noticed we have a special connection.”
He nodded. “Definitely. It took me a while to understand what the hell was happening to me.”
I laughed. “I imagine it was confusing.”
He waited.
“That night in Sten’s basement”—Gods, Sten. Was he still alive?—“I remade your lumis to look like mine. I told you about Ursa, how she was able to give me part of herself because we were so alike.”
Coldness pulsed from him.
“I thought, maybe I could do the same for you, if we were alike, too. So I reshaped you to match me, and I gave you a new queen. Half of my heart.”
His hand went limp in mine. Dread, his dread, filled me, black and thick as ink.
My mouth went dry. I rushed, “I’d learned how to shape the magic to hold everything together. To fill in the empty gaps. And you don’t have two hearts, you just have a guide, something healthy to model the rest . . .”
The way he stared at me set me off-kilter. I forgot what I was going to say. His shoulders sharpened to razors. His eyes shimmered. Fine lines weighed down his brow.
“Renn.” I squeezed his hand. “Renn, it’s a good thing. You’re healed.”
He shook his head. New vines, fresh thorns, grew from him and into me. “How much more can I possibly take from you?”
I reeled back. “What?”
“Take from you,” he repeated. “All I’ve done is take. I took you from your home. I took you from your family. I took your time, your energy, your life. And now I’ve taken half your heart?”
I frowned. “I gave it to you, Renn.”
He looked skyward, wilting. Took a beat to level himself. “Why . . . why would you do something like that?”
All of the exhaustion, the pain, the panic .
. . everything that transpired in Sesta fell away in that moment.
There was only him, only me, alone in this space, as though we were separate from the war and the world.
Emotion welled up in me like wine overflowing.
Finally, finally, after five long, gruesome months, I could tell him.
I could right the wrong, undo the silence, bare my soul.
“Because I love you.” I didn’t whisper or suppress my voice in any way. It was a declaration. It was a promise. It was truth.
He shut his eyes at the confession. A few of the thorns withdrew. Life returned to his hand, and his fingers knit tighter through mine. He set his jaw like he was in pain. So many emotions tumbled through our connection, I couldn’t discern them.
When he looked at me, unshed tears magnified the blue of his irises. “Did you know,” he whispered, “that no one has ever told me that before?”
My heart cracked. “S-Surely your mother—”
He shook his head. Sucked in an uneven breath. Swallowed, steeling himself. “I was so certain you would hate me, after what happened. After I let them take you. After I let them . . . hurt you.”
“Renn, no.” I lifted myself again to my knees and embraced him, holding his head to my chest. His arms circled under my arms and over my shoulders.
I buried my face in his hair, smelling the sea on him, catching familiar notes of honeysuckle and pinewood.
“Please stop saying that,” I whispered. “I am safest with you. I only want you. I love you. I love you. I will always love you.”
Tears filled my vision. I pulled back to look at his face. To wipe an errant tear from the side of his nose.
Hope, desperation, need. They were his, but they were mine, too.
So softly, as though he might break all over again, I pressed my lips to his.
The warmth of the contact sent tingling waves through my jaw and into my shoulders.
His hands came up to cradle my head, to kiss me as though I was a fragile thing, and maybe I was.
Maybe we both were. We were scared and hurting, the future unsure, but we were together after so long. After so much.
And right now, that was all that mattered.
The cabin was cramped, but we weren’t ready to join the rest of the crew yet.
To be apart. So I pulled Renn onto the narrow bed and curled into his side, the brazier at my back.
Renn wrapped one arm around my waist and used his other to fan out my knotted curls, helping them dry.
We lay like that for a while, Renn’s warmth far more adequate than the brazier’s.
Tucked against him, secure in this place where no one else could touch me, I felt the safest I had since January, if not before even that.
I didn’t mean to doze off, but the weariness of the day dragged at me.
I didn’t dream. When my eyelids parted again, Renn had not moved, save for his fingertips patterning circles on my back.
“Renn.” His name left my lips like a prayer.
“Hm?”
“What happened that day? In Speth?”
His hand slowed, and guilt seeped through our connection once more.
“Renn.” I propped myself up on my elbow. “You were trying to protect me. You didn’t know. Neither of us knew.”
Letting out a long breath, he traced the line of my jaw. “You are beautiful.”
I scoffed. “I highly doubt that. I’ve been starv—” I caught myself before finishing.
Starving for months, I didn’t say, but he knew.
I saw it in the tightness around his eyes, in the flare of guilt between us.
However much I wanted to, I could not simply demand his feelings change, so I pressed on. “Tell me about Speth.”
Lowering his hand, he looked at the ceiling. “I didn’t understand what had happened to me then. After I . . . after I hid you, I went back to fight. Not that I’m much of a fighter, but I knew enough. You saw, before . . . before.”
I had. I watched him cut a man in half with a single stroke of a sword.
“It was a company of dragons—Sestan soldiers. Speth was small; they’d come looking for me. I understand why, now. I fought them, Sten fought them. There were a dozen or so soldiers from the palace taking refuge there; they and a few villagers fought, too.”
“Brave of them.”
He nodded. “It was carnage, Nym. Blood in the snow. More red than white. And I . . .” He lifted his hand, palm down. “I did so much of it. It was like . . .” Trepidation unwound from him.
I remembered strong waves of sorrow pouring into the conservatory in Rodsfell.
“It’s war, Renn,” I whispered, splaying my hand across his stomach. “I won’t judge you.”
Dropping his hand, he confessed, “It was like fighting children.”
I let that settle over me, prickling across my skin like a limb fallen asleep.
“The others retreated,” he went on. “And we went north. Sten and I—”
I sat up, nearly hitting my head on the low ceiling. “Sten is alive?”
The corner of his mouth ticked upward. “He is, thank the gods. Even still.” His lip curved a little more. “When you’re relieved, it feels like the rain. Cool spring rain.”
I clasped his hand in both of mine.
“I looked for you.” Hoarseness leaked through his voice.
“They retreated, and I searched everywhere for you. Into the night. That’s when the wings .
. . It was getting dark, and I was panicking, and it just .
. . happened. Like they’ve always been there.
Like my arms.” He rubbed a hand down his face.
“The villagers, those not helping with casualties, they helped me look. I could feel you, but I couldn’t find you.
You were so scared, so desperate. He hurt you . . . I felt him hurt you—”
“Stop,” I urged. “Stop. It’s done. We need not relive it.” And yet the need to explain myself pushed at me. “I fought it, Renn. I tried to. But he soulbound me to him. I couldn’t leave his side.”
His shoulders tensed. “I’ve heard, since, that he’s a soulbinder. Is it true, Nym? That he accesses all of craftlock?”
I nodded. “All of it. Renn, I think he’s the Allmaster. The one from prophecy.”
He sat up slowly, his hair kinked from where he’d lain on it. “I’ve heard that theory.”
“And you, Renn. You might be—”
“The rising blood?” he asked, a mirthless dimple forming on his cheek. “I’ve heard that, too.”
I searched his face. “Do you not believe it? Have you not seen yourself?”
“I didn’t say that.” He sounded tired now. Like this was an old conversation for him. “I . . . I didn’t say that.”
I swallowed, trying to think how best to present my other theories.
He felt it through the bond. “Say it, Nym.”
“I think he’s your father, Renn.” He didn’t react.
“I think your mother was Sestan—Eden and Adrinn believed her to be, and her name was Alarna—and that Adoel Nicosia is your father by blood. I think, maybe, she knew more about the prophecy than we realized. I think she took refuge here, and Nicosia found out.” I sucked in a deep breath, ready to reveal what had truly made me so nervous before.
“Adoel Nicosia is the one who shattered you, Renn,” I confessed.
“I learned of it in Rodsfell. Whitestone . . . Physician Whitestone told me.”
I didn’t need the bond to feel the shock that shot through him at the name. His face revealed everything.