Chapter 44
The day before solstice, the meeting is tense. Karns and Dashol trade words, moving soldiers down different routes, deciding fates. I take in none of it, all my attention focused on Nykiri.
She hasn’t spoken to me since the wine cellar. I catch her eye twice across the maps, searching for a sign she found the oraculi, or at least a nod to confirm she’s working on it. But her face stays closed, her gaze indifferent.
When the meeting ends, the others file out. I start after Nykiri, hoping to get an update in the hall.
“Ly. Stay a moment,” Alaris says, standing.
I pause my steps but don’t meet his eyes.
“I’ve been meaning to give you this.” He holds out a black sheath with leather ties dangling off one corner. “For the moonstone dagger.”
I frown. Solstice is tomorrow, and he’s still finding time to think of me. I walk over to his desk and close my fingers around it. But he doesn’t let go.
I look up.
The moment our eyes meet, he releases his end of it.
He sighs. “This feels familiar.”
“What does?”
“You ignoring me. Not looking at me. Not talking to me. Like your early days here.”
My chest squeezes. “I’m not doing anything.”
He looks worn. His stillness no longer feels calm; it feels strained. His eyes are shadowed.
They flash silver, then fade.
“Your eyes,” I say, “keep doing that.”
He reaches a hand toward them. “It’s the solstice. It makes it harder to control.”
I swallow. I hate this tension. “Alaris, you know what I want.”
His jaw works. “And it’s not going to happen.”
“Then we don’t have much to talk about.” I turn and start for the door. My grip is on the handle when he speaks again.
“There isn’t much time left before I leave,” he says softly.
That stops me. Alaris has helped me, protected me, and forgiven me when I didn’t deserve it. He showed me truths no one else has. The idea of him leaving in the next two weeks and never coming back rocks me with a pang of panic I can barely stand through. I squeeze the sheath to my chest.
I can’t think about failing. I need to focus on remembering.
Because if I don’t figure out a way for him to succeed, he’s going to march on the emperor and die.
So I arrange my face into a mask of bland politeness. I look over my shoulder at him. “Then I don’t have any time to waste.”
The aviary is too quiet, the hawks a constant reminder of Alaris and our standoff.
So I leave earlier than usual and go to help Siro in the greenhouse.
The lobell bushes are flourishing, the first buds bulging beneath twisted leaves, even though it’s far too early.
After a bit of watering, I help Siro with the other plants.
I throw myself into the work, attacking the beds she points me to, clipping and pruning and yanking weeds.
We often work in companionable silence, but she comes over as I stab my trowel into packed dirt with a little more force than necessary.
“Something the matter?” Siro asks, her gloved hands dark with mulch.
“Nothing,” I say, gritting my teeth. Alaris lost three people on his last trip to the Citadel. He knows risks are worth it to get information, even deadly ones. So why won’t he see the wisdom in this? I strike the dried dirt and roots. “Just…suffering…fools.”
She watches me another second, then clears her throat. “Totally unrelated, but my poisons section doesn’t only have plants that will kill or grievously injure. Some just cause stomach aches. In case the person in need of poisoning is a certain lord we can’t afford to lose.”
That forces a corner of my mouth up, and my hand on the trowel loosens. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“What do we need poisons for?” Dashol asks, appearing in the greenhouse door. The light is low. He’s already here to collect me.
“Nothing. Probably.”
“Fools, maybe,” Siro supplies.
We share a smile. I doubt Siro knows where Alaris hid the oraculi, but if she did, I feel certain she would help me.
Dashol stands in the entrance, like he always does when I stay too late and don’t make it back to the aviary, but I follow his gaze to Siro.
She’s already drifted back to her planters and is wrist deep in soil.
With all the time Dashol spends on me, I don’t believe he’s too busy to come in and chat for a few minutes.
But all he does is linger and sneak glances.
“Dash,” Siro says, and it’s like a rod shoots up his back. “If you’re waiting for Lyra, can you help us switch these planters? These need more light.”
He darts across the space like he’s diving into battle. He hoists a planter that must weigh at least one hundred pounds and slings it where Siro points.
The look of determination on his face is something else.
I would have preferred to ask Siro about it first, but I can’t resist asking Dashol as he escorts me back to Alaris’s wing.
“Dashol.” I try to keep my tone casual. “Can I ask…is there something between you and Siro?”
He chokes on nothing, a flush blooming under his freckles. “Ah…no. No, nothing special between us. We used to be close friends.”
His eyes find the ceiling, then the wall, and my grin grows.
“I see.” I’m in no position to push. I’ve known Dashol and Siro far less time than they’ve known each other, and I can’t imagine the complexity that Karns adds to the equation.
Under her brother’s sharp eyes, it’s possible Dashol is terrified of the feelings he is doing a horrible job of keeping off his face.
He sags, perhaps realizing he lost from the moment he opened his mouth. “Please don’t tell her. We’ll be leaving soon. I wasn’t going to say anything unless…until I get back.”
My heart cracks as I realize what Dashol is saying. He feels something for Siro. It’s been plain in his sad eyes, made clear every time he’s in that doorway, watching her dig in the dirt. But he hasn’t said anything because he’s going to leave to march on the Citadel.
Even bright-eyed, hopeful Dashol is worried he might die. Too worried to burden the woman he can’t keep his eyes off of.
“I haven’t known her long,” I say carefully. “But I don’t know if that’s what Siro would want. She strikes me as someone who would choose to live with the best of what she has now.”
Dashol sucks in air through his teeth, his muscled shoulders tensing, then releasing. “You might be right about that, but…” He shakes his head. “I’ll spare her from any more grief. Please, Lyra, don’t say anything. Not when it’s so close.”
I nod my assent. It won’t be today, and it won’t be tomorrow, but in the next two weeks, Dashol will leave.
Alone in the bedroom, I pace, twisting the moonstone dagger. I don’t know whether I can trust Nykiri’s confidence. If she can’t find an oraculi, or simply never tried, I’ve wasted all this time.
Unless I don’t need her at all. The oraculi opened my mind, but the memories are mine. I’m sure I lived another life. Maybe I can see it without Sophiri’s magic.
I’ve always seen cyralians call magic like breathing, a twirl of a wrist turning leaves yellow as easily as ignarians produce a lick of flame. My powers seem to be having an influence on the lobell without much effort. And the time resets were violent, but involuntary.
But with my memories, there is no candle or plant for me to hover my hands over. I’m not trying to use my powers exactly…I’m digging inside of myself. If it was as easy as willing these memories to the surface, I would have done it by now.
I wish there were a cyralian here to ask, but there is one thing in this room that might help me understand more about the goddess of seasons, time, and cycles.
I go to the overcrowded bookshelf, cluttered with gilt spines and objects stowed between them. It doesn’t take long to find what I’m searching for; the cracked-leather tome is the tallest on the shelf.
I pull the book free and seal myself back behind the blue velvet curtains.
I sit cross-legged on the bed and leaf through it to Cyralia’s chapter. Unfortunately, my hopes of getting more information about cyralian power are quickly dashed…the words are all in a language my tutors never taught me. But the illustrations are beautiful, so I spend time examining them instead.
Cyralia stands on a hill, watching the world cycle beneath her. Beside Vernalia, she kneels as green things push through soil. Her hands settle on Thanovar’s shoulders, while something dead lies at their feet.
I flip to the next page and my lips part.
It’s a full-page picture of Cyralia in profile, white-haired, standing on a hill. Her hands are clasped with a figure I can tell is meant to be Arastor, the sky behind them full of stars. Cyralia and Arastor were famously lovers.
The gods never had physical bodies, but love was the closest word the prophets could offer for the entanglements between them. Vernalia and Thanovar. Cyralia and Arastor…somehow, cosmically, they entwined. They fit.
I’ve seen images like this in the capital depicting their relationship, but this version of Arastor doesn’t look like any I’ve seen before.
He’s usually portrayed with four wings, short dark hair flying up, and eyes that are black from edge to edge.
Every image of every god is an artist’s invention.
The older representations came from pure imagination and varied widely, while more recent paintings and statues have converged around traits of the incarnials and their divinial bloodlines.
This version of Arastor looks a lot more like…
Alaris. Not as he is day to day, but as he was that night, the night he flew down and saved me from the masked man.
It’s not a perfect copy of his features, of course, but this Arastor has long dark hair, silver eyes, and black feathered wings swooping up behind him.
Cold jealousy prickles over me. If I squint, it looks like a painting of Alaris and another woman on a hill, gazing into each other’s eyes.
I flick through to the final chapter of the book: Arastor’s chapter.
I trace the first picture of this long-haired god of night, soaring above the world through an endless starry sky.
On the next page, he’s looking down on the mortal world from a mountain, his long dark hair flying up behind him.
On the next, he’s in a sunny sky. A dark dagger in one hand cuts through it, opening a triangle of void.
While Cyralia is shown interacting with the other gods, in each of his images, Arastor is alone.
That reminds me of Alaris too. From what I’ve seen these last months, his whole life is devoted to stopping the wither. His relationships are with informants and the team he relies on. No one can get close to him except those who know the truth.
And the way Dashol made it sound, Alaris is the only one who can destroy the Flame and kill the emperor. Even if an army marches in beside him, the weight of success falls on his shoulders.
He’s carrying all of this, and he won’t let me help.
The door creaks open and I freeze. He’s back early tonight.
I stay still, listening to him move in the dark. The soft drop of his jacket on the chair, his steps to the bathing room. The second the door closes, I stash the book under my bed and burrow under the fur.
The door opens again and there is silence for a moment. Then his voice comes softly. “Are you awake, troublesome Ly?”
I don’t answer. I lie there, eyes open, staring into the dark. I don’t trust myself to speak. I grip the voidstone under my nightgown.
He’s only feet away. I can picture him standing on the other side of the curtains: his broad shoulders, the angled lines of his face, his dark hair curling over his brow.
I want him.
Maybe there is some pull between us that goes beyond the physical. Our patrons were lovers, after all…or their cosmic forces fit together in a way mortals interpreted as love. Maybe it lingers in us, somehow, the echo of their divine entanglement.
Not that I need a reason to want him. He’s beyond beautiful, attentive, and almost annoyingly perceptive.
And frustratingly clever with his words.
And his tongue, that mouth, the earned part of his reputation…
I want his hands on me, his mouth against my neck, his attention zeroed in.
I want to feel alive, after so many lives cut short.
I’ve never felt so alive as when I’m with him, and I’ve never felt less alone. Like someone cares if I disappear in the darkness. Like I’ll be able to face the thing that hunts me. Like I matter, and maybe I can help him too.
After another moment, I hear his mattress shift. I don’t know how I’m going to sleep, knowing he’s there, fighting myself not to call out to him. If I did, it would only be to continue what started the other night, and I’m not sure if he wants that. We are at odds, after all.
But I’m being unfairly cold, punishing him because he won’t let me take a risk. I’m not going to stop until I remember, but I should apologize for being so distant.
I’ll apologize in the morning.