Chapter 46
Hands plunge into the river and lock around my arms. They haul me through the pounding current and up into the air. I gasp. Sky. Wings. His face.
Alaris.
He carries me over to the bank, the world blurring by as I choke, unable to get in a breath.
I heave, folding over his forearm, coughing up water in a torrent. He lays me down on solid ground, as I continue to convulse and hack.
“Breathe. Just breathe.”
I drag in as much dirt as air in my first few breaths. My limbs are numb, my dress sealed to my skin with icy water.
I pry my cheek off the ground and lock onto silver eyes.
Silver eyes, bright and blazing. Brighter than stars. And wings flaring wide.
His dark brows are low, his teeth clenched.
“Reckless,” he hisses. But the hand on my back is gentle, tracing slow circles between my shoulder blades as I continue to cough. “What did you do, Ly?”
I shiver so hard my teeth crack together. He doesn’t wait for an answer. One arm slides under my knees, the other locks behind my back. His wings snap open, and the ground drops away.
The dark world rushes by below, his wings vast and soundless as they beat. I glance back at the river behind us, winding in a black ribbon through frosted trees, narrow but fast. The castle ahead is a cluster of lit windows, the bonfire still blazing in the front courtyard.
Wind cuts through my soaked dress and I press my face into his chest to hide from its knives.
He lands on the stone terrace outside his chambers.
The glass doors yield to him without a touch, and he carries me to the armchair nearest the fire.
He sets me down and runs his hands over me, checking my arms, my ribs, my feet.
I can barely feel his fingers on my frigid skin.
My heartbeats come slowly, but each one slams into my sternum, as if doing the work of three.
“Are you hurt anywhere? Did you hit your head?”
My jaw clacks too hard for me to answer at first. “N…no.”
I’m still so cold, I can’t think straight. Every shuddering breath is a struggle through my numb lips.
“I need to get this off you.” He rips through the buttons on my sopping dress. He throws it in a wet pile on the floor, but there is no time to worry about how see-through my shift is. In another second, he wraps me in a blanket, fast and focused.
He looks the same as he did that night he saved me in the field.
His hair hangs to his waist, wet with river water.
His wings flare repeatedly as he tightens the blanket around me, feathers misting when they move.
The light in his eyes no longer flickers; it pours, steady and bright, bright enough that I feel caught inside it.
I’ve never seen him so beautiful. I’ve never seen him so tattered.
He looks like he’s been in a fight. His white shirt is slashed, open to his muscled chest. His pants are torn, exposing a thigh, and his feet are bare. His earring is gone, as are his rings. And his wrists…
His wrists are banded in cuffs of some dark material, with broken chain links hanging from the ends.
“You…what happened…to you?” I ask, shivering.
He walks away, then returns a few seconds later and drapes the fur over the back of my chair.
“What…what are those…?” I try again, as he bundles it around me.
He lifts the wrist I’m looking at, as if he has no idea what I’m talking about. The dangling links jingle. He goes back to tucking in the heavy edges of the fur so they don’t slip open. “I chained myself to a mountain.”
My mouth drops open. “Wh…why?”
His jaw works once, the muscle bunching just below his ear. He turns away and stokes the fire higher, giving me a view of his folded wings and the way his muscles coil around the joints in his shoulder blades through his tattered shirt.
“Al…Alaris…?”
He faces me, his starlight stare stilling my words. “Ly, I think I am the one who is owed answers. You almost drowned. Another moment and I would have been collecting your corpse. So start by telling me why.”
His usual calm, easy expression is strained.
I tug the fur tighter around me. “I’m sorry. It was an accident. I…I was confused.”
He stalks closer, his smirk humorless, the flint in his eyes dangerous.
“Imagine my confusion when the hawks, who I have trusted to alert me if there is any danger near, saw you running and didn’t warn me.
Apparently.” He tilts his head. “You told them ‘not to tell me when you were running from nothing,’ and they listened. Should I go skewer every last one of them for the Noctus bonfire?”
“N…no!” I rattle the word out in pieces. I knew they were on my side. Good little beasts.
“Imagine my confusion, Lysandra…” His voice gets deadly soft. “When I see you about to dive into a river and an oraculi discarded in the aviary.” He leans in closer. “Leaving me to make a very quick exit from my mountaintop.”
I cringe down in the fur. I guess I don’t have to ask if he knows about the oraculi.
I force myself to meet his blazing gaze. “I had to know.”
“Do you even care if you live through this?”
“I care if you live through this. And I was right. There was another life.”
“Whatever you found out, it wasn’t worth the risk.”
The line between his brows is so rare and unfamiliar. I want to smooth it. But I had to try and find out Alaris’s fate…what did I learn?
I blink, trying to separate this life from the life I just saw.
“There was an explosion near the Central Palace. They blamed it on something natural.” I root around in my fraying mind, but it’s hard to pick out details. “There was no other disruption before I died in spring…”
The room in front of me flips to the starlit garden, the bed of narcissus. The blade touches the corner of my neck near my ear and bites in. The horror is worse than the pain as my mind tries to catch up with what is happening.
My whole body seizes, unable to react in time as the blade cuts clean through my skin. I paw at my throat, trying to stop the blood, as my life spills hot down my front.
“…ysandra. Ly. Come back.” Alaris’s face swims into focus. “Don’t fall into the memories. Stay here.” His voice reverberates with the command. “Look at me.”
I let out a few shuddering breaths, eyes darting around before I can fully obey. I blink away the image of narcissus, their place taken by the roaring hearth in front of me. And Alaris’s face, strange but familiar.
Look at me.
I let my gaze wander from his dark brow to his elegant nose, to his sharp jaw. His angled top lip. His full bottom one. His long hair reflects blue-black where the light hits it. I almost reach to brush it off his face. But my arm is bundled in blankets.
“Are you here with me?” he asks.
“Yes…I…I’m fine. It was just a memory…another death.”
For a second, his face is so blank, I think he’s calm. That unnatural calm that makes me wonder if he’s seen it all. Then his brows pull together and he drops his head.
“I couldn’t watch you today. I didn’t watch you, and you…” His shoulders tense.
“Alaris?” I whisper, voice hoarse.
Light flares under his skin, like the moon passing behind a cloud. He doesn’t lift his head. “I should really be back…” His arms quiver, his knuckles white on the armrests around me. “…on the mountain.”
I swim my hand out of the fur to reach for him. “Are you okay?”
He yanks his hands off my chair, a single beat of his wings sliding him back to a crouch.
“Stay…just stay where you are.”
He presses his fists into the floor. The chill that comes off him has nothing to do with the river.
It fills the room and makes the fire shrink low in the grate.
Frost crackles around him, spreading across the stone.
His wings won’t settle. They keep flaring, too wide for the sitting area, dragging shadows over the walls.
Then the whole room plunges into darkness.
Not only my sight, but my sense of the fire, the walls, the window, is gone. I can only feel the chair under me, and the ground beneath my feet. Even in the shadowgate, I could see my own hands, Alaris’s face. Now, I see nothing.
I’ve seen divinials swell with power on their high holidays. At Embrus, the court bows away from my father, sweating at the heat radiating off him like he’s a living flame. But even though his hair stands up like a candle, even though sparks fly from his steps, I have never seen anything like this.
Like wings. And spaces sucked into darkness. And this thrumming power that fills the air.
“Alaris?” I whisper, into the inky black.
“Stay back. Stay in that chair.” His voice sounds so far away. And calm. Like ice.
Something flares in me. Worry. I’ve never seen him look so ragged. I’ve never seen him look so broken. Noctus, his high holiday, is a time of connection to Arastor and to himself. A surge in his nature, his power, his feelings.
And he’s overwhelmed. It calms me straight back into the present.
“Alaris?” I ask again, voice clearer.
“Stay away from me, Lysandra.” His voice sounds even farther away, like he’s double the distance.
Whatever Alaris is feeling, I don’t want him to be alone with it. What dark place could he pull me into that I haven’t visited myself all these lonely nights? I’m not sure if I’m the right person to help him through this, but I want to be. I can’t deny I want to be.
I push the blankets off and slide off the chair, kneeling down on the cold floor I can’t see.
I crawl forward, hands out, searching in front of me.
I crawl until my knees ache, an impossible distance given the size of the room.
But I keep going, feeling my way ahead, until my fingertips connect with his knees.
“Alaris.” It’s no longer a question. My hands find the front of his tattered shirt. I climb them up, over his chest, to the cold line of his neck, to his face. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
“Ly.” His voice echoes from everywhere even though he’s right in front of me. “Go back. I don’t know where my power will take me. Stay away.”
It’s the easiest order I’ve ever refused. “No.”
Wind that doesn’t feel like wind blows around us, whipping my hair and dress, pulling on something deeper inside me, like it’s tugging on my bones.
Something is fraying at the edges of this space, like if I let go of him, everything here could disappear.
The power of Arastor, god of night and the eternal void, is coursing through this room.
But I can feel Alaris quivering under my fingers, and the slight motion is more important than the not-wind and strange tug on my edges in the dark.
“I’ll stay with you,” I say as I stroke down his cheek, leaning forward.
And because I cannot see his face, because there is nothing to lose in a room with no light in it, and because there is something pulling me in like a spell, I sit up on my knees and press my mouth to his.
For a moment he is stone. Then his mouth moves. Just a brush of his lips, so that if I shift back a breath, we’ll be apart, maybe miles apart, in the dark. His fingertips, cool and shaking, skate over my face, touching it so carefully, I’m not sure if he is breaking or I am.
Then he answers in full. One hand cups my cheek; the other settles low on my spine and gathers me in until there is no space left between us. His mouth covers mine and I fold against him.
The nip, and tug, and careful exploration are perfect, twirling my mind up in beautiful patterns in the dark. His hands slide through my hair and I grip the back of his neck as the kiss grows hungry, but still slow, deepening as our tongues find each other.
We’re both breaking, and we’re both holding each other here.
He separates from me, thumb grazing my lower lip, his breath close enough to mingle with mine. “Don’t run away again, Lysandra.” He taps his forehead against mine. “Whatever you run from, run toward me.”
I nod.
The wind that is not wind dies down, and the pull on my edges eases. Slowly the room comes back, the gray of the windows, the low red of the fire, his face an inch from mine, the moon beneath his skin. We are both still here. Neither of us dissolved into the dark.