Chapter 49
I jerk awake to a familiar scent: lavender.
I take a moment to orient myself. I’m in Alaris’s bed, and for the first time, I’m not alone.
I’m in his arms. A familiar ringed hand is tucked around my waist, anchoring me, while the other moves through my hair.
My rose gold waves have grown out to my waist, the dingy gray ends the only signal I ever cut and dyed it.
“Ly,” he says, before I even speak. “You’re awake.”
His voice is low and calm, his breath warm against my ear. I blink slowly, heart thudding.
His fingers card through my hair in long, slow passes. Cool against my scalp, then sliding through the strands, each drag so unhurried it feels like he could do this for hours. Each stroke sends a wash of calm over me, and tingles over my head and down my spine.
I sigh. Then I remember myself.
“Alaris!” I try to sit up. “I need to tell you…”
“Stay still. I left you alone last night because I thought these visions were finished. I’m not taking the chance again.
” His arm tightens, drawing me back against him.
His chest is cool and solid beneath me. “I’ve been reading up on Cyralia.
It turns out your…instinct…last night was correct.
The old books suggest you can be anchored by sensation.
Pleasure and pain can help slow the cycling, to keep you in the present. ”
His fingers find the crown of my head and draw down again, and my whole body softens into him, buzzing pleasure spreading over me.
How long has he been here, stroking my hair? He has better things to do. I push his arm off and sit up. “You don’t have to do that!”
He sits up behind me and traps me in his arms, speaking low in my ear. “Ly, I swear, if you even try it…this is a kidnapping. You’re not going anywhere.”
He lowers both of us back down slowly, my heart going wild. I should argue. I should insist. But his fingers move through my hair again, slow and deliberate, and the thought scatters. His thumb traces the curve of my ear, and a trail of tingles follows its path. My breath hitches.
“Alar…”
His fingers graze down to the nape of my neck, pressing gently at the base of my skull. Every thought I had about getting up, about the office, about the visions, goes quiet. There is only the cool point of pressure and the sensation spreading out from it.
The only thought that squirms through is that I wish he was doing this because he wanted to, not because a book told him it would help in a magical medical event, and I’m a problem his otherworldly patience makes him willing to solve.
As soon as he releases the pressure, I force myself to fight through the drowsy spell he’s putting me under and twist in his arms. He holds still, his expression controlled and unreadable.
The sun is dipping low, orange catching in his hair. I seize. It reminds me of the priests’ torches as they touched the kindling at the base of his pyre.
I have to find my voice. I have to convince him. “Alaris…I saw you burn.”
His thumb sweeps my cheek. “Not now,” he says quietly. “That can wait.”
I feel like I’m more shaken by the news than he is. But he doesn’t have the image of a distant Alaris, hands chained around an iron post at his back, flames climbing. I shudder.
“It can wait,” he says again more firmly. “Do you think there are more?”
“More what?”
“More memories. I’m not underestimating this again.”
I line up what I saw since I used the oraculi a second time: in the life I saw before I went in the river, I woke up uneasy, but my days went on as normal. My father paraded me before the court in spring. Then I walked into a garden and never walked out.
And last night, I saw a life where I was calm at midnight. Up until the moment when I was thrown down the stairs, I don’t remember being afraid at all.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I think that was the first one.”
He makes a low sound that I feel through his chest. “Then let’s just wait a little bit longer. When you’re ready, you can tell me what you saw.”
The words I’m ready now die on my tongue as his hand settles back into my hair, resuming the slow, steady rhythm. I close my eyes.
If there were more lives, he would hold me through them too.
So I let myself sink into the feeling. The weight of his arm across me, the slow pull of his fingers sending tingles over me, the steady rise of his chest against my back.
I have never had anything like this before.
In every life, I lived alone, and I died alone in terror.
If I think about it, I’m not sure there are many people who would have mourned me. Maybe no one.
I turn my face to his shoulder so he will not see the wetness on my lashes.
When a memory rises too close and the room starts to blur, I breathe him in. Cool air and cloves on his skin, and lavender in the air; the scent that has come to mean this bed, this place, the present. I hold it in until the walls steady.
But there is one thing I’m ready to admit…
I think I know who killed me.
At twenty I was tense, watchful, hidden in the Sunrise Palace, trying to avoid the attention of my father or brothers. But at twenty-one, something changed. The fear arrived, and the countdown began.
Every time, I died before I reached twenty-two. And while the time and place and manner of death seemed random, a pattern is becoming clear.
In the life I married Cantor, I never made it to my wedding night.
In the life when my father placed me beside him at the high table, death in the garden quickly followed.
And in this last life, where Alaris burned, and Seran told me we would need a new shadoward treaty, I was pushed down the stairs.
I can’t be sure about the backroom conversations and decisions that might have shaped the lives when I was stowed away in the tower or losing myself in drink. But I know whenever I got close to marriage, I died soon after.
And there is one more thing. The night my father sat me at the high table, I saw my mother’s face.
I thought, in the moment, that she was angry at me. Or maybe embarrassed at a flameless daughter being trotted out in front of the court. Or worried I would fail, the way I have always failed, and the shame would fall on her.
But she should have been pleased. Thrilled.
For the first time in my life, I was useful—not only useful, exalted, at my father’s side.
A good match would raise her standing. A daughter married into a powerful house is an extension of the empress’s reach.
She should have been calculating which lord to support, not gripping her cup with white knuckles and the tendons popping out on her throat.
I thought she was upset on my birthday because of the mistress in my father’s lap. But the mistress is nothing new. My mother’s emotion that night was directed at me, not at him. I just couldn’t see it then.
Now I can.
As soon as I marry, I leave the palace, and a deadly secret is no longer contained. Others will find out I have no flame, raising questions. When my children don’t either, those questions will demand answers. And my children might even carry the signs of Cyralia more visibly than I do.
“I think I know who sent the masked man,” I say, finally, the words thick in my throat.
Alaris’s fingers pause at my scalp. Then they resume, and I tell him all of it.
My mother’s face at the spring event, the fury that should have been pride.
The pattern I can now trace through five lives: afraid at twenty-one, dead by twenty-two.
When the road to marriage becomes clearest, the masked man comes.
I stare at the orange light on the ceiling and wonder which version of the secret she is keeping.
Did she take someone to her bed before the marriage?
After? Or did she come to the emperor already carrying cyralian blood in her veins, disguised behind red hair and a mostly mortal lineage the archivists never questioned?
Something like pity rises up. She was twenty-one when she married the closest thing to a living god, angry and terrifying, sizzling like a brazier. She walked into marriage with a secret that could kill her at the age when I could barely sit through a banquet beside the same man.
The sympathy lasts the span of one breath.
Because cleaning up her secret requires my death. However she came to carry cyralian blood, however young or desperate or trapped she was, the solution she landed on was a man in a mask with a blade. Again, and again, and again.
May you never live to endure what I have. When she said that to me on my birthday, I thought it was the wine and humiliation talking.
She meant it.
Alaris’s hand stills in my hair. He is quiet for a long time.
“I have been looking into it, without any answers worth reporting so far,” he says finally.
“You weren’t a very public figure, and with you missing, digging too deeply would raise uncomfortable questions…
” A pause. “I see the pattern. The empress has the means and the knowledge to do it. Your life is a threat to her.”
I swallow. Hearing it back from him makes it feel more real.
“If it is the empress, then we already have a solution,” he says, his voice low. “Once I kill the emperor, she won’t need you gone to protect herself from a dead husband’s wrath.”
I weigh his words. If my father dies, there will be no emperor to worry about the stain of a cyralian daughter.
“Do you think that will be enough? She already sent him after me in this life…”
Because I left the palace. The point was to contain me. Even though she doesn’t know why I ran, she sent him to find me anyway.
“If he doesn’t stop, I’ll keep you in my sight every moment until I can kill him,” Alaris says simply.
His words make me wriggle closer, my eyes drifting closed. Just like last time, I don’t feel like I’ve slept. It’s like I’ve been awake since I went in the river. Or for months.
But the burning pyre flashes against my lids.
“But I saw it, again and again. You don’t win.” My voice comes out soft. “The Flame keeps burning. We have to come up with something else…”
“I will hear it all. But I think that’s enough now.” His thumb completes one slow circle at my temple. “Rest now, Ly.”
I want to argue. But in another few minutes, I don’t think I’ll have a choice. I tense my back. I’m not the only one who has had sleepless night after sleepless night. “Only if you sleep too.”
His chest stills for a moment. “Fine. I’m still going to hold you so I wake up if your breathing changes.”
I swallow, nodding, like this reason is perfectly practical and does nothing to my heart at all.
He slides lower on the pillows, nestling me into his shoulder. I watch as his eyes close. My pulse picks up. I actually don’t think I’m going to be able to achieve the sleep I just negotiated for both of us.
He smiles, like he knows I’m looking, and cracks one eye. “Go to sleep, Ly.”
I squirm, adjusting. And I stare at his chest rising and falling for a few more moments. The exhaustion pulling on my mind is powerful enough to subdue my nerves.
I let his scent soothe me to sleep.
When I open my eyes, the room is filled with dim morning light. The fire has burned to ash.
He is still asleep.
I’ve been living in his room all this time, but I have never seen this. His face is slack, the careful composure gone. His dark lashes rest against his cheekbones. His lips are slightly parted. His hands are crossed on my back, and I know if I so much as shift, he’ll feel it.
So I stay relaxed, breathing slow, and I let myself enjoy looking. The strong line of his jaw, the angle of his nose, the way his onyx hair falls across his forehead. I have cataloged these features more times than I should have, but I have rarely had unmonitored access like this.
He is so beautiful it makes my chest ache.
Mine, my traitorous chest says.
No. He’s not. And that shouldn’t be what matters right now.
I have been dreaming. Proper dreams, with a tangle of things both real and unreal. A spring courtyard and lords raising their cups. The road through snow to Cantor’s keep, the creak of a carriage, his easy laugh. My father’s voice announcing a match. The threads weave together and fray apart.
But one real memory stands out. The staircase under the throne. White doors with no handles. A basin so bright I couldn’t look at it.
Even though it pains me to give up this moment, this is too important. I place my palm on his chest.
“Alaris. Wake up.”
His eyes open. For one unguarded breath they are soft, unfocused, then they zero in on me. He searches my face. “Still here?”
“I’m here.” I hold his gaze. “I know a way to the Eternal Flame.”