Chapter 23
When we get back to the cottage, Zan carefully locks the door, looks at me, and holds out a hand to me.
It trembles, just slightly.
Mine does too, as I take it.
Wordlessly, Zan leads me to his room—not our room, I realize, at least not in my head.
He sits me down on the edge of the bed and bends down to untie my shoes, and then his, and then comes to bed and holds out his arms.
I turn into them without hesitation, and he lays us both down, him beneath me once again, and reaches back to draw the covers over us.
Tension I didn’t realize I was holding immediately drains out of me, and soon, lulled by the feeling of warmth in his arms, the solidity of his heart beating, I fall right to sleep, wrapped in him.
When I awaken, as soon as I open my eyes, I feel Zan do the same beneath me.
“Everything okay?” he murmurs. “It’s early.”
So early it’s still dark outside.
“Something’s wrong,” I say.
His eyes glint beneath me, a pale light in the darkness. “Do you know what?”
I do a mental scan as far as I can reach now that I’m conscious and then shake my head slowly, sitting up. “I can’t put my finger on anything. I don’t get vague senses of dread for no reason, though.”
“I believe you,” Zan says simply. No doubt in him. “You won’t be able to sleep again.”
“No.”
He nods, sitting up. “We can probably assume it’s something to do with the priests—”
“—and probably not up here on the mountain, at least directly. I’d be able to sense them now.”
“So likely in Crystal Hollow, yes? Could you have noticed something farther afield?”
“No.” The island had been the limit of my perception because of the Quiet, and even that was wider than a sage was supposed to be able to feel.
I can’t properly sense Crystal Hollow anymore from here, which was how the Sage of Compassion could enter yesterday without my noticing. But I wonder if some sympathetic awareness remains, and that’s why all I have now is this ominous feeling.
I didn’t feel anything when the priests came yesterday, so what does it mean that I feel it now?
“It’s too early to go down yet,” Zan says. “If we don’t know what we’re looking for, showing up before people are even awake for the day will only make it look like we’re trying to pressure them.”
Argh. “How long?”
Zan closes his eyes, getting a feel for the time of day.
I used to be able to do that. My ability to sense the passage of time broke when I created the Quiet.
I wonder if I should make an effort to reacquire it, or if being able to feel the passage of time will make me mad.
“Two hours until sunrise,” Zan says. “That’s the earliest we can reasonably show up without appearing to be skulking.”
He could probably hide his presence, but if what we need to do is talk to people to find out what’s going on, that won’t help.
Argh!!
“I’m going to make more ice cream,” I say grimly.
“Eat some, too,” Zan advises. “I’ll make breakfast. We can go pick more berries on our way down the mountain.”
It feels like it takes an eternity.
Zan busies himself in the kitchen. Cooking, tidying. The “dragon in the kitchen” idiom has never seemed more laughable, because he looks like he belongs there.
How long has he been waiting—preparing—to have a home of his own, and never feeling like he could? His skills may double as how to help a sage, and maybe that’s how it started, but the little touches in how he arranges a space—that’s not practicality.
That’s the desire to have a home.
And until me, he wouldn’t—or maybe couldn’t.
Focusing on him is the only thing that makes the wait bearable.
I eat some of the ice cream I made yesterday. It’s amazing. I try to savor it.
I think I know why Zan said I should eat some, even now.
Good things can exist even when some things are wrong.
I have to hold onto that, or else what am I fighting for?
But the fact that good things can exist just makes me even angrier that I should have to fight—with myself most of all—to allow myself to appreciate them.
I eat a whole bowl of both my ice creams while Zan cooks.
Maybe believing that I deserve good things is something I can improve with practice, my kata—my meditation, my prayer—eating ice cream until I believe in good things no matter the circumstances.
And then I take what I’ve learned from this meditation and get to work.
I can at least keep creating happiness in ice cream form.
Zan visibly shuts himself down again before we go; more completely, this time. It’s hard for him to see me around other people with the mating instincts riding him. I don’t ask if that will abate or intensify if we do mate, because I don’t want to give him any more justification for delaying.
I resent not being able to give him the time to acclimate. For just being together.
So I keep a firm hand on my emotions, too, because I’m ready to lash out at anything.
And I’m very deliberately going to save this energy for whatever fucker caused what I’m feeling that’s drawn me out of Zan’s embrace.
We forego blackberry picking on the way down the mountain after all. I don’t want my mood to taint the joy of that memory.
I also want the ice cream that Zan helped me pack encased in blocks of ice to still be cold when we get there.
Nothing appears out of place as we make our way swiftly through Crystal Hollow, heading straight for Nomi’s house.
But when Zan knocks, there’s no answer.
We exchange a glance. Where could she have gone? If we ask around—maybe just with the intention of putting my ice cream in her house until the meeting is over—
No.
My patience snaps in a surge of anger.
Something is wrong, and I am not an ordinary person who can do nothing about it.
Just because I have been pretending to be ordinary for everyone’s comfort doesn’t mean that I am ordinary.
I am wearing the fucking bow, so no one will even see anything out of the ordinary, no telltale glowing of my eyes, as I spin quickly in a kata to augment my senses.
My dread grows as I turn back to Zan. “I don’t feel a concentration of your scales anywhere but here. Can you locate them?”
“With effort. It’s not easy for me to feel such a small sliver of my power when I’m encased in it. However.”
Without warning, Zan rams an open palm into the front door of Nomi’s house, and it disintegrates.
All at once, my sense of inside the house opens up—I hadn’t actually realized it was being hidden, before, that no one could sense what lay inside from the outside.
But now I feel what Zan must have suspected: banked rage.
We rush inside and immediately almost trip over Nomi’s form on the ground, lying unconscious on her back.
She is wearing the dragon scale talisman, but the scales are black and crumbling, like they’ve been overwhelmed and exhausted. Their protection spent.
“Wait,” Zan says as I rush to her. “Sometimes moving humans when they’re injured—”
“I know that, I’ve been on battlefields before,” I snap. “But if it’s just magical backlash that caused her to black out—”
This time I extend a hand that glows with wrath despite the suppressing power of the bow—which also disintegrates in my hair, overwhelmed, because fuck this—and send a beam of wrath straight into Nomi like a bolt of lightning.
Nomi’s eyes fly open, and she gasps as she surges into a seated position, her eyes wild.
“Guardian, report,” I grit out.
Her gaze flies to mine, then to Zan, seeing us for the first time and an instant later realizing what it means, before turning back to me with a snarl.
“The Order took Teren,” Nomi says.
For a moment, I probably appear still.
I am capable of blank shock, but that is not what I feel in this moment.
But the pool of wrath inside me goes from a simmer to an explosion in an instant, and it takes me a moment to let it rise while fighting the urge to give it form.
Not yet.
But that thought, too, only causes it to grow.
Because some part of me knew.
Not the specifics. There are so many things the Order could have done.
But I could have been here the whole time, had I not counseled myself toward rationality rather than acting on my anger. We could have organized someone to follow the priests and see where they took Teren, if not stopped them entirely.
But I elected to wait. To not act on my power.
There are costs to this kind of freedom.
Nomi scoots back from me, her expression gone careful at the intensity of the magenta aura spilling out of me.
I turn away from her, toward the door.
Zan grabs my arm. “Not yet, Yora.”
It is an effort of will to not lash out at him with my wrath. “Do not hold me back,” I tell him coldly.
“You’re going to reveal yourself,” Zan snaps back, utterly unconcerned by the threat I offer, which is good because it’s not focused at him, but it enrages me all the same.
“Yes,” I bite out. “I am.”
“Do you want to undermine what Teren took this risk for?” Zan demands. “He revealed himself rather than letting you for a reason, Yora.”
“And his gambit failed,” I snap. “For this to have happened—”
“Someone from Crystal Hollow helped them. I’m aware,” Zan says grimly. “But his gambit hasn’t failed yet. This community has not begun to try. You have to let them, or it’s all for nothing, and nothing will change.”
I scream at him.
No words, incoherent, just a blast of pure rage.
Zan’s eyes are bright in the face of my storm.
“I’m not waiting any longer,” I snarl.
“Oh, I agree entirely,” Zan says in a low voice. “But the first thing we need to do is get Teren back, and you have more room to maneuver as long as it’s not publicly known that you’re the Sage of Wrath. Finding Teren is more important than punishing the people responsible.”
With my wrath carrying my clarity I ask, “Is it?”
If they are not punished for a transgression such as this, they will never stop.
Zan says. “The secondary priority, then. Punishment can’t come at the expense of the people whose lives we’re trying to save.”
That, finally, makes me take a breath and begin a kata, gathering the wrath back into me.
I’m not dissipating it or spending it. I will yet need it.