Chapter Six #3
I cast my eyes heavenward. “I’m being serious.”
“As am I.” He smirks at my scowl. “Truthfully? I barely remember the man I was a hundred years ago.”
“I doubt that.”
“Oh?”
“You remember everything.” There is an accusation in my voice. “You just do not want to tell me.”
“I have always been honest with you. Since the first day we met.”
“There is a difference between honesty and transparency.”
“Yes. One is expected, the other earned. I will always tell you the truth when you ask for it. But I’m afraid you have not yet earned my secrets, skylark.”
Skies, I had forgotten the vertiginous nature of conversing with him. How he uses conversation like another battle tactic, to disorient and disarm his opponent. How he talks in circles until you can no longer remember what you asked in the first place.
“It’s late,” Soren announces, eyes flickering to the arched doorway where a gauzy white curtain flutters in the night breeze. “We can talk more in the morning.”
With that, his fingers—which are still looped around my wrist like shackles—slide down the length of my hand and intertwine with mine.
He walks toward the archway, dragging me along after him.
My thin boot soles slip uselessly against the glowing floor when I attempt to dig in my heels, finding no purchase on the smooth white crystal.
“Wait!”
He halts, half turning to look back at me. For the first time, I notice the deep shadows beneath his eyes. “For…?”
“I cannot stay here. I have to get back.”
“To Caeldera.”
I nod.
“Because your last journey through the portal was such a stunning success?”
Heat steals over my cheeks. “I was thinking…”
“I could see where that would be exhausting for you,” he says drolly when I trail off.
“I thought,” I restart, annoyed, “you might be a friend and take me back through.”
“A friend?” His tone is wry. “Is that what we are?”
“I suppose that depends on whether you help me.”
“Ah. Yes. Blackmail. The bedrock of all true fidelity.”
“Are you going to take me back or not?”
“Not.”
“Why?” I exclaim.
“For several reasons.”
“Several?”
“Three.”
“Which are?”
“Firstly,” he says, calm in the face of my vexation, “because you look like you are about to collapse at my feet at any given moment. Tell me, have you eaten a single godsdamned meal since I last saw you, or are you intent on withering away to a skeletal corpse like some boring, self-flagellating martyr?”
My chin jerks higher. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine,” he says bluntly. “You look…” His eyes scan my face, then move down my form, seeming to take in every dried bloodstain and frayed seam, lingering on the narrow slope of my hips, the sticks of my legs in the tattered uniform.
I know, since Fyremas, I have grown too thin. But even when I find the time to eat a proper meal, I rarely manage to muster the appetite for it. Some days, if Lestyn does not shove a cup of stew or a baked bannock into my hands in the infirmary after a long shift, I do not eat at all.
Something dark moves in Soren’s eyes—a flash, there and gone too quickly to properly decipher—as they shift back to mine.
“You would be most unwise to travel by portal in such a state. The leylines…they take a toll. More than the blood you spill to activate them. Given the chance, they will pull at the loose threads of your psyche. Unravel you.”
I purse my lips, unable to contradict him. The terror I felt during my doomed attempt to reach Caeldera is fresh in my mind. I have no desire to ever experience such a thing again.
“Oblivion. That’s what we call it. A state deeper than amnesia.
One that erases all that you are, undoes the stitches that hold your very self together.
” He shakes his head. “Portal travel is not for the casual voyager, and definitely not for the unprepared one. At the very least, you require a warm meal and a decent night’s sleep before we pass through again. ”
“Fine,” I begrudgingly agree. “I can see the sense in that.”
“A first for you?”
I pointedly ignore his sarcastic comment. “You said there were three reasons.”
“Did I?”
“Soren, you cannot detain me here without cause—”
“My second reason involves my own exhaustion, not yours. I myself traveled a very far distance by portal only hours ago. I am not altogether eager to make another trip so soon—especially when a brooding Pendefyre no doubt awaits on the other side, full of acrimony and accusation.”
My teeth sink into my bottom lip. I’ve not thought of Penn since my arrival. Is he already back in Caeldera? It’s nightfall. Surely, he is back by now. Has he realized I have not returned? Does he think I have deserted him on purpose? Gods, he will be worried…
Or relieved, a bitter voice whispers from the back of my mind. He wanted peace of mind. Your absence, however unintentional, may well be a gift to him.
“Tell me.” Soren cuts into my unpleasant thoughts. “How fares our fiery king?”
I swallow hard. “Take me back to Caeldera and see for yourself.”
“Clever. But no.”
My sigh is resigned. “And your third reason?”
He hesitates, staring at me for a long beat. “Consider it an unearned secret.”
“You truly aren’t going to tell me?”
“I would, were you ready to hear it.”
“Soren—”
“We can resume this squabble in the morning. But for now, I have not seen my bed in well over a month and I am most eager to reacquaint myself with it.”
“I am not sleeping in your bed,” I grouse at the back of his head when he starts walking again, dragging me along in his wake. His hair is still dripping wet, sending droplets down the back of his neck, the blades of his shoulders, the defined divot of his lower spine where the towel is slung.
“Did I invite you to sleep in my bed?”
My eyes narrow. “Then where am I to sleep?”
“This is the Water Court. We have no shortage of rooms. Pick one.”
He stops, shoves aside the curtain, and, like a partner leading the steps of a waltz, spins me through it, into the night.