Chapter 5 Unbidden Gifts #4
She did not see him arrive. She felt him.
His emotional signature was unlike anything she had encountered in the Garden, a complex and tightly controlled architecture of feeling that reminded her of a fortress, high walls and narrow windows and a central keep that was sealed and guarded and radiating a heat that was not warmth but vigilance.
Beneath the fortress, deep in its foundations, she sensed something vast and slow and dark, an emotion so old and so deeply buried that she could not identify it, only feel its weight pressing against the lower limits of her perception like the pressure of deep water against the hull of a ship.
She was sitting on the moss at the base of the amethyst tree, her eyes closed, her hands resting on her knees, when she felt him approach across the clearing.
She opened her eyes, and there he was, standing at the edge of the dome of interlaced branches, his black coat moving in a breeze she could not feel, his amber eyes fixed on her with an intensity that made the fortress of his emotional architecture shiver and crack, just slightly, just enough for her to catch a glimpse of something warm and unguarded beneath the controlled surface.
He did not speak. He simply watched her, and she watched him, and the clearing held its breath around them, the bell-flowers in the canopy falling silent, the moss beneath her stilling its gentle pulse.
The Garden, she was learning, responded to the emotional states of its inhabitants, and the state that existed between her and Malakor in that moment was so charged, so layered with currents of attraction and wariness and the mutual recognition of two people who were more dangerous to each other than either was willing to admit, that the
Garden seemed to hold itself very still, as though afraid of disturbing something fragile.
Sera stood. The movement was involuntary, her body rising to meet his presence the way a compass needle rises to meet a magnetic field, and she took a step toward him before she could stop herself, drawn by the pull of that fortress with its cracked walls and its guarded warmth.
He did not move. His amber eyes tracked her approach, and the crack in his emotional architecture widened, just slightly, and she saw more of what lay beneath the control, a loneliness so profound that it made her chest ache, a loneliness that was not the absence of company but the absence of something more specific and more essential, something that had been lost long ago and never replaced.
She was close enough to touch him now. She did not decide to reach for his arm.
Her hand moved on its own, rising from her side with the same instinctive certainty that had drawn her to the nightbloom in the dark woods, and her fingers brushed the inside of his forearm, just above the wrist, where the skin was warm and smooth and darker than the surrounding shadow.
The world broke open. Not the gentle, controlled opening of the memory-vine but a violent, overwhelming flood of sensation that hit her like a wave and dragged her under.
She was no longer standing in the clearing.
She was somewhere inside Malakor Thorne, inside the fortress, inside the foundations, and what she found there was not loneliness but grief, a grief so vast and so old that it had become a geological feature of his emotional landscape, a canyon carved through the bedrock of his being by a loss so total that it had reshaped everything around it.
She saw a face, a woman's face, dark-skinned and fierce-eyed, with a scar that ran from her right cheek to the corner of her mouth, and she felt the love that Malakor had felt for this woman, a love so consuming that it had threatened to consume everything else he was, and she felt the moment that love had been cut short, a moment of violence and sacrifice and a sound that was not a word but a scream, and the scream was still echoing in the foundations of the fortress, still reverberating through the dark stone of his emotional architecture, three thousand years after the woman named Lyra had drawn her last breath in the Descent.
Sera snatched her hand away. The contact broke.
She staggered back, her palm burning where it had touched his skin, her nightbloom flaring white against her hip, and she looked at Malakor with eyes that she knew were wide and shocked and that were telling him everything she had seen, because she could not have hidden it if she had tried, not from him, not from a being whose emotional control was as sophisticated as his.
His face had gone still. Not the controlled stillness of the Warden but the absolute, frozen stillness of a man who has just been seen in a way he did not consent to be seen, whose most deeply buried wound has been laid bare by a stranger's careless touch.
His amber eyes were very bright, burning with a light that she recognized now as grief made visible, and his jaw was clenched so tightly that she could see the muscles working beneath the bronze skin, and he said nothing, and the silence between them was so heavy that she felt it pressing against her chest like a physical weight.
"Malakor," she whispered. "I am sorry. I didn't mean to.
I didn't know it would--" "Go to your chamber.
" His voice was low and even, the voice of the Warden, and it cut through her apology like a blade through silk.
"Rest. We will speak of this later." He turned and walked away, and Sera stood in the clearing with her burning palm pressed against her chest and the echo of a dead woman's scream ringing in her ears, and she understood, with a clarity that was both painful and inescapable, that she had just done something that could not be undone.
She had touched the Warden's grief, and the Warden would not forgive her for it easily, because forgiveness required vulnerability, and vulnerability was the one thing that Malakor Thorne had spent three thousand years learning to refuse.