Chapter 9 The Edge of Knowing #4
He tilted his head, and his face descended toward hers, and the distance between their lips narrowed to inches, and Sera could feel the warmth of his breath on her mouth, could smell the clean, mineral scent of his skin and beneath it something darker and more complex, the scent of shadow and combat and the lingering residue of the Descent, and her eyes were half-closed and her lips were parting and the moment was building toward something that felt as inevitable as the tide, and then— A sharp, urgent knock on the door shattered the moment like a stone thrown through glass.
Malakor's hand withdrew from her face as though burned, and Sera's hand fell from his chest, and they sprang apart with the jerky, guilty haste of two people caught doing something they were not yet ready to acknowledge, and the space between them expanded from intimate to formal in the span of a single heartbeat, and the Warden's mask slammed back into place with a force that Sera felt in her own chest like a door slamming shut.
"Enter," Malakor said, and his voice was the Warden's voice, flat and commanding and stripped of every trace of the roughness and warmth that had filled it moments before.
The door opened, and Cassian Solenne stood in the doorway, his gentle face creased with concern and something more urgent, and his hands were glowing with the soft, warm light of active healing, and the light illuminated the corridor behind him, where Sera could see the flickering, agitated luminescence of shadow-beings moving with the hurried, purposeful energy of a crisis still in progress.
"Three more wounded from the breach," Cassian said, his eyes moving from Malakor to Sera and back again, and Sera was certain, with a mortification that burned in her cheeks, that he had sensed what was happening in this room before he knocked, that his healer's sensitivity had registered the emotional resonance of two people on the edge of something significant, and that his decision to knock loudly and urgently had been a deliberate interruption, a kindness disguised as an emergency.
"Two of them are in the early stages of emotional Hollowing from the combat strain.
I need your authority to access the deep cultivation reserves.
" Malakor was already moving toward the door, his stride purposeful, his bearing that of the Warden, his face the mask, and he paused at the threshold and turned to look at Sera, and in that look she saw everything he could not say in front of Cassian: the frustration and the longing and the fierce, protective tenderness that he had revealed in the shelter and that she had felt in his touch a moment ago, and beneath all of it, the same terrible fear that she had sensed in the Dark Bloom, the fear of reaching out and being destroyed.
"Rest," he said again, and the word was command and plea and apology, and then he was gone, following Cassian into the corridor, and the door closed behind them, and Sera was alone.
*** She did not rest. She sat on the edge of her sleeping platform and pressed her palms against her face and breathed, and the heat of his touch still lingered on her jaw like a brand, and the ghost of his heartbeat still pulsed against the palm that had rested on his chest, and the hollowness in her chest was not emptiness now but something more complicated, a tangle of desire and frustration and the sharp, specific ache of a moment so close to fulfillment that its interruption felt like a physical wound.
She sat in the dim silver light and tried to untangle the knot of her feelings, and the attempt was as futile as it had been every other time she had tried, because feelings did not untangle, they compounded, layering over each other with the blind, organic persistence of living things, and the compound was what it was, vast and messy and impossible to reduce to its component parts.
She wanted Malakor. The wanting was not simple and it was not comfortable and it did not conform to any of the neat, rational categories she had used to organize her life in the Sunlit Realm.
It was vast and terrifying and shot through with a vulnerability that she had spent her entire adult life learning to conceal, and the Dark Bloom had stripped the concealment away and the battle at the Seventh Anchor had proved that she was capable of more than she had imagined, and the Council's accusations had shown her that her enemies were powerful and patient and already several moves ahead, and she was sitting in a room in a world that was not hers, wanting a man who might be the only thing standing between her and destruction, and the wanting felt like the most dangerous thing of all.
Her eyes found the nightbloom on its shelf across the room, and she stilled.
The flower was glowing. Not the steady, heartbeat pulse she had grown accustomed to, not the gentle silver luminescence that had accompanied her through every moment since she crossed the Veil, but something brighter, more intense, a light so concentrated that it cast sharp shadows across the walls of her small quarters, and the shadows moved as she watched, shifting and rearranging themselves in patterns that were not random.
The nightbloom's silver veins, which had always pulsed in the simple, rhythmic pattern of her heartbeat, were now forming shapes, intricate and deliberate, lines and curves and angles that arranged themselves across the black surface of the petals with the precision of writing.
Sera rose from the sleeping platform and crossed the room, her bare feet silent on the cool floor, and she stood before the shelf and stared at the nightbloom, and the patterns on its petals were still forming, the silver veins rearranging themselves with a slow, deliberate purpose that made the hairs on the back of her neck rise, because the shapes were not decorative and they were not organic, they were geometric and precise and they bore the unmistakable character of language, a script she did not recognize but that her shadow-touched eyes seemed to understand on a level deeper than reading, the same way the crystal in the Arbor had spoken to her in a language she had never learned, the same way the nightbloom had called to her across the Veil in a voice that bypassed her ears entirely.
She leaned closer, her face inches from the petals, and the silver light washed over her skin, and the patterns were almost legible, almost coherent, shapes that hovered on the edge of meaning like words heard through a wall, close enough to recognize as language but too muffled to parse, and she reached out, her fingers trembling, and touched the nearest petal, and the nightbloom's light flared, bright and hot, and the patterns on the petals shifted, rearranging themselves with a speed and precision that suggested intelligence, not the simple, responsive intelligence of a plant reacting to emotional resonance but the directed, purposeful intelligence of something communicating, and the shapes it formed were larger now, clearer, and Sera's breath caught in her throat because she could almost read them, could almost see the words that the silver veins were trying to form, and the words were important, she could feel their importance in her blood, in her bones, in the shadow-touched essence that had carried her name across three thousand years and two realms. But she could not quite read them.
The patterns dissolved and reformed, dissolved and reformed, cycling through configurations that taunted her with their near-legibility, and each cycle brought the words closer to clarity and then snatched them away again, and Sera stood in the silver light of a flower that should not exist, in a room in a world that was not hers, watching her own name take shape on black petals and dissolve before she could read it, and the not-knowing, the hovering on the edge of understanding, was the most exquisite and the most terrible form of suspense, because she understood, with the deep, instinctive certainty of her shadow-touched blood, that when the words finally became clear, they would change everything.