30. A Story I Didn’t Know I Was Telling #2
For what felt like minutes, the only sound was the sigh of the desert breeze and the soft chuffing of the horses.
“Do you think that’s true?” he asked finally. “That some people aren’t meant to be alone?
I fiddled absently with the stellarium compass threaded onto the cord next to the lumen shard around my neck.
“I think,” I answered, choosing my words carefully, “Pollux helped Castor feel whole because she wasn’t afraid of his blinding light.
And the same for Pollux, because he didn’t fear the darkness of what she was. ”
“You’re not afraid of me.” The words weren’t asked as a question, but there was a vulnerability behind them. As if he were astonished that they were true.
“You’re not afraid of me, either.”
“How could I be? You’re the only one who’s ever looked at me as though…you were listening to a story I didn’t know I was telling.”
My breath caught. “Griffon—”
“In your story,” he went on, his voice rougher than it was before, “they orbit each other forever, don’t they?”
“Yes,” I answered, still digesting his earlier comment. “Neither can exist without the other’s gravity.”
He shifted closer on his bedroll until his shoulder pressed against mine. “I’m not sure if that’s romantic or terrifying.”
I huffed a laugh as the warmth of him seeped through my blanket.
“Do you think King Faisal was right?”
Griffon turned his head to look at me. “What do you mean?”
“That things happen not by coincidence but because of some divine plan? He made it sound like everything that happened—from the airship crash to the slave traders to the solving of the puzzle—was predetermined.”
“Does that bother you?”
Thinking, I traced a pattern on the thick fabric of my bedroll. “I don’t know. For as long as I can remember, I was told what I was supposed to be. A chosen one. Gifted. A Sideri with an ember.” I glanced over at him. “But I never was. So either fate decided I wasn’t worth the effort, or…”
“Or fate doesn’t work the way they think it does.”
“Maybe not.” I rolled onto my side to face him.
“What if the universe just creates situations? Like intersections or places where paths cross? And we get to decide which way we go.” I met his gaze.
“You could have killed me in the catacombs. Or I could have stayed in Inframare. Or we could have died on that pyre. But we didn’t. ”
“Because we chose differently,” he added softly.
I found his hand again in the small space between us. “Maybe that’s what the king saw. Not that we’re pawns on some divine chessboard, but that we kept choosing each other. Kept choosing not to give up. Choosing to believe that there was something better up ahead.”
His fingers tightened around mine. “I like that better than thinking it was all decided for us.”
“Me too. I want my choices to be mine.”
“Even the stupid ones?”
“Especially the stupid ones,” I laughed.
The desert night grew colder, but neither of us moved to separate our bedrolls. We just lay there beneath the infinite sky, two people who'd been cast out and lost and searching.
After a while, I spoke again, but my voice was barely above a whisper. “Do you think we’ll really find it? The village?”
“I don’t know.” He took a deep breath. “But either way, we’ll both be there to find out. And somehow that makes it less impossible.”
Something settled in my chest at his words.
Not peace exactly. We had way too far to go and way too many dangers yet ahead of us for that.
But it was a certainty that whatever waited for us in Volantia—we’d face it together.
And considering that neither of us knew what we were doing, it was both comforting and mildly panic-inducing.
Like we'd just signed some invisible contract neither of us could quite read the fine print on.
“You should sleep,” he murmured. “Tomorrow’s going to be another long day.”
“I will,” I said with heavy eyelids, “I just want to look at the stars for a little longer.”
He shifted then, pulling me against him. And with a familiarity that suddenly felt right, I rested my head on his shoulder. I breathed in his scent mixed with dry desert sand and smoke as I felt him drift off to sleep.
Gemini sparkled above us, its Castor and Pollux winking in the vast darkness and spinning in their eternal orbit. So balanced, and so very complete.
We’d soon cross the border into Volantia, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were riding toward more danger than either of us anticipated. Where we were hunted. And where we might not even find the home we were looking for.
I closed my eyes and listened to Griffon’s steady breathing and the soft nocturnal sounds of the desert. The dunes stretched out ahead of us, and on the other side of that mountain range a queen was tearing her kingdom apart looking for the man who slept beside me.
But tonight, under a vast ocean of stars, I savored this moment.
Not as a defective Sideri. Not as the girl without an ember.
Just Wren, a stargazer who was traveling toward an uncertain future with someone who held her as if she were the stars themselves and made the uncertainty far less terrifying.
Above us, as they had done since the very beginning, the ancient stars gazed down upon two lost souls. And tonight, I felt a little less alone beneath them.
I yawned and shifted, Griffon’s arm tightening around me. “Comfortable?” He murmured with gravel in his voice.
“Yeah.”
“Good, now go to sleep, stargazer. Tomorrow we ride toward certain doom.”
“Together?” I asked, already drifting.
“Absolutely.”