Chapter 52 Rasha
Rasha
Langzu – inner Bian, the Sovereign’s castle
The first inventions created to extract magic from Numinar fires were small, simple, and horrifyingly inefficient.
An oven was used to burn the branches, which first had to be cut into smaller pieces.
This oven did not have a door (imagine how much magic was lost by this one omission alone!).
Instead, a narrowing chimney with a rough ceiling caught some of the magic while the smoke escaped.
The fire was quenched and the magic was subsequently captured in jars for later use.
From illustrations showing large-scale burning and black smoke, we know this process was later industrialized, the living branches burned, and the mortals stopped separating the smoke from the magic.
Sheuan.
“Shut the door,” I told the servant. The woman obeyed, her hand shaking.
My eyes adjusted to the dimmer light. In spite of myself, I drank in Sheuan’s appearance like a woman who had been deprived of water.
Her clothes were simple but finely wrought; her hair bound halfway up with a golden comb.
I remembered the feel of it between my fingers, damp with her sweat.
“You’re here,” she said, still frozen by the door.
“And you never expected to see me again.” I’d examined this thought in the quiet of night, when I remembered the way her body had fitted against mine.
At those times, I’d only felt sad, slightly wistful.
But now the words, spoken, left my mouth with the heat of the forge.
My faith might have been shaken, one of my horns eaten away, but I had yielded to each challenge and remained, somehow, unbroken.
“Don’t say that like you’re angry with me.” There was something plaintive in her voice, and I could see, the way I had in the tent – the vulnerability beneath the grasping, that desperation for connection she couldn’t quite acknowledge, that she did her best to always turn aside.
“How am I supposed to feel? Happy? Relieved?”
She lifted a hand and then let it fall back at her side. “Don’t think I’m not glad to see you again.”
“What else am I supposed to think? You left me without a second thought. I told you everything I’d been through.
I admitted it to you, someone I’d known for a few short days, when there are so many others I haven’t told.
And you still left, knowing how I would feel.
” It felt good, to vent these feelings as they swam up from beneath some buried rock.
She ground the ball of one foot into the floor, her fingers curling into fists. “What was I supposed to do? There was no great happiness in store from us that I turned aside. You could not leave your den and I could not leave Langzu.”
I still remembered the acute pain of her leaving, though I’d known that was how our brief encounter would end. “You could have cared. You could have turned around. You could have said you were sorry.”
“I was hurting too!”
I gave her a long look. We both knew she could close that pain away, lock it into a box. She was older than me, she was more experienced, she’d broken hearts before and had no regrets. “Well. Here you are. Where you wanted to be. Was it worth it?”
“Rasha…” Her voice was a whisper. She moved closer, as though pulled against her will.
I gestured to the room, to the castle surrounding us.
She’d gotten everything she’d wanted. And what did I have except my doubts?
Except a certainty that whatever happened between me and Kluehnn and my sister and the crow, it would all end badly.
“You’re married to the Sovereign. People respect you now.
You’re not beholden to your family or your clan anymore.
You’re in a place you can maneuver things to your will. ”
She dared another step closer. “I never deserved you.”
I let out a soft snort. “That’s not why you left the way you did. In the end, you thought you deserved everything.”
“It’s not that I thought I deserved everything – I thought I deserved something.”
“At whose expense?”
She closed her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath.
Her hands found one another, fingers twisting together, her gaze flicking to the wall.
“Maybe there is truth in what my mother said to me. I need too much, so I took. But you aren’t my mother, you never owed me anything.
I took and I didn’t think about what I was leaving behind.
Not really.” Her gaze found mine. My stomach flipped. “I am so deeply sorry.”
The heat in my chest cooled, though I stirred fruitlessly at the embers, lingering on the image of her proud back as she’d walked away.
How could she so easily find the gentleness in me?
It didn’t feel fair. I held up the filter.
“How do I know you aren’t just saying these things because of what I’ve found?
I’m not as na?ve as I once was. I know this is what Kluehnn has come to find. ”
Sheuan let out a breath. “You don’t. You have to trust me.”
“I’ve tried that once already.”
She must have moved a step or two when I’d not noticed, because she stood over me, so close I could smell the scent lingering on her skin.
I found myself craning my neck to meet her eyes, two dark pools that threatened to drown me if I let them.
Her jaw moved as though she wanted to say something, her lips parted, ever so slightly.
I knew that she was considering closing the distance between us.
She wouldn’t have been Sheuan if she hadn’t noticed the way I leaned toward her, the quickness of my breath.
There was safety for her in this, in the control she’d always hold over me.
I couldn’t bring myself to reject her fully, because some sad, stupid part of me still hoped she would change, that she’d want me more than she wanted everything else.
Yet I also knew that even if she did choose me, I wasn’t in a place to be chosen.
I was still in the den, and I’d tangled myself up with Mull, with the gods, with secrets I didn’t know how to process.
A different kind of heat flooded through my body as I thought about the touch of her hands, her lips. We were alone – who would have to know? Maybe it wouldn’t kill me this time, to part with her. Maybe I would be the one to turn away and not look back.
No. That could never be me. Yet I decided I didn’t care. If pain was the price, so be it. I would let her inflict pain.
And then she lifted her hands and took a deliberate step back, without even looking at the filter.
Her gaze was locked on mine. “This isn’t how I want to treat you.
Not anymore. Maybe, finally, my luck has run out.
I have to be at peace with it, if it means I can finally start putting things right between us. ”
She looked so utterly broken in that moment.
I’d thought myself the weak one when we’d first met, but she’d gotten everything she’d thought she’d wanted and it had shattered her.
“What would we be putting right between us?” I could barely breathe past the ache in my chest. “Is there anything there at all? Can there be anything?”
“No.” It was the flatness of her tone, the way she tried so hard to pretend this didn’t matter to her, when I could tell how deeply it did.
I surged to my feet. The touch of her hair beneath my fingers felt as ephemeral as a morning mist. Without another thought, I pressed my lips to hers, our bodies aligning, my other arm, the filter still in my grasp, snaking around her waist. It was different from when we’d kissed in the tent; it was the same.
I’d made that choice without knowing the full consequences.
I made this choice knowing that this moment might be all we had.
She pulled back, the warmth and softness of her body leaving me. Her fingers touched my cheek where Mull had scratched me. “I don’t deserve this.”
“No,” I agreed, turning my face into her palm, pressing my lips to the inside of her wrist. “You don’t.
” I wrapped a hand around her wrist, pulling her into me.
She let out a soft little moan. I stopped it with a kiss.
And then another. I couldn’t seem to stop.
If this was all I would get, then I would take my fill of it.
Her hands found my face, one pressing at the back of my neck, the other rising into my hair, fingernails light against my scalp. She stopped as her fingertips brushed the scar. “Does it hurt?” She was breathless, her heartbeat a steady thump against mine.
I shook my head. “Only a little.”
Something changed in her face, her expression suddenly thoughtful.
I let go of her, bringing my hand and the filter between us. “Take it. Hide it.”
Someone else might have taken a moment to consider, to ask if I was sure. But Sheuan merely slipped the filter back into the satchel.
There was something else I was supposed to do. The letter. Of course. I’d completely forgotten about it. I dug into my pocket, pulling it out. “And here. Mull wanted me to give this to you.”
She tucked it into the satchel on top of the filter. “Mull? You saw him? Is he well?”
I hesitated, unsure of what to tell her. “He’s whole and hale.” I took her hands, kissed her gently, thinking of what I should say – that her cousin was now altered? She seized me by the front of my robes, deepening the kiss until all thoughts of Mull fled.
The door creaked open.