Chapter 21 Toran #2
Nes didn’t look up from the body. Didn’t turn to face him as one word fell from her lips, as if it had slipped beyond her reach. “Hide.”
“What?” It was not what he’d expected her to say. Fight. That was what he’d expected. Maybe run.
Her shoulders lifted up and down as she drew a deep breath. She turned to him. “If I were the Witch,” she said, “I would hide.”
Hide. He couldn’t understand it. This was the girl who hadn’t backed down when locked in a prison. The girl who’d shoved him into a brawlhouse pit. Who’d gotten in that rowboat, head high, despite her bone-quaking fear.
Nes was the girl who made him feel things he hadn’t thought possible after Loriana’s death. The girl who made him both remember and forget his past.
And the girl who’d just shoved her fist through a corpse’s chest cavity.
He searched her face, eyes darting to her most prominent freckles. But there was no deceit there. And he knew—somehow, he knew—she was telling the truth.
“Why?”
She shrugged, her mouth cocking to the side. “The whole country wants to kill me. Why wouldn’t I want to stay alive?”
“And only hiding would guarantee your safety.”
“There’s no guarantee,” she said. She crouched beside the body, dirty fingers smoothing puckered skin. “Safety is relative.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, everyone feels safe in different ways. Safety could mean hiding away in a tower or hiding behind the walls of a legacy you despise. It could mean fighting. Swinging a sword against people you thought were your allies for the sake of another.” Nes’s fingers stopped moving.
She met his gaze. “Or safety could mean being in the arms of someone you love, someone who loves you. There might not be real, physical protection there, but you could still feel safe in their embrace. Because the threats of the world fade away when they’re there. ”
He knew what she meant. He’d wanted to be that person for Loriana. But she hadn’t needed him in that way. Perhaps Nes did.
When he didn’t respond, she turned back to the body. “Come look at this. Bring the lantern.”
He crouched beside her and held the lantern over the corpse.
A scrap of skin was folded over its back, showing the pink, squishy underside of the flesh.
He gagged at the sight. Nes pressed the skin back into place, covering the hole.
Lines, steady and black and nearly invisible on the backdrop of the man’s skin, were etched over where his heart had been.
Lines that, when put together, Toran recognized.
“It’s like the symbol,” he breathed. “The one from the Drowning Square.”
Nes nodded. “I could smell it.”
“This symbol had magic?”
Nes’s finger traced the symbol on the man’s chest. “Not exactly. It was trapped inside the body. I couldn’t smell it until the corpse was close. The scent was so faint.” She pulled her hand back. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t?”
“This, the magic. Magic likes being the one with the strongest willpower. It likes knowing it won. That’s why it doesn’t stay in the dead. There’s no will, no life, to influence in a corpse. So why was there still magic inside this one?”
She stood and he straightened, too, mulling over her words.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said again.
“We’ll figure it out,” he promised. Then, though it was caked in dirt and remains, he took her hand, ran his thumb over her knuckles.
And this time, she didn’t pull away.
They lit a fire to burn the body.
Heart or no heart, he’d said, it was better not to take any chances. It had been dead when it first attacked them. There was a chance it could rise up again. He didn’t care if Nes claimed there wasn’t a drop of magic left inside.
They couldn’t leave until the body burned down to ash. They sat side by side in front of the fire because—though they were burning a corpse and the smell was atrocious—it was still a fire, and they needed the heat. It was freezing tonight.
Nes huddled closer to him, pressing her shoulder against his arm. His eyes wandered to every place they touched. Arms, hips, thighs.
He remembered what it was like to feel her against him. To hold her in his arms as he had when they’d fallen in the ocean. To have her body press against his as she’d done in that small alcove after the brawlhouse.
His body flushed with a heat that had nothing to do with the fire blazing before them. He turned his head back to the flames.
“We need a plan,” he said.
Nes hummed. “I have a plan.”
“Care to share?”
“Don’t you trust me?”
He should say no. She’d tricked him and kept things from him. “No” was the logical answer. But he wasn’t feeling very logical right now.
Nes held her hands out to the fire, fingers spread so wide it looked like the flames swooped between them.
He extended his own arm until his palm covered the back of her hand.
He folded his fingers in the gaps between hers until the flames could no longer poke through, until he was the only one filling her empty spaces.
“I do,” he whispered.
And, at his words, she curled her fingers around his, gripping him tight. Together they lowered their clasped hands until they sat in her lap. His knuckles skimmed the inside of her thigh.
“Do you trust me?”
She turned toward him then, met his gaze. There was something in her eyes. A cloud he couldn’t quite see through. And he knew any answer to spill from her lips now would be a lie.
“I think—” he started, but she shushed him with a single finger.
Her one finger turned into her whole hand. A hand that cupped his cheek, her thumb caressing the smooth skin there. Her touch was as delicate as a cloud over a blue sky. She leaned closer.
“This doesn’t require thinking, Toran,” she breathed.
Red rose to her cheeks, filling the light spaces between her freckles with color. The blush sent his mind spinning and his heart racing. He’d been wrong. Her lips held no lies tonight.
But he desperately wanted to learn the truths hidden in them. She pulled him toward her, her body a soundless call his own responded to with eager abandon. He’d never felt a need as intense as this. Not even with—
He pushed the thought away. Now was not the time to reminisce. For the first time in a long time, he wanted to be here, in the present, with Nes.
Her hands wound around the back of his neck, pulling him even closer, her fingers tracing words he couldn’t see. He leaned down to her, ready to steal her breath away, but the fingers against his neck froze. Her grip became much less sensual and a lot more like the steel of a set of handcuffs.
“What’s wrong?”
“Tell me you have a scar here.” Her whisper fluttered the tiny hairs around his ear, making his confused heart skip a beat.
“What?”
She pressed hard against the back of his neck with a single nail. “Here,” she said. “You have a scar, right?”
He had scars. Plenty of them. One from when Quint slashed his calf while practicing. Another much smaller scar beside his belly button from the archer in Aeos who took down Kai and Safie. Two on his left arm from when he’d jumped out a window with Kohen as kids. But none on the back of his neck.
He frowned. “No, not there.”
Nes yanked his head down until his forehead hit her chest. She sucked in a breath so hard he was shocked his hair didn’t fly up her nose.
“What is it?”
Her fingers were moving again, tracing something on the back of his neck. She let go, and he lifted his head, met her eyes.
“Nes, talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”
She glanced down at her lap then back up at him. Her jaw locked.
“The symbol,” she said. “The one on the guards in the Holy Triad, on Mikaud’s neck after he died—” She cut off just as the last of the body was burned away.
“What about it?”
Beside them, flames were sucked into the ash until only flickering embers remained. He felt as if his heart were withering away with them as he waited for her to speak the words he knew were coming.
But knowing didn’t make the blow any less striking when Nes said at last, “You have it, too.”