Like Ribbons
CAELAN
Ihad decided that I loathed swimming as much as I loathed walking.
We surfaced into the chamber, and I stopped.
It should not have existed. An open cavern beneath a lake, breathable air, light coming from no identifiable source.
Water at the opening above us, sitting there, not falling, defying the basic arrangement of the world for reasons that were apparently its own business.
The cavern was massive, stone formations hanging from the ceiling like old teeth.
The floor was flooded to our knees, and whatever light filtered through from above fractured across the surface until it looked like a piece of night sky had sunk into the water and stayed.
Beautiful seemed like an insufficient word.
I made a note that under better circumstances, I would bring Sera here.
“Gods. I hate this.” Maelor emerged behind me and shook his arms with the determination of a wet dog. Droplets scattered back into the pool.
I ignored his request for a salary increase and surveyed the chamber.
The shard caught the light immediately. Far wall. A crack between two formations, splitting the light into colors against the stone behind it. I crossed to it, unhooked the hand pick from my belt, and crouched.
Maelor appeared beside me and squinted. “That's not the mirror shard.”
I worked two strikes into the crystal and loosened a decent piece. Cold in the palm and smooth to the touch. The color somewhere between blue and green and silver, all at once, depending on the angle. It would set well in silver. A pendant, or earrings. Either would suit her.
I put it in my pocket and stood.
Maelor was staring at me.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just mourning the terrifying man you used to be.”
I moved to the other side of the chamber. Another cluster sat against a formation of boulders. Silver, solid, warm against the skin in a way that cold stone shouldn't be. The mirror shard. I worked the pick into the base.
“So what happens after you break the bond?” Maelor crouched beside me. Unhelpful, as always, but present.
“She gets her freedom.” The pick found purchase.
“So that's it.” A pause. “You part ways.”
I looked at him.
I had thought about it. Of course I had. What came after the bond broke, after Maerith dissolved whatever the dagger had made between us.
Sera's contract was already cleared. I had made sure of that. She had a dream she had been killing toward for a decade. Coast, cottage, blue walls, chickens. She had told me, and I intended to see it happen. Her freedom was not something I wanted to withhold. It was something I wanted to hand her.
The greedy part of me hoped it wasn't what she would choose.
“She's not made for court,” Maelor said. The one thing I had been trying not to think about directly.
She wasn't. That was true. The politics, the performances, the endless management of who stood where and what it meant. None of that was Sera. None of it was what she wanted or what she should have to want.
But Twilight was not like Crown.
I had thought about that too. More than was practical.
Sera not as a guest, not as a guard, not as something I was keeping for reasons I could defend to a council.
Mine. Publicly, officially, wholly. Primoria would not accept it.
The king would not accept it. None of that particularly mattered to me.
Twilight had accepted stranger things. Maelor, Riven, and Brie had already accepted her, which was the only acceptance that counted for anything.
She was human. I was fae. I had looked at that fact from every direction and reached the same conclusion each time.
I would watch her age. I would stand beside her grave while the centuries continued without her voice in them.
If that was the price, I would pay it without negotiation.
I would mourn her for the rest of an existence that might last another thousand years, and I would choose her again at the end of it.
All she had to do was choose me first.
I rose with the mirror shard and pocketed it.
“Let's go,” I said.
Two steps toward the water, and pain detonated through my left arm. I grabbed it, hissed. Not a blade. Something traveling through nerves, the sensation not originating in my own body.
The bond.
“What's wrong?” Maelor was beside me immediately.
It passed. I flexed my hand. The serpent ink sat black and still on my arm. But the wrongness of it lingered.
“I'm not sure.” I looked at him. “We need to go back. Now.”
I was halfway across the chamber when it hit again. Ribs. Sharp, focused, the unmistakable signature of a blade.
I moved for the water.
“Something's wrong.” I went in.
Maelor was already with me.
Pain exploded on my left thigh, and I nearly choked on water.
The nerve pain returned somewhere in the ascent, shoulder to spine, and I kept swimming because there was nothing else to do.
We broke the surface, and I was already struggling to pull air in.
Maelor hauled me by the arm. My legs wanted to fold under me with each step.
The bond was wrong. Thinner than it had ever been. Like ribbons between my fingers, slipping.
The shore came into view.
“There.” Maelor let go of my arm and moved forward.
Riven knelt at the shore, half submerged at the water's edge.
In his arms was Sera.
She was too still. The water around her dark with blood that was still spreading.
The rest of my strength left me. I went to my knees and pulled myself the remaining distance to them.
The air went out of me and didn’t come back as the panic took hold. My vision narrowed to her and nothing else.
Her hair was plastered against her pale face.
“Sera.” My voice cracked.
I pulled her against my chest, Riven shifting to help.
She was cold, far too cold.
Riven’s face did something I had never seen it do. Guilt, fear, desperation in equal measure.
“It's my fault.” His voice came out flat. “I went after them and left her alone. It’s my fault.”
“Fuck.” Maelor's voice had lost its register. “What do we do?”
I didn't answer. I pressed my hand against the wound in her abdomen, blood moving between my fingers regardless.
She was still fighting. She had to be. With the blood she had lost, any normal human would have been gone already.
The bond pulsed faintly. Too faintly.
“No,” I said quietly. To her, or to the bond, or to whatever was listening.
I tightened my grip on her.
I prayed. Not to any specific god. To whatever would answer. For a miracle, or something close enough to function as one.
Then the thought arrived that I could not stop once it started.
That even if she died, I would go with her.
That there were worse things than that. Centuries without her voice, without the dry observations and the counting things under stress and the way she watched me when she thought I wasn't paying attention.
The bond would take me. And maybe that was not the worst outcome.
My forehead came down to hers. I closed my eyes.
I heard Maelor say my name, very quietly. Heard him go still.
I waited.
Felt the ribbons slip.
“Well,” said a voice behind me. “What do we have here?”
My eyes opened.
We all turned.
Maerith stood at the tree line. Her eyes burned amber, bright and deep, the runes along her arms and chest lit against the dark like something old and awake. The air moved toward her. A smile curved on her face that sent a chill down my spine.
I had prayed for a miracle.
The gods had sent a witch instead.