I’m Not Holding Back
I’m Not Holding Back
SERAPHAE
The whispering made excellent background noise for dying.
Ancient words I didn’t understand, creepy in the way old and forgotten things were. They lulled me anyway. Everything was warm. Not like water or blankets. It had mass that wrapped around me like a second skin, like something that had always been there and was simply acknowledging it now.
I always imagined dying would feel cold.
There was something that hummed underneath the whispering. Strange and familiar at once, the way you could sometimes feel the edge of a word you couldn’t quite find. It felt like it had always been there, waiting. I reached for it.
It pulled away.
Then cold slammed into me. Entirely unwelcome. The warmth gone, replaced by intrusion. I wanted to dig my hands into something, grip anything solid, but there was nothing.
Then that was gone too.
Silence. Weightlessness. Just the barest thread of existing and drifting.
If this was hell, then where was Caelan?
My head pulsed painfully with every heartbeat, like it was threatening to split. The dark faded toward white. The voices came next.
“…the starwardens reported.”
“…waking up.”
“…Sera.”
Colors turned into shapes. Shapes became a face.
Caelan.
He was looking at me as if he wasn’t certain I was real.
“Wh—” My voice did something humiliating. I cleared my throat. It was sandpaper. “Where am I?”
He pressed lightly on my shoulders when I tried to sit up. A dull ache answered from my abdomen.
Memory arrived all at once. Assassins. Fae.
I felt like someone had dropped me into the Hollow, let horses stomp over me, and then recovered the pieces with a shovel.
Caelan brushed his thumb across my cheek.
“We’re back in Twilight,” he said. “You were wounded.”
“Wounded is generous.” Maelor’s voice, from somewhere behind him. “You practically died.”
I looked around. Maelor behind Caelan. Riven in the doorway, leaning against the frame, an expression on his face that was split between relief and grief. I wasn’t sure which emotion won. He couldn’t hold my gaze and looked away.
I touched my abdomen where the wound was. Where a wound should still very much be. But there was only a one-inch scar and nothing else.
“How am I alive?”
His expression tightened, and he clenched his jaw once instead of answering.
I looked at Maelor.
He looked at Riven.
Riven looked at the floor.
Caelan brushed hair from my face and finally spoke. “Maerith saved you.”
A long stretch of silence as I tried to understand.
“The witch.”
He nodded.
“How?” I said carefully, mentally preparing for the worst. A new cursed tattoo felt possible.
The fire in the hearth was unusually loud. Silence carried a weight that it usually didn’t between us.
His mouth opened, and then it closed.
Caelan had never lied to me. I had catalogued this as a fact over weeks of proximity. There had been moments where a lie would have been the easier choice, and he had gone silent instead. He was going silent now.
“Rest,” he said finally. “We’ll talk when you’re stronger.”
“I don’t need—”
He tucked the blankets to my chin. His thumb moved across my forehead once, twice, slow and deliberate.
Oh.
Fine. Nap first, answers after.
I closed my eyes.
The whispering didn’t come back. The warmth didn’t come back. Just Caelan’s voice, low, saying veyra and other words in Primorian I didn’t understand, over and over until there was nothing at all.
I was going to die of boredom before anything else finished the job.
The wound was closed. The scar was there as evidence. But my body had apparently not received the message that the crisis was resolved and continued to behave as if I had recently been stabbed. Okay, it was recent. But it should still have had an end date.
The pain was duller now, though still insistent. It flared when I sat up too fast and reminded me of its opinion every time I forgot about it.
Maerith had closed the wound, Caelan explained. The damage still needed to heal. Magic sealed, not erased.
Healers could close a wound and stop the bleeding.
They could not repair bone, nerves, and organs beneath it.
What Maerith had done was none of those things.
My wound simply stopped existing. I did not know what the cost of what Maerith had done was.
Caelan seemed determined not to tell me about it. Magic like that always had a cost.
Always a balance.
The rest of what happened that night came in pieces, from different directions, over several days.
Caelan's magic was what allowed Maerith to find us in the first place.
When I was dying, Caelan had reached without meaning to, and the magic in the sky had answered. Two centuries sitting still above Twilight had moved toward Winter.
The starwardens would have reported the sky anomaly to Mallas. So we had never been to Mirror Lake. Caelan had sent word to Mallas that I’d fallen ill on the road, and we rode straight for Twilight. Whether Mallas believed it or not was another thing. We hadn’t heard from him.
I did not think about how Caelan had reached. Did not think of how that meant he had briefly lost control because of me.
It had been a week and a day since we returned from Winter.
Three servants helped me bathe. Caelan had decided this was necessary, and I had been too weak to argue the first time, and by the time I could argue, the routine had been established. It was nice initially. Then the novelty had since worn off considerably.
Brie came regularly. The first visit, she cried.
Which was genuinely frightening. I had had people cry in front of me before.
Begging for their lives, mostly. That was professional, and this was something else entirely.
Someone crying because I had nearly died was not a category of crying I had any experience receiving.
“This is for your entertainment.” She winked and placed a stack of books in various colored bindings on the nightstand beside me.
I never had the luxury of spending time reading, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.
Then she produced a bottle of wine and placed that next to the books too. Those were far more useful than words on paper.
Maelor came too. He had opinions about eggs and their role in human recovery.
He reached for a book on my nightstand and suggested that he’d read to me.
I was sitting up in bed, balancing a plate with a mountain of eggs that he said was absolutely necessary.
He opened to the first page and started reading. “Helaena had never known what it felt like to be touched. Not until the wolf king Kaethmore—”
The book slammed shut.
I stared at him as if that would give me an explanation.
He placed the book back down on the nightstand without another word and grabbed another. Thumbed through it for approximately five seconds and then stood up.
“What?” I asked.
He gathered all the books against his chest. “I’ll bring you new books.” Then he did a double take on the wine bottle and took that too. Confiscating the books I could forgive, but the wine was frankly overreach.
Riven came once that I saw.
I had woken up, and he was already there. Sitting in the chair across from the bed, arms crossed, legs sprawled, watching me with calm patience. We didn’t speak. It should have been strange, but it wasn’t. He stayed while I drifted back under.
The other times, I knew he had been there by what he left.
Once, I woke to honey in the air and a purple flower on my nightstand. Veyras. I asked Caelan if he’d left it. He said he hadn’t. It could only be Riven, then.
Another time, I woke cold. The hearth had gone out. I pulled my blankets closer and heard fire catch. When I turned, the hearth was burning, but no one was there. Just amber light and the edge of a shadow that wasn’t.
Xander came once before he was sent off to investigate the Mirror Lake ambush.
“Let’s go south.” He came in like a storm, pushed open the door hard enough that the hinges got offended. “Get out of the north. We can go to Aurelion like you always wanted.”
I stared at him from my bed.
He was dressed completely in black, from his clothes to the leather armor and the cloth mask at his neck. It made the blond of his hair stand out like sunshine lost in a night sky.
“I can’t leave.” I shook my head. “The bond doesn’t allow distance.”
His shoulder slumped. “You’re not safe here.”
“I’m not safe anywhere. Not until the bond is broken.”
“Then we leave after the bond breaks.”
I tensed. It was subtle, but not subtle enough.
He cocked his head. “You don’t want to leave.”
My fingers curled into the sheets.
“Fuck’s sakes, Sera.” He covered his mouth and stared at a wall.
I sat up straighter. “You said so yourself when we first came here. We can stay in Twilight.”
He paced the room. Stopped. Then pointed at the door.
“Is it because of him?” He gestured wildly. “Are you in love with him?”
“Wh—No.” I looked out the window. “It’s just that—”
“You will never be safe here,” Xander interjected. “Bond or not. You will never be safe if you stand beside a prince with powers feared by both realms. You’re not stupid, Sera.” His eyes searched my face. “And you still choose to stay.”
I held his gaze and opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
The sound of the hearth crackled in the dense silence.
Xander exhaled a long breath and ran his hand over his face. He crossed the room with a long breath of resignation before reaching out to touch my cheek.
“If he hurts you,” he said softly. “I’m going to kill him.”
I held his hand on my face.
“If he does,” I smiled at him. “I’ll help you.”
He looked at me for another moment. Then leaned in and pressed a kiss to the top of my head.
“Try not to get assassinated while I’m gone.” He turned to leave. “I’d hate to track down your murderer for nothing.”
Then he was gone.
Caelan came multiple times a day. He arrived with meals, like a feature included with the food.
“I need to get out of here,” I said, arms crossed.