CHAPTER 40
I was there the day he was claimed. I could feel it coming. I packed his things, knowing what would come next. I readied my own pack, determined to follow him to the very gates, where I would be barred. I watched in helplessness as the flames took him.
The fire was worse than anything I had imagined.
—Entry from the private diary of Jerris, Dragonbound
SERAE
Late Autumn, Talmon 1036
I woke from one dream straight into another.
“Eldreth?” I called uselessly. He stood beside Bale, emanating that intensity I loved about him, like he was ready to tear down the world for me. Only, I knew he wasn’t there. This was the fever, mixing dream with reality as it had been for the past week.
I shivered, and a small cry escaped me as the skin across my back tugged and split.
My ankles were the worst of it, swollen with edema and pulsing with a heartbeat of their own.
Two new cuts across my back from today acted as rivals, truncating my sleep to mere minutes at a time.
The night brought me alternating sweats and chills.
That, plus the fever dreams, was a clear sign of infection.
At least Bale was with me.
He appeared in my room in the middle of the night with a bowl and cloth to clean my wounds. He wouldn’t tell me how bad they looked, but I already knew. I closed my eyes, and if fire weren’t raging through me, I might have had tears to shed.
The specters in my dreams were talking, but it was shouting to my ears. A cool hand touched my face. I opened my eyes, this time to a vision of Gerta. My mind was intent on torturing me.
“Can you move?” she asked.
I let my eyes slip back closed. “Leave me be,” I told the specter.
There was a thud behind me. “Yes, pack it,” Dream Eldreth growled. His voice constricted my aching soul. There was muttering, then, “I didn’t expect him to be alive, did I?” Scrambling and another thud. “Fuck!”
“Get her up,” a voice I didn’t know hissed.
My eyes opened again. A woman I vaguely recognized was examining me.
Sifting through my memories to place her was like wading through tar.
“We’ll have to wrap her and go.” She gripped my head and looked into my eyes, tilting my head this way and that.
My eyes closed tight against the throbbing in my head at the movement.
“Fever delirium. What the fuck happened to you two?”
“Our father,” Bale rasped, then he let out a groan. He’d been hurt. The margrave got to him, too.
“A full rank is on the way,” a new voice warned from my window. She was bald, slender, and dressed in black leathers. I knew her from training. “If we’re not out of here in five minutes, we won’t be leaving.”
Leaving. My mind started to wake.
“Take him,” Eldreth said, then the bed beside me shifted. “Fuck, Serae. I’m going to have to carry you.”
The sheet dragged over my abused skin, and I whimpered. Strong arms lifted me, and I was wrapped into his warmth and the scent of mint and eucalyptus and something that was entirely him. Not even my imagination could reproduce that perfect mix.
“You’re here?” I whispered. Stinging shot down my back as my spine cradled into his arm.
“Yes.” His face was tight, and he did not meet my eyes. “Find her anything loose,” he told the first woman.
“Nothing but fucking dresses,” she replied. She was also clad in dark leathers, though I saw mail glint on her chest.
“My room…there.” Bale gasped from the floor. “Through the tapestry. Wardrobe…”
“Go.” Eldreth’s voice rumbled through me, waking something in my chest. The fog over my mind was clearing. I was looking straight into his steel-blue eyes. “You’re okay,” he whispered to me. “You’ll be okay.”
“Eldreth, time to go,” a man at the door warned. I recognized him as well.
Pain spiderwebbed over my back, but my gasp was for a very different reason. Eldreth was holding me in his arms, and my bedsheet was wrapped around me. The others in his room were his ranng.
His eyes raked over my broken, bruise-splotched skin, and the pain in them shattered me. His forehead dropped to mine. “I’m here.”
I grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled his lips to mine. I kissed him hard, ignoring the stabs of pain in my forearms and wrists. His lips and tongue met mine, stroke for stroke, but he broke it far too soon.
“We have to move. Can you walk?”
“Yes,” I answered, though I wasn’t sure I could.
He set me on my feet, then caught me as I swayed.
“Here!” Gerta tossed a bundle of clothes at Eldreth.
He caught them and pulled a tunic over my head. He dropped to his knees and helped me with shaking hands into a pair of trousers that he cinched tight below my hip bones, where I was blissfully unharmed.
“Let’s move. Get him.” Eldreth’s chin jutted toward a heap on the floor.
The man beside Eldreth handed him a sword that he sheathed at his hip. “We can’t cover the distance with two wounded,” he said.
“We’ll have to.”
“Two wounded?” I turned to look. The heap I’d assumed was a pile of covers was a man. His shirt was stripped halfway off, and a thick, white cloth was haphazardly tied across his shoulder. Before my eyes, it was staining red with blood.
“Bale!” I screamed.
I threw off Eldreth’s grip and ran to my brother. The man holding him upright stepped back as I collided with him. Bale let out a loud oomph when I gripped him around the middle. Our skin touched, and my second sight flew open. His lifelight was dull gray and dimming.
“No,” we commanded. The power I’d been craving all these weeks flooded me.
I ripped away the bandage and cloth packed into his wound, then rolled him to his side.
I gripped his shoulder, pressing my palms directly into the entry and exit points of his wound.
Warm blood covered my hands in pulsing waves.
Heal, I commanded. I directed the light through my arms and into him, knitting the wound together from the center outward. His pain mingled with mine.
“Keep going,” encouraged that familiar voice in my head, and I wanted to weep.
I pushed more light into Bale, and when I could sense the wound was closing, I instinctively searched the rest of him.
“His mind.”
As soon as she said it, I felt the burning block buried deep within him. It couldn’t fucking have him. I forced all my light into it, but it pushed back with fire. I screamed and dug in, matching my will against it. Every time I gained an inch, it doubled the force of its flame, pushing me out.
“Let go!” Vaya’la cried out in my mind.
I ignored her and pushed harder. I would not let this thing win out.
“Release me!” A voice resounded in my mind, but it was not Vaya’la’s. It was male and deep and crackling.
I couldn’t let go. I tried, but the light tunneled out of me and exploded into the night. My nails dug into Bale’s skin, but still, I couldn’t stop. My fingers refused to listen as I tried to force them to release. I was trapped in the burning light.
Bale’s hands wrapped around my wrists, prying me off him. “Let go,” he said in a voice that was not his.
Fire and light exploded out of us, slamming into everything in the room. Screams and shouts echoed all around.
Then, darkness.
My hands dropped to my sides, and Bale took a deep breath. His eyes went wide, and he pressed a hand to his shoulder, rearing back. In the firelight, I caught a glimpse of his pink, unblemished skin—fully healed.
Firelight?
Behind him, the sheets, tapestries, and rug were all kindling. Fire lapped up the side of one bedpost. Bale got to his feet, pulling me up with him. He gripped his head as he shoved me backward and into Eldreth’s waiting arms.
“Get her out of here.”
Eldreth’s strong hand gripped my arm, and we were running. Through the hallways, down a staircase, into the kitchens. I caught a glimpse of the staff in their nightclothes huddled against a wall behind Riht warriors with weapons drawn.
“Bale!” I screamed.
“Behind you,” he called back. “Keep going!”
We burst into the cool night air, and at least five joined our ranks. Their lifelights flickered with more emotions than my swirling mind could read. We ran to the curtain wall and followed it to the small side gate that Bale and I used to sneak through as children.
An arrow whizzed past, clanking against the outer wall, followed by shouting.
Across the courtyard, a group of a dozen men charged us, each flashing with reds and oranges—hatred, anger, fear.
I reached into the ground, and roots erupted around them, weaving through their limbs.
Screams of shock and terror replaced the shouting.
There were more ahead, blocking the door. At least another five, maybe six.
“Eldreth,” I panted, pointing ahead. The group was flashing between blood orange and mint green, a mix I wasn’t expecting. Anxious and hopeful?
“It’s us.”
We collided with the group moments later, and I was engulfed in a bone-crushing hug. I looked up into Teke’s face. They were pulsing with bright green joy.
“Thank the Great Dragon!” they cried.
“Run now, hug later,” Lex said, pushing Teke away. “Who’s the naked one?”
Bale was still shirtless when he reached my side. The lifelight around him flickered like a wreath of flames.
“Bale,” I gasped, reaching out a shaking hand.
Relief flooded me, smoothing over his healed skin.
He wouldn’t even bear a scar. He was warm to the touch, but it could have been his natural body heat.
He gripped my hand, pressing it against his shoulder, and gasped.
Power surged through me, filling me with heat that pitched toward feverish.
“Can you feel that?” he asked, voice tinged with awe.
Shock radiated through me. “Can you?”
“How?”
“Let’s go,” Lispen called out.
The last of our group barreled through the door, slamming it shut behind them. It barred from the inside, but Raif and Ivank rolled a boulder they found who knows where in front. We ran together toward the trees.