CHAPTER 42 #3
He let the name hang in the air, and my chest squeezed.
The last moments of her life played before my eyes, and before they were through, sobs racked my body.
Tell her… Kahvrah’s hollow eyes and crumpling form hit me all at once.
Grief was a sucker punch so swift that I turned away from him and buried my face in his pillows.
Drawing breath became a struggle as my body shuddered under the weight of it all.
My closest friend was gone.
After a moment, the bed beside me dipped, and Eldreth’s strong hand stroked soothing paths down my back. But no amount of soothing would change her loss or the fact that I was the one to blame for it.
Yes, I had my ranng, and I would take my time to thank Vaya’la later, but there was no one left on this soil who truly understood me like she did. Bale was an entire sea away, and who knew when I would next see him.
More than that, the happiness that Gerta would never feel lanced straight through my heart.
I had robbed her of that. Gerta had found a life here worth living, and I failed to give it to her.
I didn’t keep her from being sent back to Cavendaffe.
I didn’t help her get safely back to Drakh.
She had given her life for me, and the last moments she had were ones of hopeless defeat.
I cried, perhaps for hours, until my eyes were grainy with each blink and swollen to slits. All the moisture was leached from my body into those tears. Now, even they were gone. And so was she.
“Please, drink this,” Eldreth pleaded. He had never left my side, not as I collapsed back into sleep from exhaustion and woke up to fresh tears already dotting my cheeks.
I sat up, took the glass he offered, and drank. The pain in my heart had bypassed unbearable and looped back around to numb.
“Do you think you can eat something?” he asked in a low rumble, like speaking at a normal tone might frighten me back into tears.
“Yes,” I said, “but there’s something I need you to do for me first.”
“Anything.” He spoke without hesitation, and I knew in my heart, without the confirmation from my second sight, that he meant it.
“Ask your brother if the name Drake means anything to him.”
ELDRETH RETURNED with two bitter draughts from Marr Magda—one for calm, and one to replenish my body after multiple days asleep.
I downed them both. The first must have been potent, because the weight on my shoulders lessened, and I felt even the tension in my brow slip away.
Next, I managed to bathe and relieve myself before tiring out and climbing back into his bed.
As a reward, he propped me up against far too many pillows and settled me in with a tray.
Never in my life had I tasted something as incredible as this vegetable broth from the kitchen.
It was a giant, steaming bowl of heaven.
It was rich and dense and just the right amount of salty.
An infusion of rosemary and oregano danced over my tongue.
I dipped a thick hunk of buttered bread and ate and ate and ate.
Alongside them was a tiny chocolate treat, which Eldreth delivered with a stern warning from Dallah to eat last. Rounding off the meal was a tea specially brewed by Henkel, and it came with a demand, again relayed by Eldreth, to offer my full critique when I was next able to make my way to the kitchens.
All of them together did wonders to temporarily keep my grief at bay.
“If this stays down—”
“It will.”
“—I want babi next.”
Eldreth chuckled. A half-smile played at the corner of his mouth, and if I weren’t so distracted with this masterpiece of bread and broth, I would have jumped in his lap and kissed it right off.
My other deterrent came in the form of an overanxious Ellán, lounging in a chair dragged in from Eldreth’s sitting room, tapping his fingers endlessly against his knee.
His mouth had opened four times now, but each time, a look from Eldreth had him clamping it shut and tap, tap, tapping away.
When he wasn’t playing a tattoo with his fingers, he was bouncing his knee or shifting back and forth in his chair.
I took a final gulp of tea, pushed aside my tray, and surveyed them both.
Ell leaned forward. “That name—”
I held up a single hand, silencing him. My mind was still sluggish, but I was able to wrangle my thoughts while I ate. “The day I was taken from Drakh, Eldreth brought me to a safe room beneath the keep.”
Eldreth nodded.
“I expected to be alone in that room.”
“But you weren’t?” Eldreth shot a look at Ellán.
“But you weren’t.” Ellán sighed and hung his head. “I can explain. He wasn’t dangerous, I swear it.”
Eldreth sat forward in the chair Kahvrah had vacated earlier and fixed his brother with a spectacular glower.
His whole body tensed like one wrong move from his brother would make him snap.
Ellán’s head darted between us so fast, he looked like a drunk owl in a bright blue overcoat.
I almost waited for him to hoot. A laugh bubbled up from somewhere deep beneath my ribs, and both men turned back to me with matching quizzical stares.
“Bale would never hurt me.”
Eldreth’s face morphed into understanding, but Ellán’s brow only furrowed. “You found out his name?”
Quick as lightning, Eldreth was out of his chair and smacked Ellán upside the head.
“Ow!”
“That’s her brother, you fucking idiot.” He left the room and returned with a glass of water for me and one for himself.
“Ohh.” Ellán’s face went through a full range of emotions. My second sight, still open, flashed like a rainbow before settling on a lightly curious aquamarine.
I took a deep, slow drink, allowing the cool water to loosen my tense throat.
Then, I spoke. I explained how I found Bale, what I’d surmised about the attack, my desperate need to return him safely, my capture, and my questioning.
When I got to the part of my torture, Ellán rose, moved to his brother’s side, and placed a steadying hand on his shoulder.
Eldreth’s knuckles were white as he gripped the arm of the chair, and though neither spoke as I relayed the tale, the wood cracked when I got to those final days when my back was split open time and again.
Ellán’s hand tightened claw-like on Eldreth’s shoulder.
Still, they let me speak as I explained what I could remember of our battle on the coast. Tears fell from my eyes as I recounted the deaths, and as I remembered nothing after commanding the trees, Eldreth took up the last part of our journey home.
“Fuck, Serae, I’m so sorry,” he finished, hanging his head. “I told him to follow, but I had to get you out. I couldn’t go back for him.”
Ellán’s skin paled whiter than the bedsheets, and his lifelight flickered with fierce sparks of red-orange: terror.
“Peace,” I told them both, and I rose from the bed and moved on instinct before Eldreth.
He reached up and rested both hands on my hips.
With one hand beneath his chin, I turned his face up to meet mine.
“Bale is alive. He is protected by a Great Dragon.” Eldreth’s brow quirked.
I could feel Ellán tensing again, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from the swirling blue-gray storms that were threatening to consume me.
“One day, we will go to his aid, but not yet.”
“You’re certain?” he asked.
“Yes.”
That was enough for Eldreth but not Ellán.
“So, what, we do nothing?” Ellán demanded. “Just leave it in the hands of the Great Dragon?”
“No.” My voice held an authority that was all my own. “Go to Dane, tell him everything. There’s a lot for us to discuss—tomorrow.”
Ellán looked to me, then to his brother, then back to me, and his lips quirked up into his most devious smile. “Tomorrow sounds like an excellent idea. I’m borrowing your reálti for the rest of the day. I’ll tell them they have your leave, shall I?” He was backing out of the room already.
I couldn’t free my attention from the darkening storms that held every bit of me too captive to respond.
Eldreth rose to his feet as the main door thumped closed and the lock clicked.
His hands never left my waist, and my whole body tingled with anticipation.
The air in the room held more of a chill than I remembered, but the heat that radiated off his body wrapped around me.
I closed my eyes and allowed his passion, the brilliant golden glow of his lifelight, to wash over me alongside that delicious heat.
“I missed you,” I whispered.
His hand stroked up my back and threaded into my hair. “It’s my fault. I fucking hesitated, and I lost you.”
I don’t know when my hands began moving against the hardness of his body, but I couldn’t get enough of his muscled chest and abs and—fuck—those obliques that I knew led straight to the part of him I was most desperate to explore.
Our lips met, and there was a moment of pure bliss, where everything in me stilled and hyper-focused on his mouth.
But my heart was still so heavy. How could I enjoy him when there was so little joy left in my world?
I turned my head up to him, knowing the pain that he would see seeping out of me, but unable to stop it. As my eyes fluttered open, his darkened, and that warm yellow desire of his lifelight threaded aubergine with regret. His beautiful, soft, demanding, luscious lips turned downward into a frown.
His words registered. I pulled back, and for the first time, I saw the pain hiding behind his eyes and flickering in faint wisps of deep violet in his lifelight. I gripped his biceps—dragons, this man is a god amongst men—and dug my nails in enough for him to feel. “You didn’t do this.”
He pulled back an inch, but I gripped him even tighter.
“I need you to hear me. This was my choice. It was my mistake thinking they’d take Bale and leave me be. I never thought it would come to all of this.”
“I should have stopped them. I should have cut them all down before they had a chance to touch you.”
My hand moved to cup his face. “I did this, not you.”
This was the difference between him and the reputation he’d built as weaponmaster of the Riht.
Everything he did—every death he took, every choice he made—was to protect others.
It was never selfish or cruel or for personal gain.
He carried this burden so that others might live.
But he would not carry this one. “If it’s a choice between reliving what happened to me and you losing that hesitation, the part of you that makes you the most human, I will always choose the pain.
Don’t you ever sacrifice your humanity for me. ”
His lifelight grew stronger, but then it dimmed again. “There’s something else.” He took a moment to compose himself. Whatever it was, we could navigate together. There was no turning back. “It’s your father…he’s dead.”
Shock sliced through me. My hands dropped from him as I took in his words.
Dead. I hadn’t expected it to hurt. After losing Gerta, I didn’t think anything else could hurt.
I slipped back to take a seat at the edge of the bed.
This was the man who had brutalized me up until mere days ago.
This was the man who stood on that beach and chose to kill the man I loved rather than take me back into his home.
This was the man whose calloused command had led to the death of my closest friend.
But, this was also the man who told my mother to let me have my fun when I wanted to run off playing swords and arrows with Bale.
He was the same man who encouraged my learning when he discovered my talents at my lessons and how quickly I was outpacing Merria, despite being younger.
Somewhere along the line, his priorities shifted to what his children could bring him rather than what his children could do. How did it all change?
“How?” I asked aloud.
“Please don’t hate me when I tell you this.”
I looked up, not expecting Eldreth to know the answers to the questions of my twisted, wretched mind.
His face hardened into a mask of barely concealed rage. “By my hand. After what he’d done to you, I couldn’t let him live.”
I blinked. All the sound in the room evaporated, nothing but heavy silence pressing in on my ears. “How?” I repeated. My mind had gone numb, and when I tried to call on my thoughts, only blank blackness responded.
“Does it matter?” he asked, voice grating and rough.
“It does. How do you know he’s dead?”
“No one can survive a blade through the throat and spine. Not even your healing could reverse it. He’s dead.”
In my mind’s eye, I saw him lying on the pebbled sand, blood matted in his raven-black hair, his body crushed by fleeing horse hooves.
His head nearly severed from the brutality of Eldreth’s blade.
Shock and horror were stamped forever over his navy-blue eyes.
Bile rose into my throat. I barely turned my head in time to miss Eldreth as I vomited all over his floor.