I WOKE TO SCREAMING. The sound was full of raw terror—the kind of sound a person made right before they were murdered. I leaped out of bed and collided with a piece of furniture, smashing my big toe.
“Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I didn’t know this bedroom. It had been pitch- black when I’d come in here. I’d only been able to find the bed by patting around in the dark. Gods only knew what kind of obstructions stood between me and the door. Gods only knew where the door was. The screaming intensified. I eventually found the door handle and then nearly tripped over a panting Onyx as he shot passed me out of the door. I followed the white smudge of his body down the hall.
“Stop! No. I said no! STOP!” Fisher yelled.
Without thinking twice, I ripped the door open and charged inside. The curtains weren’t drawn in here, and moonlight flooded through the windows, painting everything luminous silver. Wearing just his pants, Fisher lay in the center of a bed that was way too small for his body, on top of the sheets, shivering, his skin running with sweat. At first, I thought he was having a nightmare, but then I saw that his eyes were open and fixed on the ceiling. He blinked, and a tear rolled from the corner of his eye, racing over his temple and running into his hair.
“Fisher?”
He shook in reaction to my voice. At his sides, his hands clenched, gripping at the sheets. “Go,” Fisher said in a cracked voice. He watched me out of the corner of his eye, though his head didn’t move on the pillow.
“What’s wrong? Are you—”
“Go!”
“I can’t just go. Something’s wrong with you.”
“I’ll be fine. I—” A ripple of pain passed over his face, his eyes rolling back into his head. His back arched off the bed as he gritted his teeth, screaming out a vicious curse in Old Fae. “Fuck! Stop! Stop, stop, stop,” he chanted. “Please. Stop…” The episode, the seizure, hell, whatever it was that was causing him so much distress ebbed, and I watched, heart pulsing in the base of my throat as his body eased back onto the mattress. As soon as his back was flush with the bed, the shaking started up again.
Mind made up, I said, “I’m going to find someone. This isn’t right.” “No! No.” Fisher tried to swallow, but that seemed too painful to
accomplish, so he cleared his throat instead. “It’ll end soon,” he rushed out. “How soon?”
“An…an hour. Maybe two. I’ll…be fine.”
“Fisher, no! You need help. There must be a healer here.”
“Just…please. Get me some water. That’ll help. Then…go back to bed.
Get some…sleep.”
Yeah. Right. Sleep. With him in pain in the next room, screaming at the top of his lungs. That wasn’t happening. He was so fucking stubborn. “I’ll be back in a second,” I told him. All of the candles had guttered out long ago, and I wasn’t blessed with magic that could simply conjure flames when I needed them, so I went scavenging. In the living room, I pulled open one of the curtains, thanking the gods when the moonlight lit up the furniture and all the other tripping hazards that stood between me and the kitchen.
I found a dusty glass in one of the cupboards, filled it from a pitcher on the sideboard, and returned to Fisher as quickly as I could. In my absence, Onyx had jumped up onto the bed and tucked himself into the male’s side, resting his head on Fisher’s stomach. He whined when I entered the room, his eyes moving from me to Fisher, as if he were trying to tell me something.
“Can you lift your head?” I asked.
“No. I can’t move…anything.” Fisher closed his eyes, screwing them shut.
“All right. I’m going to help you, then.”
“Just…set it on the nightstand. I’ll…drink it later.” Each word was labored. His body was so tense that it looked as though the tendons in his neck and arms were on the verge of snapping.
“I’m not leaving you here like this, you idiot.” I climbed up onto the bed and lifted his head up. It took considerable effort to get my hands beneath his shoulders and to lift his torso enough for me to slide in behind him, but I managed. Resting my back against the headboard, I let him lean back into me so that his head was propped against my stomach, a leg on either side of his body. He didn’t protest when I held the glass to his lips and carefully poured some water into his mouth. It took a long time for him to drink, but sure enough, he drained the whole glass.
“You can go now. I think it’s…passing.”
He was so full of shit. If his trembling was anything to go by, this episode was just getting started. “I’m not going anywhere.”
His hair was plastered to the side of his face in wet, dark waves. His eyes met mine, and my heart stopped for two beats when I saw the quicksilver in his right eye; it pulsed, nearly covering his whole iris, leaving only the smallest crescent of green to shine through. “I’ll make you go if…I have to,” he ground out.
Make me? Oh, he’d make me, would he? This fucking asshole. I was trying to help him, and he was dead set on pushing me away. How could he be so infuriating, even when he was incapacitated and incoherent from pain? I spoke clearly so there would be no misunderstanding me. “If you use the oath you tricked me into to force me from this room right now, I will never forgive you. I will find a way to make your life absolutely fucking miserable. In fact, while we’re here and having such a lovely conversation about this, you’re never going to compel me against my will again. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”
“I don’t need—”
“I am not fucking around, Fisher. If you have any respect for me, if you care about me even the tiniest, most minuscule amount, you will never, ever compel me again. Do you understand?”
He licked his lips, eyes burning into me. Even though I was upside down in his field of vision, he must have been able to make out the fury on my face because his eyelids shuttered, and he gave a small nod. “I… understand.”
“Great. Now stop telling me to leave. I’m staying.” Again, another nod. “Okay.”
The next four hours—Not one. Not two. Four— were rough. Onyx hid his face in the sheets whenever another wave of delirium washed over
Fisher. I held onto him as best I could when he bowed up from the bed, but that didn’t seem to help, so I let his body contort and shake. The chain around Fisher’s neck stuck to his skin, the pendant with the crossed daggers wrapped in vines rested in the hollow of his throat, wet with his sweat, and I glowered at the cursed thing, wondering why the fuck it wasn’t doing its job. This was because of the quicksilver. There was no doubt in my mind about that. Even if I hadn’t seen how badly it had spread across his eye, I’d have known from the chanting I could hear in the back of my mind all of the time now.
Annorath mor! Annorath mor! Annorath mor! Thunder in my ears. A bleak omen.
During the darkest hours of the night, when clouds must have swept across the moon and the room was thick with shadows, Fisher stilled for a while. “Tell me something. Distract me. Sometimes it’ll ease if…my mind goes elsewhere.”
I ran my hands along his shoulders, working my thumbs into his taut muscles as I had been for the past hour. I wasn’t surprised when the ink beneath his skin drew closer to the places where our skin met. I watched it climb my fingers, forming shapes, and then runes and delicate designs as they inched upward. There was every chance they’d still be there in the morning, but I couldn’t bring myself to care right now. “What should I tell you?” I asked.
“Anything. Tell me about your life…before.”
I sat for a moment, wrestling with that. I didn’t know where to begin. There were a lot of things I didn’t want to talk about. Many things I didn’t want to remember. Dangerous corners of my mind I had no desire to return to.
Fisher’s head shifted against my stomach. “Why are you frowning like that?” he asked. I glanced down and found that he was the one frowning up at me. His brow wasn’t rolling with perspiration anymore. The shaking seemed to have slowed down a little too. A relief.
“I don’t know. I have very few bright, happy memories to share from Zilvaren.” I’d touched Fisher’s skin plenty over the past few hours, so I didn’t even think about it—I ran my finger over his forehead, down his
temple, sweeping away the wet hair from his face. He closed his eyes, his lashes fine and delicate as strokes of black ink against his pale skin.
“I don’t want bright and happy,” he whispered roughly. “I want real.”
Those words weighed heavy. This, from the male who refused to give me the real answers to the questions I had about him, was enough to make a girl want to scream. But my suspicions on that front—that Fisher was bound in some way and couldn’t answer—had, at some point, solidified as fact in my mind. And look where we were. He was lying in my arms, immobile and vulnerable in every sense of the word. Laid bare. I could be a little vulnerable, too.
“My father died when I was two. I don’t even remember him. My mother was four months pregnant with Hayden when it happened. A sand dune came down on a trader’s outpost on the glass flats. He was either crushed or suffocated to death, one of the two. And when we lost his income, my mother became a prostitute,” I said bluntly. This wasn’t a secret back in Zilvaren. Everybody had known Iris Fane, either from exchanging chits for her time or because the other mothers in our ward would bitch and complain as loud as the day was long about the fact that a woman of loose morals lived amongst them. “She sold her body for food and water mostly, but she made money, too. Her client list was mostly comprised of guardians. Madra’s men. Five days out of the week, she worked at this place near the market. The House of Kala. Kala’s employed security, so the women who worked there were safe for the most part. One shout from a bedroom and five huge bastards would kick the door down and beat the living shit out of whoever was causing trouble. But she worked from our home sometimes, too. To make ends meet. I used to watch through a crack in her bedroom door when the guardians would come, resplendent and proud, dripping in their golden armor.
“The man I used to apprentice for. Elroy? He loved her. She was beautiful and full of this…this fire. He’d come to the house and fix things from time to time. He never tried anything on with her, though. He wasn’t like that. The amount of times he took care of her when one of the palace guards beat her black and blue at our house…” I shook my head, absentmindedly twisting a piece of Fisher’s damp hair around my finger.
“She didn’t want me to follow in her footsteps, so she made him promise to take me on in the forge as soon as I was old enough. I was ten when I first stepped into his workshop. And my mother? She’d already
started smuggling weapons into the ward by then. It started as pieces of scrap metal. Things that could be turned into weapons. Elroy was happy to make them at first. Just daggers. Small knives. My mother handed them out to her friends at Kala’s first, to protect themselves with when they took their work home with them. But then she started bringing home swords and shields. The kinds of things that would get her killed if she was caught trading in them.”
I hated remembering the knocks at our door in the middle of the night while my mother was working at Kala’s. The masked men who would thrust heavy hessian sacks into my hands and then sprint off into the dark. But I forced myself to do it. “She had me running items from our house to the forge every day soon after that. The guardians didn’t pay much attention to a scrawny kid on her way to work. Years went by, and she started introducing me to all kinds of men…”
Fisher’s breathing hitched. He’d been loosening up gradually, but now he stiffened again, his nostrils flaring. He didn’t say a word, but I knew what he was thinking.
“Not those kinds of men. They never touched me. They showed me where the entrances to various tunnels were. The ones that led to the underground reserves where Madra kept water reservoirs. Plenty to supply the whole city and then some. They showed me how to tap the tanks and siphon off a little here and a little there. They showed me how to pick locks and how to climb. I learned how to fight with daggers and how to throw them. A rebel would stay at the house, hidden in the attic, for a week, or a month. Sometimes maybe two. Then they’d switch out, and someone new would show up. Hayden knew nothing about it. He was too young to understand most of what was happening, and he didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut. So I learned how to fight, and steal, and how to take care of him, too, since our mother was never home anymore. And that’s just how it was for a long time. I spent my days in the forge. After, I cared for Hayden. Cooked for him. Kept the house clean. And then, as soon as he went to sleep, I’d be out stealing whatever we needed to live.”
“When did you sleep?” Fisher wasn’t fighting against the pain anymore.
It sounded like he was struggling to stay awake.
“I didn’t, really. I took naps whenever I could, and…I don’t know. I just kept going.”
“Sounds shit.”
“It was, and it got even worse. My mother grew increasingly angry. She was tired of being treated like dirt and degraded by men who thought they were superior. She decided she wouldn’t accept guardians as clients anymore. Some of her regulars, the ones who used to come to the house, didn’t take it well. One morning, six years ago, she left for Kala’s but forgot her water ration. She’d left it on the kitchen table, her bottle still full. She hadn’t even taken a sip. I knew that without it, she wouldn’t get any water all day, so I grabbed it and ran after her. I found her in the square, already on her knees. The guardian she’d turned away the night before was there, looking smug as hell, while his underlings searched her bags. They found two knives—tiny, useless things. The blades were barely three inches long, but that didn’t matter.”
“Because the punishment for carrying a weapon in the Third is death,” Fisher whispered.
“I watched them slit her throat,” I said. “No arrest. No trial. They love handing out their sentences on the spot. Saves time and effort, I suppose. She died face down in the sand, in the blistering heat, with five men pissing in her hair and on her back. Then they just left her there. I ran to her as soon as they were gone. Flipped her over. Shook her.” I shrugged. “But she was already gone. I couldn’t carry her by myself, so I had to run and get Elroy. When we returned to the square, our neighbors were standing over her, spitting in her face. Elroy knocked out one man who was trying to rip her clothes off.”
‘What’s the problem? She was a dirty, disease-riddled whore. She didn’t care about the world seeing her tits. Here, how about I fucking pay her?’ He’d tossed a scuffed-up penny onto my mother’s stomach and then kicked her in the ribs. That’s when Elroy broke his face. I didn’t tell Fisher that part, though. Some memories can be spoken, even if it feels like dying to bring them to light. But others can’t. I would never repeat the words that man said about my
“No. If he’d taken us in, the guardians would have put two and two together and realized that he had made the daggers my mother had been carrying that day. I didn’t want to endanger him, so, for all intents and purposes, Hayden and I disappeared. We found our own attic spaces to sleep in. Above taverns mostly, where a little noise at night wouldn’t be noticeable. I’d sneak in and out of the forge, so no one knew I was working there. The skills my mother’s rebel friends had taught me ended up keeping us alive. We managed.”
So much left out. Painful nights filled with arguments. Nights spent sleeping on hard floors in the sweltering heat with nothing to block out the twins at the windows. Unending hunger and a thirst that was never slaked. ‘Managed’ was a generous term for what life looked like after that bastard had cut my mother’s throat.
Fisher finally twisted over and laid his head back on his pillow. “Come here,” he said.
“What?”
“Don’t make me drag you down here.” There was a tired but playful catch in his voice.
He wanted me to lie next to him. Hell. I was going to have to unpack that in the morning, honestly, because a wave of exhaustion like no other rolled over me as I scooted down the bed and straightened out my numb
legs for the first time in hours. I made sure to arrange myself so that no part of my body was touching Fisher’s, but he made a vexed sound and wrapped his arm around my body. Placing his hand against my stomach, he drew me close so that my back was flush with his chest. The warmth from his body was divine. I could feel his heart beating against my back—slow and even, in time with the soft push and pull of his breath. Somewhere toward the foot of the small bed, Onyx groaned comfortably and nestled deeper into the blankets.
This was…new. Different.
Fisher hooked his fingers underneath the hem of my shirt and rested his hand against my skin. The move wasn’t sexual. It was simple contact between one person and another. Grounding. Intimate. A connection.
“My mother was killed, too,” he whispered thickly. “We have that in common, Little Osha.”
I wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but he had already fallen asleep.
