My eyes were crusted shut when I woke up, and I nearly panicked in the darkness, terrified of what I
might see or hear within it. But there was still no sign of Reshaye, to my relief. Piece by piece, it all came back to me. My dreams — my memories. Sarlazai, and what came after. Every dead Farlione face. And…
I forced my eyes open (crack!) to blinding brightness, and to the sight of Max pacing the length of the room, looking as if he had been doing so for a long time. There was something about his demeanor that was so different than the intimacy we shared last night — even compared to the typical, everyday intimacy of our friendship before this terrible week began. A certain removed, focused intensity.
He looked terrible. And yet, he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. This second thought felt slightly traitorous, as it flitted through my mind.
I shouldn’t be happy that he was here. He was, after all, sharing a room with the same thing that had killed his family.
The thing that now lived inside of me.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I told him. My voice was raspy. He barely acknowledged me. Barely even looked at me.
Instead he sat at the edge of the bed, placed his hand on
my sweaty forehead, and practically interrogated me about how I was feeling. (Headache? Tolerable. Chills? No. Nausea? Moderate. Fever? Mild — on, and on.)
I answered him with increasingly curt responses. Then I ran my tongue over dry lips and whispered, “Why did you come back?”
He looked away. “Your energy needs to be on taking care of yourself. That’s where you need to focus all of that relentless brute force, because you’re going to need every bit of it.”
A small part of me sank into the faint affection of the way he said, “relentless brute force,” distant as it was. But that was quickly drowned out as a knot formed in my stomach.
“Max—“
“It took over last night,” he said, abruptly. “Briefly. Just for a minute, while you were sleeping. But you need to be aware of it.”
He said this all with strained, level factuality that I knew he had to force.
I felt like my stomach dropped through the floor. “What— what is it?” I whispered.
But Max just said, “Can you feel it now? In your head?”
I started to shake my head, but he continued. “Don’t answer so quickly. Really feel for it. Quiet yourself. Listen.”
I paused. Closed my eyes. And, slowly, a glow simmered to life within me — my own mind, lighting up like a map, just as the souls in the tower of Tairn had that day of the battle.
I ran my fingers across all of it, every cluster of shadows. And I did find Reshaye — folded up in a corner, completely dark, completely silent. A… presence.
“It is as if it’s sleeping,” I murmured.
“It is as sick and weak in the beginning as you are. What it did last night took away all of its energy.”
“The memories or—” I couldn’t even figure out how to word it.
“Both. All of it.” I opened my eyes, and Max was regarding me quietly, sharply. “Pay attention to how it reacts to these things, and always, always, know where it is. Your gifts should make it easier for you than it was for me.” The “I hope” was unspoken, but we both heard it. “Now we’re going to take this opportunity to learn how to shut it out. It should be easy for you right now.”
My head still pounded, but compared to how I had been feeling since receiving Reshaye, I felt ready to swim the Aran seas. Certainly more than well enough to throw myself into Max’s instruction as he described how to bind Reshaye into its own little room, secluded in a separate corner of my mind. His, he told me, had been like a closet
— a door he could imagine closing, then bolting shut. A rudimentary, simple image for a Solarie who had only limited grasp of mental magic.
But I saw things differently. My mind was not a maze, but a web — spools and spools of thoughts that grew more complicated the more I looked at them, my attention lighting up threads like clusters of fireflies. It was dark where Reshaye was, as if it had inhaled the threads down its throat. I imagined wrapping it in a series of bindings, shackling it, locked with a key that I hid within the recesses of my own thoughts.
But still, this seemed so… weak. I did not voice this, but Max must have seen my apprehension anyway. “Some of it might be a crutch,” he said. “And no, this probably won’t work forever. That’s why you always have to be looking for it. Always. But it’s a start.”
A start. That was something. It had to be.
For a moment, we stared at each other. Something tightened in my chest as I took in the shadows beneath Max’s beautiful eyes.
He held my gaze only for a moment before looking down at his hands, fidgeting.
“Max—” I started, but he turned away, reaching into his pockets and placing a series of rattling bottles on the desk.
“This one is for the headaches.” Each sentence was punctuated by another pang of glass against the wood. “This is for the nausea.” He continued down the line — for the chills, for the lack of concentration, to force a dreamless sleep. Then he paused before the two final bottles. “This one will knock you out in seconds.”
He did not need to tell me why I might need such a thing.
“And this one will render your magic nonexistent for anywhere from minutes to hours depending on how much you take.”
I strangled a gasp. I didn’t even know such a thing was possible.
And then he just stood there, gaze drawn to the ground.
I wanted to seize upon this moment of silence, but I wasn’t even sure what I would say.
A knock on the door interrupted my thoughts before I could clarify them, and Nura entered. “You look worlds better,” she observed, then turned to Max. He barely looked at her.
“So,” she said. “You came back after all.” “So it would appear,” he said tightly.
Then her eyes fell on the bottles lining the desk and her eyebrows rose. “How did you manage to get these?” She paused at the last one and shot him a look. “Is this what I think it is?”
“You’re the mind-reader, not me.”
“Did you leave Ara to get this? Even Zeryth and I typically can’t get our hands on this stuff.”
He shrugged. “I have my connections.” Then he tucked his hands into his pockets and straightened, flicking his
gaze to me. “I have a few things I need to do. You’ll be alright for an hour or so?”
Words that I could not untangle still coiled in my chest.
So many things that I had wanted to say to him.
But I swallowed them back, and simply nodded. He gazed at me for just a split second longer before he turned around and slipped out the door.
 |
NURA SAT beside me for a while, examining me, taking my pulse and checking my breathing. At her mere touch, a revulsion rose in me. When I looked at her, I saw flashes of memories that weren’t mine. Most vividly, the image of her blood-stained face, palm raising to my temple, in a betrayal that would wreck Max’s life and destroy the city of Sarlazai.
Perhaps she noticed me flinching away from her touch, because she gave me a long, quiet look, one that balanced on the edge of an unspoken question.
“Has it begun speaking to you?”
The memory of that voice slithered through me. “Yes,” I said.
“Good. I think you’ve pushed through the worst of it, then. And you should be able to begin harnessing it soon.”
Harnessing it. Is that what she told herself she was doing in Sarlazai that day?
“What is it?” I whispered.
“That’s not an easy question to answer. The best we can tell, it is essentially raw magic — raw magic that draws from a deeper level than that harnessed by human Wielders, deeper even than that drawn upon by the Syrizen, or the Fey.”
“But it… speaks.”
“It is sentient,” Nura said, lightly. “Yes.”
“So what is it? Or was it?”
“No one knows. It was secured by Zeryth’s predecessor, Azre. Somewhere past Besrith.” She was quiet for a moment, her gaze slipping further away. “He died before anyone could find out exactly where. But it is very powerful.”
Memories flashed through my mind. Memories of fire and blood and destruction, and above all, devastation. Memories of Max’s family, and their dead, horrified faces.
“It showed me memories,” I said. My gaze met hers, and I knew we both understood which ones.
Nura’s throat bobbed. Her only hint of emotion. “It is a terrifying creature in many ways,” she said. “But it is also incredibly powerful, and even in the horrible things it does, it saves many lives.”
“It showed me what you did in Sarlazai.” My fingers clenched, and Nura’s eyes flicked away from me, suddenly preoccupied with the notes on her lap.
“I did what my position and my rank bound me to do.” “You forced him.” My words came through clenched
teeth. The betrayal that Max had felt that day still ached in my chest. I knew what that was — to feel like your body is not your own. And his memories of the city’s destruction mingled with my own half-remembered images of the capital of Nyzerene burning. “And so many died.”
Her gaze shot to me, sharp as the edge of a blade. “I did what I had to do, and I will carry that weight to my grave. Thousands and thousands more would have died if the war had continued. It would have gone on for years. And I saw it, then — an opportunity.”
I could smell the burning flesh. Opportunity.
“You know as well as I do that sometimes, we have to do terrible things for the sake of something bigger. You knew that when you spilled your blood on that contract.” Her mouth tightened, a sorrowful wrinkle forming between her brows. “Max was the most important person in my life.
There was only one thing I loved more than I loved him.” Her eyes flicked back to mine, brighter, colder. “Ara. Only Ara.”
My stomach knotted. Love? Was that love? To betray someone’s trust so viciously? To make sacrifices on the behalf of so many other people?
No. Never.
I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth. Nura rose, wandering to the desk and looking at those little glass bottles.
“He came back last night, then?”
For some reason, my answer made my chest ache. “Yes.” I watched the corners of her mouth lift into a little,
mournful smile. “I knew he would.”
