I dealt with unpleasant emotions the same way I always did: burying myself in work. At least there was never a shortage of people who needed
my attention, plans that needed my eyes, problems that needed my brain. Filias, Serel, and Sammerin didn’t even try to approach me. Riasha came to me under the guise of work, but she watched me with concern that had nothing to do with trade strategies.
“We’ll find another way to free him, child,” she said, quietly, unprompted. “I promise.”
I had to clench my jaw so hard that it trembled to keep from saying something I’d regret.
“We have work to do,” I said, after a long silence, and Riasha nodded, and we didn’t speak of it again.
It was dark by the time she left, and by then, my mind was useless. The walls of my tent suffocated me. My rage had begun to fade, replaced with an even more unpleasant hopelessness.
Finally, I rose and went out into the night. Most people had retreated to their tents. I passed Serel’s, illuminated from within with warm flickering lantern lights. I could make out two silhouettes within. The shapes were distorted by their embrace, but I knew what I was seeing. I’d recognize Serel’s form anywhere, and Filias’s, tall and lean, was easy to identify.
I turned away. A terrible, acrid feeling stirred in my stomach.
Of course it’s easy to make this choice when he still has someone to go back to every night. He doesn’t know how it feels. Why should he care?
My own bitterness shocked me the minute the thought flitted through my mind, and I immediately hated myself for it. Serel deserved happiness.
And Filias, however we sometimes disagreed, was a good man.
This isn’t who you are, Tisaanah, I told myself. But sometimes it was so damned hard to be kind.
I tucked my hands into my pockets and kept walking. There was a little ridge at the edge of the encampment, which had become one of my favorite places to sit alone at night. But as I approached, I realized someone had already beaten me there.
I hesitated, then approached.
I sat beside Sammerin, who was smoking a pipe and scratching little ink drawings into a beaten-up notebook. We sat in silence for a few long seconds.
Sammerin spoke first. “I never intended to give up on him.” “I know. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No. It was justified.” He let out a long breath and set down his notebook. “I fought against that decision, Tisaanah. At least, as hard as I could, considering the language barrier. But I made my position very clear.”
“I know,” I said, quietly.
“I wanted to have another option by the time you returned. Another path forward.” A humorless smile twisted the corner of his mouth. “The cruel thing is, I have never been a good idea person. Back in our military days, that was him.”
It didn’t matter if Sammerin was an “idea person” or not. I had been racking my brain for hours, and I was beginning to think that we had simply run out of options.
I would never, ever say that aloud.
“The thing is…” A long puff of smoke. “I may not agree with their decision, but I do understand why they’re making it. Perhaps if I were them, I would make the same one.”
I fought the urge to argue with him—never, I wanted to say. And yet… I thought of Jaklin’s children, both under ten. Thought of Melina’s dead body.
“It makes me sick, Sammerin. It actually hurts to think of him suffering in that place. I can’t just… give up.”
“I know. But you’re only one person.”
Despite myself, I choked a bitter laugh. “People are always telling me that. I don’t understand why.”
Sammerin gave me a deadpan look out of the corner of his eye and released a long exhale of smoke. “I wonder indeed.”
It felt good to laugh, even half-heartedly. But my smile faded fast. And it was the first time I had ever given voice to this confession—this precious, shameful secret—when I said, “Before the Arch Commandant fight, he asked me if I ever thought about what it would be like to stay with him forever.”
I could still remember it so clearly—What if it wasn’t just two weeks?
What if this was our lives?
He had said it the way someone spoke of a dream, with all the vulnerability and joy of giving life to something precious. He had handed me his heart.
And what did I give him in return?
My eyes burned. “And I said nothing. I didn’t answer him. Because I was afraid.”
Because I was too cowardly to let myself believe in a future. Too terrified of my own selfishness. Too overwhelmed by how much I wanted him and the dream he offered.
Shame curled in my stomach.
“What if he’s in that place, alone, and he thinks that I have abandoned him?”
What if he didn’t know that I was here, loving him so much I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t live?
“He doesn’t think that.” “How can you know?”
“When Max believes in something, he gives it his whole self. It’s his greatest strength and greatest weakness. And you, Tisaanah, were the first thing he had believed in for a long, long time. It takes more than four walls to break that kind of faith.”
He said it so matter-of-factly, like it was nothing more and nothing less than the truth.
My composure threatened to unravel. Like I had so many times, I collected myself, closing away my pain like a wound that had been stitched up too many times. The stitches would break again later, in private. They’d hold long enough until then.
I gave Sammerin a sidelong glance. “How are you, Sammerin?”
One eyebrow twitched. “I am utterly fantastic.”
Sammerin’s sarcasm was like expensive whiskey. Subtle and refined, but plenty potent.
I leaned my head against his shoulder. The position gave me a better view of the notebook in his lap. He had been drawing a little Aran townhouse with a sign over the door, upon which Sammerin had scratched, Esrin & Imat.
It was his practice.
“I’m just tired,” he said, softly, after a moment. “We’ve been fighting for a long time. Traveling for a long time.”
I recognized the emotion in his voice. I had felt it myself, many times.
My people were fighting to reclaim their homes, while Sammerin had been wrenched away from his. The others liked him well enough, but he struggled with the language. And Sammerin’s life here, like all of ours, had become a monotonous string of battles and broken bodies and camps moved late in the night.
“You miss your home,” I murmured.
“I left a lot behind. My patients, my practice. Family.”
A pang of guilt twinged in my chest. “We will make sure you return.”
He gave me a small smile—the sort of smile that said he appreciated the sentiment, but didn’t entirely believe me.
But it would need to be true, I decided. I wouldn’t accept any alternative.
“It just takes time,” I said. “A wise man once told me that creating is harder than destroying.”
The corner of Sammerin’s mouth lifted, recognizing his own words echoed back to him.
“I suppose,” he said, “it will be worth it.” Gods, I hoped so. I hoped so.
 |
I WAS ACCUSTOMED, by now, to strange dreams. But this was not a dream. It started as one, and ended as one. Whatever happened between was a cataclysm.
One moment, I was in a field of flowers watching a familiar left-skewed smile—a dream, of course—and the next, the entire world was falling apart, as if sight and sound and touch and smell and the invisible forces that held all of those things together were being ripped apart from the inside out. Somewhere far away, yes, but physical distance meant nothing here. The pain was immeasurable.
A thousand different moments collided.
Suddenly I was in a beautiful, unfamiliar room that I hated, looking up at the ceiling, gasping for breath.
Suddenly I was trapped between four white carved walls, beating at them with my fists, fire in my veins with nowhere to go.
That moment of connection existed only for seconds—less, even, and yet it made everything else stop. That was Max. I’d know his presence anywhere, even by a few fractured seconds through his eyes.
I needed to go back. Needed to reach him. I tried to harness this overwhelming flood of magic, tried to channel it, but there was no structure to it, no reason. It was a putrid flood that went in every direction at once. A fundamental shift in the world.
I screamed his name, but I had no voice, no words. Whatever wound was being ripped into the deep layers of this world tore wider. I was swept away.
|
“Tisaanah.”
I didn’t want to wake up. Didn’t want to relinquish my dream.
Was it a dream? It had felt so real. I reached out for my magic again, feeling for those roots that connected me to the world beneath—feeling for him.
Nothing. “Tisaanah.”
My eyes snapped open and I jerked away. Ishqa slowly came into focus.
It was dark. A single lantern lit my tent.
It took me a moment to collect myself. “You’re late,” I said. “I apologize.”
I sat up as he approached my bedroll. With the flickering light of the single flame falling across him, illuminating his gold hair and gold eyes while the rest of him fell into shadow, he at first looked like some sort of apparition rather than a living being.
And yet, as he came closer, he seemed… oddly human. I blinked the sleep from my eyes. “Are you alright?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You seem…” Sad. “Tired.”
Only the corner of his mouth moved. “It has been a long hundred years.”
Was that a…joke?
My head hurt so, so much. I rubbed my temples. Everything felt as if it was tilting. When I rose, I half expected to tip over.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“You are not alright.” He rarely asked questions. He mostly made statements.
“I had… a strange dream.” “A dream.”
I heard what he really meant in the tone of his voice. What he was really asking.
“You must be careful,” he said. “You do not know whether the king is still able to take advantage of your use of deep magic. And we can’t risk—”
“I know.”
I spoke more harshly than I intended, mostly because I hated that Ishqa was right. I knew how dangerous it was. I was there when it happened to Max—when Max drew deep from his magic during his fight with Nura, and the Fey king seized upon that passageway. I was the one who had cut that connection out of him at Max’s desperate request… even though I knew it could destroy so much of his mind.
The memory alone made me ill.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was… I don’t know how to describe it. A shattering.”
Anyone else might have acted like I was being nonsensical, and I wouldn’t have blamed them for it. But Ishqa just seemed concerned.
“Did you feel anything else?”
I wasn’t sure why I hesitated to say it. “A bit. A strange place I did not recognize. And…”
“Him.”
I nodded.
Ishqa looked uneasy. “We need to be careful.”
“I can’t turn away from any chance at learning more. Not if we’re to win this war.”
He gave me a long, piercing look. “I may seem old and inhuman to you,” he said. “But I understand why you are doing this, and I understand that it has nothing to do with the war. I know what it is to mourn someone. But—”
I didn’t want to have this conversation again.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said, tightly. “Where did you go?” “That is irrelevant.”
“Did you go to see your son?”
A single muscle twitched in Ishqa’s throat, the only movement in a marble-still expression. “No.”
I rose, stepped closer to him—close enough to see all the little imperfections in his face that distance and the darkness had shrouded. A faint wrinkle at the corner of his eyes, a scar at the angle of his chin, a few strands of that sleek golden hair that whispered silver. How easy it was for his kind to hide the painful markers of a life of mistakes, the wounds of the past carefully stitched up and tucked away beneath layers of elegant stillness. Humans just bled our pain all over everything, denying it with our last breath while crimson seeped between our fingers.
That’s how I’d felt, these last few months. Like I was bleeding out.
“These people have given you their trust, Ishqa,” I said. “And they don’t trust easily. You’ve earned it. We’re grateful for all that you’ve done for us. But…”
The “but” escaped my lips without my permission, my voice trailing off. I still felt something, whenever I looked at Ishqa—something with a razored edge.
Ishqa said, quietly, “But there are still pieces of her hatred for me in you.”
Her. It. Reshaye. Aefe. I didn’t answer.
“It was my greatest mistake,” he said. “I can say this a million times over, and it would not be enough. Perhaps the loss of my son is punishment for what I did then.”
A single crack in his calm expression revealed a hint of pain. Such a human, recognizable thing.
He spoke as if his son was dead. He wasn’t—though he had been close to it, in Nura’s captivity. He had been rescued by the Fey king’s forces and remained loyal to King Caduan. Ishqa rarely spoke of it. Only now did I glimpse what he must be feeling, knowing that his son probably thought he was a traitor. To him, his son was just as unreachable as Max was in Ilyzath.
Pity knotted in my chest.
“Perhaps our attachments are inconvenient,” I said, quietly, “but what are we doing any of this for, if not for them?”
Ishqa looked as if he would respond, and then thought better of it. He put out his hand.
“Show me.”
I obeyed. He cradled my palm, frowning down at the swirls of gold. They looked even more otherworldly now, with the lantern light streaking the metal bands like little rivers of fire over my skin. The burning had dulled to a faint ache. Otherwise, they didn’t feel like much of anything.
“Tell me again what happened,” he said.
I did, describing the orb that Farimov had presented to the Fey, and what it had done when I tried to touch it.
Ishqa was silent. My palm tingled as his magic reached for mine, as if testing the thing on my skin.
Then suddenly, he dropped my hand and straightened. His eyes leapt to mine, and I saw something very strange on Ishqa’s face—panic.
“We need to leave,” he said.
“Why?” I asked. “What did you—” That was when the screaming started.
