T he vase shattered against the wall. Caduan barely flinched, stepping slightly to the left to avoid the glass that now twinkled across half the
floor.
My shoulders heaved, breath ragged, muscles shaking. I still was not accustomed to that, my body responding so physically to my frustrations.
“I can’t,” I gritted out. “You can.”
“I. Can’t.”
“How many times will we have this conversation?” Caduan nudged broken glass with his toe. “Soon I’ll need to send someone to buy more vases.”
I whirled to him, snarling. “You give me an impossible task.”
“There is nothing impossible about it. Its possibilities are endless, actually.”
I almost struck him. Perhaps then my magic would appear. My power had given Tisaanah the ability to wither flesh, Max the ability to reduce anything to ash. If I were to strike Caduan, perhaps a special gift that was only my own would appear. I imagined his too-calm face melting into a puddle of goo. This image brought me some brief comfort.
“Endless,” I scoffed. “It’s meaningless.” “That’s not true.”
It was true. For the last several days, ever since I tentatively agreed to help Caduan in his war, he brought me up to his chambers and tried to teach me how to use my magic.
That, at least, was what he claimed to be doing. In practice, he was putting an empty vase before me, and telling me to “create something.”
Create something?
These instructions meant nothing to me. What was I to create? A butterfly? A flame? A snake?
“Any of those things would do,” Caduan said, passively, when I asked.
But I could not create a butterfly without first molding Tisaanah’s magic. I couldn’t conjure a flame without Maxantarius’s spark.
I asked for other suggestions. Caduan only said that he couldn’t tell me what to create.
“Why not?” I had demanded.
He replied, “Because that wouldn’t tell either of us anything worth knowing.”
“You are not telling me anything worth knowing.”
Caduan gave me a cryptic smile, and told me, more impatiently this time, to try again.
Days passed. The vase remained empty. Caduan’s instructions grew more demanding. My vexation bubbled to the surface. Another vase shattered against the wall.
It had been five days. Five days of this. I was sick of it. A tight feeling now lived in my chest, and every time I looked at Caduan’s disappointment, it grew more suffocating.
Enough. I agreed to try, but I hadn’t known what I was agreeing to. I hadn’t realized that trying something and failing—over and over again— made me feel just as helpless and trapped as I had in the room of white and white and white.
Useless. I was useless then, helpless, alone. Just as I was now useless, helpless, alone.
That thought made my breath come faster, faster, faster. My hand closed around the water glass on the table. Lifted it.
Caduan cringed.
But instead of throwing the glass, at the last moment, I closed my hand around it, tight tight tight, until pain spasmed through my palm.
“This was a mistake. I don’t have anything.” The confession slipped from my tongue so easily. Unbidden, I remembered Tisaanah’s steel mind, and the way she so carefully hid such insecurities from spoken words. I’d
watched her tuck the thoughts away deep in the darkened crevices of her mind, the same ones that I had occupied.
I realized that I wasn’t as strong as she was. Not in my magic, and not in my empty mind.
“You aren’t trying,” Caduan said.
I welcomed the flood of rage. Easier than hurt.
I whirled to him. Two strides and I was across the room, so close to his face. He didn’t flinch.
“Not trying? For five days, you have remained in this room with me, and you tell me that I am not trying?”
A muscle twitched above Caduan’s lip. “For five days I’ve watched you run in circles. I am helping you, Aefe.”
I needed an outlet, needed something to shatter. I reached for another glass, but Caduan grabbed my wrist.
“You are better than this.” His fingers tightened, hot against my skin. “Then tell me what you want me to do.”
“I want you to think. I want you to lean into the silence and find something there.”
“Find what?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
His hand still clutched my wrist, tighter still, tight enough that it ached just slightly. I liked it—the constriction. It was the first thing in five days that felt even remotely familiar, like a tether when I had been floating at sea.
I leaned into it, my lips twisting into a sneer.
“What do you expect me to find there?” I hissed. “There is nothing inside of me but silence. I don’t understand how anyone can live like this, in a world so empty. I need to feel… to feel…”
I stumbled. Words were too weak to describe what I meant, so I gave
up.
“You would not understand it.”
But Caduan’s face had gone pensive. “Go on,” he said, quietly.
“You would not understand.” I tried to pull away, but his grip held firm. “There’s something there, Aefe. Do not back away. Go on. You say you
can’t make something out of nothing. Why?” I hated him.
“I have seen what you can do,” he pressed. “In all your forms, then and now.”
“You don’t know what it’s like,” I snapped. “I did great things, but only when I had something to… to become. A song to sing louder or…”
This did not make any sense to him. “Go on, Aefe.”
“When I was in them, I could take their magic and make it stronger. I knew I was powerful—infinitely powerful—but they gave me the material. Even so long ago, even as Aefe…”
My tongue ran over my teeth, the point of my canines. Not as sharp as they were long ago, in a different version of this body.
“Even as Aefe, I had no magic of my own, only the ability to take from others. And now, in this body, I am empty. What do you expect me to create? I need the magic of another. A power to amplify. I cannot make something from nothing.”
“It isn’t from nothing. It is from you.”
I was so angry—how could he still not understand? “What am I, if not nothing?”
It was in the name I gave myself. Reshaye. No one. Nothing.
Caduan’s lips went thin. In a movement so abrupt that it made me stumble, he wrenched me closer. He pressed my palm to him—down past the buttons of his loose shirt, against the smooth skin of his chest.
It was so unexpected that I tried to pull away, but his fingers tightened again.
“Listen,” he demanded. “Stop fighting, and listen.”
I wasn’t sure why I obeyed. My breaths were still heaving, hard enough that at first I heard nothing but the rushing of my own blood in my ears.
“What do you feel?” Caduan asked. “Nothing.”
“Not true.” His eyes met mine, spearing me. “What do you feel?”
Nothing, I still wanted to say. But then, I became aware of faint, faint movement beneath my fingertips—the thrum of warmth beneath his skin, a steady rhythm.
I became aware of the movement of his chest, rising and falling. Not just beneath my fingertips, but against my cheek, where his breath caressed my skin.
As soon as I noticed these things, they were everywhere.
The warmth of blood moving beneath his skin. The rhythm of his breathing. The minute vibrations of the muscles of his hand, still wrapped around my wrist. The sheer warmth of him, close enough to surround me like an embrace.
The sensation was like falling into something warm and familiar.
All this time, and I had felt so alone in this empty body. Perhaps my body was empty, but how had I not realized that being close to another could feel so similar to sharing one? I had been so certain that I could not understand this strange unspoken communication that I ignored these things. But now I wanted to bury myself in the minute movements of his flesh—in his breath, his heartbeat, in the low vibrations of his voice.
I did not realize that I had moved closer until he spoke, so quietly, and I felt it through my whole body.
“What do you feel?” he asked again. “I feel… you.”
I watched the muscle tighten at the corner of his upturned mouth, the flutter of pulse beneath his fair skin. I felt his breathing grow slightly more rapid, because I felt everything, now. His other hand had gone to rest at my back, a barely-there touch that sent ripples up my spine. For a moment I thought he would pull me closer, and I welcomed it, because I was nothing now but the desire to lose myself in the body of another.
But he did not. The touch remained light, gentle.
“You think you are alone, Aefe, in this body. But there is life everywhere. In blood and flesh. In breath. In a heartbeat.” His thumb gently caressed the back of my hand, where he still pressed my palm over his heart, and my breath shuddered.
“Tell me,” he murmured, “is this empty?” “No.”
I struggled to speak.
He pulled away slightly, and a small wordless sound of protest left my lips. But he still cradled my back, still gripped my wrist. He removed my hand from his chest and then pressed it to my own, so we now stood face to face, my palm to my heart.
“Tell me what you feel,” he whispered.
At first, nothing. My own body seemed lackluster compared to everything I felt in his.
But then…
A steady beat, rushing a bit too fast. The inflation and deflation of my breath, the rhythm of my lungs. Warmth. Growth.
“A body is an incredible thing.” He was close enough that his words rustled my hair. “There is life in every fiber of you. You are always moving, growing and changing. You are never stagnant. You are never silent.” He pulled away just enough to look at me, his green eyes brighter than I had ever seen them. His fingers folded into mine, still pressed over my heartbeat
—his other hand rose to take mine, opening it between us.
“You are not nothing, Aefe. You are a miracle. Now create something.” It was so easy, now. How had I not seen it?
I was full of it, teeming with it, this magic that I could manipulate just as I had once manipulated others’. I was made of it.
I simply had to sculpt it.
My skin tingled. I couldn’t bring myself to look away from Caduan’s eyes. Seconds passed, and his gaze lowered. A smile bloomed over his face.
“Look,” he murmured.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to watch that smile.
But finally, I looked down. There, cradled in my palm, was a tiny, black rosebud, fresh leaves still unfurling.
Strange. In the past, I had leveled cities and destroyed entire armies. But none of those things had ever brought me the pride of this single, tiny flower. Something created only by me. Something alive.
“Perfect.”
And when I glanced up at Caduan, he was not looking at the flower—he was looking at me.
 |
I DID NOT MAKE another flower that afternoon. I managed a few tiny leaves, and a single unopened bud. I didn’t care. I felt euphoric. I could have continued all night. Though Caduan urged me to be patient, I couldn’t stop myself, grinning with increasing glee with every leaf that sprouted in my palm.
How had I never known how good to felt to create things?
Caduan grew tired quickly. Soon he watched me from an armchair, then with one hand propping up his chin, and finally, I turned around to show
him my latest creation to see him slumped over, asleep.
It was not late. I was not tired. But I watched him for a moment, then sat in the chair beside him. Practicing by myself did not seem as appealing.
I watched the rise and fall of his breaths, admiring, without anyone to make me self-conscious, all of these staggeringly beautiful, newly noticed things. He didn’t wake; he barely even moved. When my own exhaustion set in, hours later, I reached across the table to rest my hand on his, my thumb over the inside of his wrist. The beat of his pulse lulled me to sleep.
“My king.”
I blinked blearily. Luia leaned over Caduan. Dawn light spilled over his face, and mine. Our hands were still tangled between the two chairs.
“My king,” Luia said, louder, a shaper note to her voice. She gripped his shoulders. “My king, wake up—”
His eyes opened, slowly.
Luia immediately released him, letting out a breath of relief. She barely looked at me.
“I’m…” Caduan rubbed his head, then glanced at me. “I apologize. I was more tired than I realized.”
I rubbed sleep from my eyes.
“I apologize for waking you so early,” Luia said. “It is our Threllian allies. They have asked urgently to speak with you. Meajqa has been handling them, but they’re pressing. We will continue to work with them, but we wanted to make you aware—”
“I can meet with them.”
Luia’s eyebrows rose. “You are under no obligation to give them a personal meeting.”
“Meajqa shouldn’t travel to Threll, and if he insists, he certainly shouldn’t go alone.”
“I can go, or we can send—”
“No. I will go. I have been too far away from these matters.” His eyes, still tired, flicked to me. “Aefe will come with me.”
Luia’s face twisted up. “What?”
What?
My first impulse was to refuse. The Aefe of before would have refused.
But I stopped myself before the rejection left my lips.
I am different than I thought I was, I reminded myself. When I agreed, Caduan’s smile flitted across his face like that early-morning sun.
