W hen I woke again—really woke—I was in a bed. That alone was almost enough to convince me that I was dreaming. I sat up to see
Sammerin’s back, hunched over a desk. Tisaanah was already up, and she gave me a grin that made my heart stop when I rolled over.
Sammerin rose and turned to me, the corner of his mouth lifting in a pleased smirk. “At long last. Welcome back, Max.”
Brayan and Sammerin had brought us to a nearby city on the outskirts of Threllian control. They said that the Fey and Aran armies had both retreated once things started to get wild—and, apparently, things did get very wild. To hear them tell it, Niraja, even in ruins, no longer existed at all. “I have never seen anything like it,” Sammerin said, when we gathered around the table to regroup. “It was like… the landscape was moving beneath our feet. People were getting caught in rocks and plants that just
moved of their own accord.”
“It was one of the Fey,” Brayan said, stiffly, clearly uncomfortable with everything we had witnessed. “She was doing things that no one should be able to do.”
“She?” Tisaanah said.
“Reshaye,” Sammerin murmured.
The thought made me sick. With the fresh context of my newly restored past, I understood better than ever exactly how bad it was that thing not only still existed, but existed in its own body.
We needed to change that, and fast.
“It was…” Sammerin frowned. “If I hadn’t seen it firsthand, I don’t know that I would have believed it. We are in uncharted territory, even by
our standards.”
As if on cue, we all looked at the table, and the mysterious item that sat at its center.
By the time Tisaanah and I were pulled from the swamps, we barely clung to consciousness. We had hardly looked at the thing we’d dragged back with us. Now, in the harsh light of day, I could appreciate just how unnerving it was.
It was a heart—an anatomical heart that looked as if it had been carved from white marble. Sammerin had examined it thoroughly and told us, with some unease, that it was incredibly accurate, to the point where he suspected it was an actual human heart that had been… preserved? Petrified?
Certainly, it was no normal object. It spoke to some deep power within me, deeper than my flames and even deeper than Reshaye had once drawn from, strange and volatile and… inhuman.
“So is this it?” Sammerin asked, quietly. “Is this what Ishqa had sent us to go find?”
I didn’t have an answer to that question that I liked.
Tisaanah looked at her hand—the mark no longer glowed quite as brightly, but it had spread, now crossing the boundary of her wrist. “It’s what the wayfinder led me to,” she said.
Ishqa had spoken of magic that would spell the life or death of nations. Could this thing do that? It seemed, at once, equal parts impossible and inevitable.
“Ishqa had better get back here,” Sammerin muttered.
We all shifted uncomfortably at that. No one had seen Ishqa since Niraja. Sammerin said they had gotten separated when the chaos erupted. While Brayan had found Sammerin, neither of them had been able to locate Ishqa before they were forced to drag Tisaanah and me away.
“He’ll find us,” Tisaanah said. “He’s like a cat. He always makes his way back.”
She had a bit more faith in Ishqa’s trustworthiness—and durability— than I did. Still, I hoped she was right. I didn’t know how we would learn anything at all about this thing without his help.
After a long, awkward silence, Brayan rose, cracking his back.
“We should be safe here for a while,” he said. “We give Ishqa three days. After that, we assume he’s dead.”
Harsh, but fair. We had few other choices in wartime.
“In the meantime,” he went on, “I suggest we all get some rest. We aren’t in any condition to do anything useful now.”
Sammerin nodded. He looked exhausted.
“Good,” Brayan said. That was as much of a goodbye as we were going to get. He left without another word.
I glanced at Tisaanah. She was still looking at the heart with an intense concentration etched into her face, a tiny wrinkle between her eyebrows. A dizzy flood of affection fell over me at the sight of it—because it was such a familiar expression, and I loved that it was suddenly so familiar.
Yes, a lifetime of memories was a heavy weight. When they returned, I had thought some of them might break me.
But then, some of them were this.
I brushed my hand over the small of her back. I hadn’t been able to help myself. Those little touches had been sprinkled throughout this conversation, like I needed to remind myself that she was here. She looked over her shoulder and smiled, and that made all this other ridiculousness seem inconsequential.
Sammerin stood. “This is disgusting.” “What?”
He gave me a deadpan stare. “Wait until I’m out of the room before you rip each other’s clothes off.”
“You should be so lucky.”
He scoffed as the door slammed behind him.
And finally—finally, finally, finally—we were alone.
Tisaanah stood up and stretched, then gasped sharply. “There has been a terrible mistake.”
I leapt to my feet, alarmed. “What?”
She gestured to the room. “There is only one bed in here!”
I exhaled a rough laugh. There was indeed only one bed in here. One wonderful, luxurious bed.
Fine, it was in actuality a tiny, rickety bed that seemed to slant slightly to the left. I didn’t care. It was still the best bed I had ever seen.
“Ah. You’re right,” I said. “That’s a problem.”
Tisaanah turned to me, her wide eyes sparkling with amusement at her own hilarity. “Huge problem.” She flailed her arms out, then placed them
around my neck. Her accent broke the word up into several sing-song syllables—hu-u-uge!
Fuck. I was gone. Even when I didn’t know who she was, I was gone.
My hands settled at her waist, our bodies aligning. Her smile faded, the ever-present wrinkle of thought returning as she examined my face.
I pressed my thumb against it. “We don’t need this right now.” “Don’t we?”
We would, of course. There was so much to talk about, think about, worry about that it made my freshly demolished head spin. But I didn’t want to do any of that right now.
Instead, I wanted to re-familiarize myself with her—every part of her. I wanted to trace every scar, the outlines of every shade of her skin, the curve of every muscle or swell of flesh. I wanted to lose myself in her in every sense. I wanted it so much that it overwhelmed me, like a starving man before a feast.
She pressed her hand to mine. Blue-white light shivered at her fingertips. My magic answered that call as if it was second nature. My flames mingled with her cool, smooth light, tickling both of our hands but never burning.
“It’s so easy,” she said.
“It is,” I agreed. The flames intensified, spiraling around my forearm.
The lanterns in the room brightened, then dimmed.
“Show off,” she said, even as she grinned and let silver butterflies unfurl from her free hand.
“Me? Look at yourself.”
“I will not deny it. It’s good to finally feel strong again.”
I could not imagine Tisaanah ever being anything but strong. Still… I knew what she meant. For six months, I’d been a prisoner of my own body. I’d forgotten how wonderful it was to speak to magic so effortlessly. I vowed to never take it for granted again.
Tisaanah’s magic reached out for me, and mine met it with ease—a far cry from the walls that had barred us the last time we tried this. I let her reach into my mind. Let her see everything that evaded words. Let all the boundaries between us fall away.
The lanterns in the room flared again. I couldn’t wait anymore.
I kissed her, hard, and she fell into it immediately, lips parting. She wrapped her arms around my neck and I pulled her closer—still not close enough. She tasted like home. Like everything good about reclaiming where I had been.
We stumbled to the bed, our kisses growing more frantic, my grip around her tightening as my grip on everything else fell away. I didn’t give a damn about Ilyzath or my memories or the Fey or the end of the world. All those things became utterly inconsequential compared to the almost- sound that Tisaanah made when my hand slid over her breast, and the slight parting of her thighs as we collided gracelessly with the edge of the mattress.
No. None of those serious, important things would matter again, I decided, for a very long time.
My hand slipped between us, my fingertips barely brushing the apex of her thighs over the too-thick fabric of her trousers, and Tisaanah drew in a desperate gasp against my mouth.
If I was a stronger man, I could be patient. I could take my time to re- familiarize myself with her slowly, inch by inch, over the course of hours.
Her hips lurched, and she fell back onto the bed, pulling me with her. Our kisses never broke. I reached for her shirt, closed my fingers lightly around the seam.
I decided that I was fucking weak.
The fabric was thin. The buttons tore off easily. Tisaanah wore no undergarments, her beautiful breasts exposed to the chill of the air, peaked by the cold. I abandoned her lips to taste each one, a louder, so much more satisfying moan escaping her as I swirled my tongue around each peak.
Even her skin tasted like citrus.
“Max,” she breathed—a request, a plea—and I had so missed the way she said my name. I had to pause, look down at her splayed out messily on the bed beneath me, lips swollen, skin bared, hair fanned out in tangles around her.
“Max…” she murmured again. “I know.”
Fuck, did I know.
She started to unbutton my shirt, and I ripped it off over my head. She unbuttoned her pants and before she had even finished the motion, my hand was sliding down between her legs.
She whimpered, her hips bucking against me, and I groaned a curse. My trousers were painful.
She freed me from them, and I hissed another, more creative expletive as her grasp settled around my length.
I kissed her deeply, cupping her tipped-back chin as my tongue explored her mouth. “I need you now,” I growled into her lips. “I can’t wait.”
She breathed in Thereni, “Yes.”
We weren’t even completely on the bed, her backside barely resting against it, me still kneeling on the ground and leaning over her. She kicked down her trousers just enough to open her legs. She was so wet that even the first stroke was hard, deep, her hips rising to meet mine with equal force.
She said again, in Thereni, “Yes,” and I decided it was my new favorite word—decided it over and over as she moaned it again, as I drove into her again, again, again. One hand clutched a fistful of her hair—the other gripped the curve where her waist met her hip, bracing her.
I could fucking die here. Like I said, I was weak.
This wasn’t sweet, slow lovemaking. Wasn’t a languid reunion. This was frantic, desperate, feral.
Her thighs tightened around me. Her teeth closed on my lip, hard enough to draw forth a spike of pain and the taste of iron. I felt her coiling, felt her muscles tightening.
I was greedy. I gripped her wrists above her head, stretching her beneath me so I could take her whole body, push myself deeper.
I’d almost forgotten how fucking beautiful she was when she climaxed. I had to stop kissing her just so I could watch her, control fully relinquished, her head thrown back, lips parted and muscles trembling as she contracted around me.
The sight pushed me to the edge. I thrust deeper into her and threw myself over it, burying my face against her neck, tasting her skin, teeth marking her as I groaned her name.
The intensity of it washed me away.
When the wave crashed and faded, I was face down in her hair. Her chest heaved under mine as she struggled to catch her breath.
Everything in the world was a little fuzzier and softer. I felt content. Not sated—yet—but content.
We lay in silence, not moving, the room soundless save for our serrated breaths.
Then I pushed myself to my elbows and turned to her. “I’m fucking furious with you.”
