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What would it be like to walk with Harper that way? To share a mug of cider. To touch him without feeling like I will come apart?
“Why didn’t you tell me you spoke Karkaun?” “You didn’t ask.” Musa keeps walking, and now I am trying to keep pace with him. “The Mariners used to trade with the barbarians, before Grímarr became their high muckety-muck.
I turn to see Harper coming down the hallway. His sleeves are rolled up, and there’s rain in his hair and glistening along his cheekbones. No distractions, Shrike. Do not stare at his forearms—or his face—
“Go on, insult me,” Musa says. “But you and I are more alike than you know, and that’s not a compliment. You’re in a position of great power, Shrike. It’s a lonely place to be. Most leaders spend their lives using others. Being used. Love isn’t just a luxury for you. It’s a rarity. It’s a gift. Don’t throw it away.”
“There is more than love of another,” I say. “There is love of country—love of one’s people—” “But that’s not what we’re talking about,” Musa says. “You are lucky enough to love someone who loves you back. He is alive and breathing and in the same vicinity as you. By the skies, do something about it. For however long you have. For whatever time you get. Because if you don’t, I swear that you’ll regret it. You’ll regret it for all your years.”
We draw our stories from the deep places, Laia. I sat in the lamplit warmth of her wagon, but the air grew cold as she spoke. They are not just words. They are magic. Some are potent as poison, and strike you dead upon speaking them.
The wind rises, nudging me northwest, so I follow it. Instinct is instinct. Sometimes it’s a shout in your head, and sometimes it’s your mind telling you the wind wants you to move in a particular direction.
“Let me up,” I grumble, and Laia shoves me back to the bed, something that is both irritating and intriguing at once. “Shut it, you,” she growls at me, eyes flashing.
My armor creaks as I shift from foot to foot, still staring, which is when I realize that I have not thought this through at all. Because no one in her right mind would wear armor to seduce the person she’s been pining after for months.
I meet his pale green eyes with a plea in my own, begging him to understand, to not make me any more embarrassed than I already am.
I can’t just come out and say why I’m here. I’ve been horrible to Harper. Avoiding him, ignoring him, barking orders at him, never offering him a word of kindness or gratitude. What if he doesn’t feel anything for me anymore? What if he has moved on?
“I’m here because it’s been months since you kissed me, but I think about that moment so often it feels like it happened yesterday,” I say. “And because when I saw you go down in the battle, I thought I’d—I’d tear apart the world if anything happened to you.
In his hands, I am beautiful, sacred, beloved. Beneath his lips, I am undone.
“I have learned to love you these past few weeks, Laia.” She says it casually, as if it is not extraordinary to gift someone with love.
And you cannot make me stop loving you, Elias Veturius. Not when I know that somewhere in there, you feel the same.” I grab his cloak, rise up on my tiptoes, and kiss him. Hard. Angry and bruising. His nose is cold from the wind, but his lips are soft and deliciously warm. Kiss me back, you dolt, I think, and he does, but far too carefully, his desire caged. It drives me mad.
“Elias,” he says after a moment, the slightest bit of warmth entering those cold gray eyes. “From you I prefer Elias.”
When she screamed my name, I had not a whisper of hesitation. It doesn’t matter that I said I wouldn’t help. It doesn’t matter that I need to interrogate Maro to figure out what the hells he’s doing with the ghosts. When she called out, all that mattered was her.
She didn’t run. Of course she didn’t.
He is lost, Soul Catcher. His grief has taken him.
Training while suffering cramps was a special sort of hell.
“Good morning, sister.” Livia comes down the hallway, her guards behind her. And there’s nowhere to throw the damned tea. The only thing to do is drink it as fast as possible, but of course, it’s bleeding hot, and I nearly scald my face trying to get it down.
“Diladhardha means ‘to know the heart of pain,’” Mamie says. “We seek truth, Laia. And when we find it, we must approach it with empathy. We must understand the creatures, fey or human, who populate our tales. Respect them. Love them, despite the villainous things they do. We must see them. Else how will our stories echo in the hearts of those who hear them? How will the stories survive beyond one telling?”
“Sechei and Diladhardha are the first steps to hunting a story. When you have attained them, then a story might be coaxed from the shadows. I have heard many tales of the Nightbringer. But none that will allow me to understand him or love him or respect him. I know him only as a creature of great evil. I fear loving him. I fear respecting him. I fear if I do, I will lose myself.” “Such stories are dragons drawn from a deep well in a dark place,” I murmur.
I must break through to him. But how? I speak to Death itself. I am an ant, waving my feelers, attempting to get the attention of the universe.
A universe, I realize, trying to understand the world of the ant.
“You are broken. But it is the broken things that are the sharpest. The deadliest. It is the broken things that are the most unexpected, and the most underestimated.”
Are there people in the world who still experience happiness? Enjoy it, I want to tell those people. Enjoy it, because soon it might all be gone.
Elias shifts closer, and his arm comes around me. He might as well have transformed into a talking rabbit, I am so surprised.
In that moment, I wanted to transform. To scream at her that I was beloved, once, but that all who loved me were gone. That her kind had not just stolen my people, but my name.
Husani offered me the love of a mother: fierce where Mauth was sober, pure where Mauth was calculated.
It is one of the talents of humans to surprise, even after millennia of knowing their kind.
