A Fire Endless (Elements of Cadence, #2)

by Rebecca Ross

More whispers laced through the court. Remarks and exclamations, punctures of delight. Kae surmised that half of the wind spirits—the ones who made up the king’s court—were in favor of Bane’s cruelty. It would be entertaining to watch this unfold on their routes. But the ones who were quiet . . . Kae wondered if they were as weary of this as she was. Of watching Bane give the earth and the water and the fire commands that were utter nonsense. Of making humankind suffer for his entertainment.

Two of her wings. The shade of sunset melting into night. The shade that had been hers and hers alone. Broken, stolen. Dangling in the northern king’s hands. He laughed at the expression on her face.

But the more Jack had relived that agonizing exchange, the more he realized that Adaira must also have wanted to appear as nonthreatening as she could in the west. And Jack was a threat in two ways: as a bard, and as the illegitimate son of the Breccan who had given her away to the Tamerlaines decades earlier.

Jack didn’t know how to explain it. He didn’t know how to give his grief a shape, a name, because he had been doing just fine the past month, letting his pain simmer beneath the surface. He slept, he ate, he worked the croft. And yet there was no joy for him in these occupations. He was simply taking up air, and he knew it and he hated it.

Adaira had called music his first love, and now it was stirring again inside him, like a flower blooming beneath frost. He had known it would return to him eventually, but he had predicted that he would have to reach the point where not making music had become unbearable before he surrendered. Then he would have no choice but to crack open his own stubborn bones to find the music there, gleaming in his marrow.

“If I am weak for wanting you, then let me embrace that weakness and make it my strength,” he said, his gaze fixed on the west. “And if you must haunt me, then let me haunt you in return.”

The pillars were hewn from wood and carved to resemble mighty rowan trees. Their branches formed an intricate arbor over the highest point of the ceiling, and chains of red gemstones and iron chandeliers dripped from them. Hundreds of candles burned from above, their wax melting into stalactites. The stone floor was polished so fine that Adaira could see her reflection in it. The windows, arched along the walls, were made of mullioned glass patterned to mimic the Orenna flower—four red petals dusted with gold. Adaira could only wonder how the sunlight would look burning brightly through such glass.

She had loved him enough to let him go. And yet she did not feel stronger for it. Not when she realized her decision had been fueled by fear.

And Adaira, who had been crushed by her first love and still carried deep wounds from it, hadn’t been able to see Jack being happy with her. Not if the price was giving up the essence of who he was. Eventually, he would want to leave. He would leave her, as all the people she loved inevitably did.

He took one of the jewels between his gloved fingertips, holding it up to the light before setting it on her palm. Adaira studied it, realizing the jewel was similar to the gemstones she had worn in her hair at the thanes’ dinner. The same jewels Innes had been wearing in hers. “Whose blood was in my hair last night?”

The fire spirits were the only ones he had not encountered face-to-face yet. Last month he had called to the sea, to the earth, to the air. But not the spirits of fire. Jack had discovered by talking with the other spirits that fire was the lowest in their hierarchy. Fire resided beneath the great power of air, beneath the solid weight of earth, beneath the strength of the sea. The fire spirits were considered the least of the folk, and Jack didn’t know why something so vital had so lowly a standing.

How had a spirit of the northern wind grown so powerful? Who or what had crowned Bane, making him king of all others?

Unite the clans. Discover the way to dethrone tyrannical Bane. All simple tasks, Jack thought, becoming almost hysterical as their implausibility sunk in.

She had been suppressing these tears for weeks, for years, and they came fast and furious now, the sound of a heart that had broken. Jack quietly bore witness to his mother’s pain, to the sacrifices she had made, to the weight she carried, alone, as a woman who loved a man she could never claim.

She didn’t know what to say. It was too much to think about, this notion of dividing all her responsibilities into slices and giving them away.

But when it comes to endings . . . well, they can take many shapes, can’t they?

But such anger would only rot her from within, reducing her to smoldering ashes, because the truth was that Lorna and Alastair were both gone, buried beneath eastern loam. Being furious at their deceit did nothing to them but everything to her, and anger would wear her down into dust. Adaira wanted to avoid that fate. She didn’t want to let something that had been good in her life turn sour.

real, good advice

She often thought of them as capricious in nature, fickle as a summer storm on the isle, as neither good nor bad but somewhere in between. Blowing whichever way pleased them most. She had never imagined that something so fierce and clawed and cold and infinite as the northern wind could come to love something soft and gentle and mortal.

Ice and fire, brought together as one. Sisters divided, united once more. Washed with salt and laden with blood—all united will satisfy the debt you owe.”

“I’m not from these parts. Do enlighten me, Thief.” The man smiled, his scar puckering his cheek. “There are many ways to enter these prisons, Mad Thief. But there are only two ways out. The first? You die of the cold and the damp. The second? You face the culling.”

“Cora.” Jack’s stomach wound into a cold knot, listening to the way Rab spoke her western name. How he drew it out. It made Jack want to fill Rab’s mouth with dirt. To slice his tongue into a serpent’s fork. To crack every tooth from his gums and watch him swallow the fragments.

She watched the man kneel before her. She watched him lay a hand over his chest, over his heart. A hand that was pale and elegant. Adaira drew a sharp breath. She would know his hands, his posture, his body, anywhere. All those times she had watched him play his harp. All those hours he had walked shoulder to shoulder with her. When he had lain with her, skin to skin, in the dark. Jack.

Jack had never seen her cry. He had never heard such an unearthly sound wrenched from her chest, and gooseflesh rippled over him as he listened. It froze the marrow in his bones as he felt her pain, her grief. He knew in that moment she had been holding this in for days, for weeks. This emotion that she had quietly buried in a castle surrounded by strangers.

“That this year and a day still belongs to us,” he said. “We still have autumn, winter, and spring. And nothing—no spirits, no lies, no schemes, no culling—can come between us. I am first yours, as you are first mine. Before all others. But if we are going to make this work, we need to be together. We can take our time to become what we want to be. We can take it day by day if you’d like me to remain at your side.”

“I’ve thought about this every night since you left me,” he whispered as he kissed her knees, the inner warmth of her thighs. She gasped when he tasted her. The sound went through him like lightning, and Jack savored the moment. It was simply him and her in the darkness. There was nothing else beyond the door and the walls; there was nothing else save for her and the fire she stirred in his blood and the ancient vows they had spoken beside a thistle patch beneath a stormy sky. The choice they had made to bind themselves together. There was nothing but the way she said his name, both a prayer and a plea, and he answered her without a single word.

palliasse,

How did something timeless fall in love with something subject to time?

bracken,

red sorrel,

g...

She stared at them, knowing that whatever rested within these letters was going to change everything. She could sense it, like she could taste the thunderstorm in the air, still hours away. Like a shock of electricity, as if she had raked her hands through freshly spun wool and then touched the hilt of a sword.

Until this moment, Jack had thought it was Bane who created the hierarchy, for no other reason than to keep certain spirits low and beneath him. To seal their mouths, silencing their voices. Controlling what they could do and say, and how much power they wielded. But it hadn’t been inspired by Bane at all. The hierarchy had been made by Iagan’s music.

He would have to move slowly, carefully. He didn’t need to treat this night as the last time they would ever see each other and speak, even though it very well could be. Jack needed to be confident that he would sit at a table with Niall time and time again, maybe in the west, maybe in the east. Maybe in a little cottage on a hill, at Mirin’s table. Surrounded by the ones he loved most.

And I would love nothing more than to bore you with mainland stories day after day and sing for you until your guilt sheds like old skin and you choose the life you want, not the one you think you deserve.”

“You and I have faced many things alone,” Jack murmured. “Between the mainland and the isle, the east and the west, we’ve carried our troubles in solitude. As if it were weakness to share one’s burdens with another. But I am with you now. I am yours, and I want you to lay your burdens down on me, Adaira.”

She had not known her place then. But she would carve it into stone now. She would find it in the stars when the clouds broke. She would trace it in the lines on Jack’s palms. In the cold echo of his scar. In the taste of his mouth.

He began to weep. Bowed over the stone, Torin stopped crushing the remedy. The sobs tore through him, emerging from that deep, lonely cavern in his chest. The broken place he had hidden for years, fearful of acknowledging the damage that dwelled in him. But it was there, and he felt its jagged fragments.

Come into the darkness, come into the deep with me. He wanted to find that edge with her, the edge she had spoken of, when one thing becomes another. When the superfluous at last fades away, leaving behind nothing but salt and bones and blood and breath, the only elements that matter. The edge where the very essence of each of them was found.

“You don’t know what you do to me,” he whispered. “By you alone I could be undone.”

“But I cannot let you go without telling you that I was proud to call you mine then,” Niall whispered, “even if only your mother and the spirits could stand witness. And I am proud to call you mine now.”

Frae had always wanted to know what magic felt like. She imagined she had grasped it in her hands sometimes, when she harvested wildflowers from the valleys or drank from one of the trickling pools. When she looked up at the stars on a moonless night. But now she knew. She felt the magic, gentle and soft, when she took Mirin’s hand and grinned.

“I may not be able to play a harp again, or sing for the clan,” he said. “But I have found that this is my song. This is my music.” And he framed her face in his hands. “Months ago, I told you that I was a verse inspired by your chorus. I thought I knew what those words meant then, but now I fully understand the depth and the breadth of them. I want to write a ballad with you, not in notes but in our choices, in the simplicity and routine of our life together. In waking up at your side every sunrise and falling asleep entwined with you every sunset. In kneeling beside you in the kail yard and leading a clan and overseeing trade and eating at our parents’ tables. In making mistakes, because I know that I’ll make them, and then restitution, because I’m better than I once ever hoped to be when I’m with you.”