19

the night of ordinary dreams

TEN YEARS EARLIER

Serenity envelopes me in its loving embrace, as it always does in these secret moments when I like to pretend I can fly.

Arms spread like the wings of a white eagle, the breeze of night cascades over me. The breeze is strong enough up here on the tower to fool me—just for those brief, fleeting moments—that there’s enough lift under my arms to carry me.

It never does.

I stare at the clouded gleam of the moon, but my mind is far away, on Taroh, on father, on the dark one who stole my heart.

Is there a word for this? More than troubled, less than mind-loss. To be submerged in the woes of life, threaded together from all angles like spiders working together to create the most complex web ever weaved—and I am stuck in the centre of it.

Perhaps I will stumble across that word one day in scripture, just as I stumbled out of the High Court’s celebrations some moments ago.

My kicked-off sandals lay somewhere behind me on the tower roof. The skirt of my slip is torn and muddied, a red spill stains down my front, blood or wine, I don’t know.

I escaped the festivities with nothing but fatigue.

The music became too loud, the flutes speared me with their wretched pitches, the cellos thrummed in my bones, the calls and songs and shouts of the party rattled my brain in my head.

And I had to flee.

I snuck away from father on the dais, left him to his sliming of Lord Braxis, and came where few will follow.

The place I might like to fall.

The moon powers the winds higher off the ground. My lashes flutter in the brush of it over my prickled flesh. Strands of chestnut hair flow in the breeze, they frizz and fall from my braids, but I keep my arms splayed like wings.

That’s when he comes for me.

I expected he might.

But to hear him, his soft, gravelled voice from the archway some distance behind me, is to deflate me.

“Wishing you could fly?”

The gleam of the moon glares at me as it creeps out from behind wispy clouds.

I shut my eyes on the light; now, I am submerged in dark.

In the dark, my troubles find me.

No escape.

‘ I love you ,’ I want to tell him. ‘ But my father won’t let me love you .’

I’m fool enough to part my lips, just a touch, but enough that I fast bite down on my tongue. I almost speak these ugly truths to him, truths that don’t matter when the sun takes over this night, when it kisses the lands I belong to, and vanishes Daxeel from my life.

So instead, I speak a lie, “I’ve never wished such fantasies.”

I build a fortress between my heart and the one who owns it.

The soft sound of his leather boot flattening on the stone comes; he moves closer.

“My curse is to be an ordinary one,” I murmur the confession and the wind steals it away.

But ever the dokkalf, Daxeel’s sharp hearing snares it. “Ordinary?” he echoes the word with another step closer.

I keep my back to him, but slowly, my arms lower to my sides. My shoulders slump and I blink my eyes open to stare at the moonlight. It warns me with its bright glare, warns me that in the true light, my dark one will disappear—and I will stand alone again.

That time comes too quickly. The month of the Fae Eclipse slips from my grasp like it’s nothing more than powdered sand.

“What is ordinary about you?” he asks, closer, a hint of amused doubt in his light tone.

He does not feel the weight of our looming end as I do.

“No dreams,” I say, and why I confess to him, I don’t know. “No ambitions, no goals, no true thirst for adventure.” Or life . “I am ordinary.”

“Not everyone is meant to fly. The greatest lie of life is that those who do not soar, who don’t want to soar, are unexceptional.”

Hands limp at my sides, I feel the kiss of the breeze dance over my fingertips.

My admission comes to easily. “I might like to fall one day.”

A bitter smile snakes onto my lips as I turn my chin.

I look over my shoulder at him. I should be startled at the little distance between us, that he could reach out his hand and ghost his touch down my spine, but all that shows on my face is that plain, bitter smile.

“How human of me,” I whisper.

It is the honeywine that loosens ugly secret truths from my lips. The golden liquid pulses through my veins in place of blood and stirs me dizzy and silly.

It must be.

“Now that is no ordinary thought.”

“But it is.” I turn to face him, my bare feet planted firm on the edge of the roof, a free-fall death drop at my back. My head tilts to the side. “If I was human and in that world all my life, I wonder the path that would’ve grown before me.”

A frown touches his brow. “Why wonder such things?”

“It teaches me—about me. I think, sometimes, I would have held a lame career. Worked at something meaningless. I would have married. Had children. Not because I wanted those things…”

“Then why?”

“It’s the other way around. Why not? It’s so easy for them to be ordinary. Here, it’s a great shame.”

Daxeel’s smile is shrouded in shadows. “And what would be ordinary for you in this realm?” He reaches out for me, offers his hand. I take it. “What shames do you carry for your ambitions?”

“To keep dancing,” I say as I step off the roof’s edge. “To have a scripture room of my own, to keep animals… to have a husband who loves me. To have friends. Ordinary—but to me, it’s everything and I can’t understand why anyone would want more than that.”

Daxeel draws me into him. His chin rests on my head as his arms come around me.

He holds me, firm. “You want a husband who loves you and you think it simple. But love is no ordinary thing.”

I melt into him.

“You,” he mumbles into my wind-swept hair, “are anything but ordinary.”

For a moment, I believe him.