22

Aleana has stayed to her bed for two whole phases now, shadowed by Melantha and Morticia at all times.

It makes for dullness at Hemlock House; halls that seemed so vibrant and full of life, now cold and creaky, like the house itself understands what looms ahead.

I don’t remember the last time I saw Rune or Samick.

Daxeel and I don’t share more than a glance on those occasional moments we pass on the stairs, then he’s gone to speak with the iilra, to strategize with warlords.

Eamon is often gone, too, whether it be with Ridge or to find a way out of the honour duel.

Dare sticks around.

I spend my time with him more than anyone.

He keeps up with our lessons, so after I leave Aleana to her bed rotting early this phase, I head to the roof to meet him.

We climb the lattices for a while before he moves us onto basic dagger handling. I’m better at this now, but I’m no warrior. I have the cuts on my hands to prove it, both healed and fresh.

And forget about swords.

Last time he tried to teach me how to hold it, just hold it, the weight of it toppled me sideways. All the dancing in the worlds, and my muscles aren’t quite enough for the balancing of a sword that’s almost as tall as I stand.

So daggers it is.

I face Dare on the mat, my gaze speared into his hands. I study every twist of his wrist, turn of his forearm, curl of his fingers. I watch the wink of the blade as it flips in the air, then Dare swipes it back into his grip.

I plant my feet, firm.

I mimic.

And a sharp wince cuts through me.

The edge of the blade leaves its mark on the meat of my palm; a crimson line crafted from dotted beads of blood. A small cut, barely there at all, and so I only cringe for a moment before I try again, and again, and again, until I don’t cut myself at all.

By that time, Ridge has followed the song of the blades all the way up to the roof.

I catch a glimmer of movement out the corner of my eye—and turn to see him at the panelled door. He sits himself on the edge of the stacked crates.

As our gazes lock, he gives a warm smile that earns a wave from me. He says nothing, just watches me through the rest of my training.

Even with a visitor, Dare stays as focused as an arrow spearing towards its target. There’s no slacking off around him. A flicker of his dark male side.

He only relents when he shoves me off the side of the roof and I catch myself on the lattice without dropping my dagger.

Time inches into the start of the First Wind when Dare flicks his hand—a gesture to sever the lesson.

I rush over to Ridge at the crates. He is quick to draw out a valerian stalk from the neckline of his brown leather armour.

I plant myself on a crate stacked full of heavy chains and fold my legs before I snatch the stalk and bring it to my lips.

Dare wanders closer, running a damp washcloth over his arms.

“Have you gone to see Bee yet?” I ask.

Ridge lights a second stalk.

“I told you.” A moody severity has Dare in its grip, as it has done all lesson. He throws me a gold gaze that swarms with a warning. “I’ll see her in Licht when she seeks shelter from the darkness.”

My eyes roll to the back of my head. “Then what?”

Ridge frowns through the vapours. He keeps his questions to himself.

Golden eyes thin on me. “I will ensure she repays the gold she stole from me—and torment her some.”

Ridge’s brows shoot up, and so I decide that Eamon didn’t fill him in on the latest.

Eamon was never as committed to gossip as the other litalves. Hybrids…

“How will you torment her?” Ridge asks and offers him the stalk, but Dare just shakes his head slightly. “True torture?”

His rosy mouth twists with doubt. “No.”

A scoff catches in my throat. “If you weren’t such a grouch this phase, I would ask what your aim is.”

He swerves his stare to me.

I shrug. My confusion is betrayed in that gesture and the downturn of my mouth. “If you’re at all interested in her, I don’t recommend scaring her. That’s all I will say.”

But not all I will think.

Daxeel made it his priority to ensure my confidence and security around him back when he loved me purely. He didn’t scare me, torment me, torture me. He fought his own primal instincts, tortured himself in that alone, all to ease me.

So I don’t understand Dare’s methods or his goal. And this vendetta he has on Bee, it’s more than that she stole his gold, it’s more than that she bested him at his own game.

He likes her.

I stand by that observation as firmly as I stand by my own will to live.

Dare sighs and reaches out for the stalk loose between my fingers.

I hand it over, watching the harsh lines of his face soften, like the mood that’s clouded him all phase starts to evaporate before me.

“Bedding,” he decides after a long pause.

My mouth puckers.

I don’t believe that’s all he wants with Bee, that when he’s done tormenting her, he simply aims to have her in his sheets.

But it’s Ridge who asks, “Is that all? So much trouble for mere bedding?”

Dare brings the stalk to his lips. “What more is there?”

I’m unconvinced.

I watch as he inhales long and smooth.

Vapours snakes around his nostrils, cloud his face—but they don’t hide the frown of doubt that creases his brow, nor do they shield the slight flutter of his lashes from my sight.

Dare is also unconvinced.

I suppose he’s uncertain of his own motives, the balance of anger and desire, and which result he’s really chasing.

I leave him to his confusion, and hope Bee makes it out of Dare’s volatile ways alive. I’m short on friends and I have grown a bit fond of her.

I pinch the ember of the stalk, then stow it away in my boot for later.

Dare keeps to the roof as I walk with Ridge down to the lobby.

He and Eamon have a date.

And of course, I cannot go.

Daxeel’s command keeps me confined to Hemlock, and Eamon is headed to the tavern again, another inspection that inches him closer to leaving me behind once my time here is done.

“Eamon says it was your idea,” Ridge says as I stomp down the steps beside him; he descends the stairs with a much more grace. “The bar,” he adds at my bemused look.

“It wasn’t.” The smile playing on my lips is small. “It was my idea to name it after myself,” I add with a sheepish grin, “but not the bar itself. That’s all him.”

Still, I smile something proud and follow him down to the lobby where Eamon waits. And though my instincts push me to join them, the commands of slavery keep my boots planted on the floor, and I can’t leave, not without Daxeel’s permission.

So at the doorway, I just wave them off.

In the front garden of the neighbouring home, Kalice tends to a thorny bush of the dark berry. She only nods her head in greeting, three faerie hounds prowling around her legs in a circle of protection.

Then the door closes on its own accord and isolates me. Just as Daxeel has probably commanded it to.

Before I can start for the stairs, the rapid thumps of boots hit the basement steps. I falter, eyes squinting through the late dimness of the foyer lights and watch for whoever comes up the stairs from the kitchens.

The yellow hair is first. Braided long and thick, like a rope that unravels down a spine. Cat eyes gleam through the duskiness.

Rune rounds on me in the lobby, the hue of his eyes fading into something buttery. No threats to be found in his amused smirk.

His hand rests, relaxed, on the banister and he aims that small smile at me. “I received a letter.”

That’s all he says.

It takes me a moment to stumble into it.

A letter.

‘If you have not enough courage to face the one you want, write a letter to him.’

Words I spoke to Aleana on the ice-floor.

My mouth rounds into a circle. I hesitate before I speak careful words, “Folk write to you? Must be nice.”

His smirk tightens but his eyes remain soft. “What you do for her is generous,” he says as gently as any dark male can manage with accents like sandpaper and barbed wire, and so I think he keeps his voice low to avoid overhearing from anyone who lurks in the shadows of Hemlock. “But you overstep boundaries.”

I slump and my mouth puckers with a pout. “I’m to die anyway, so what does it matter?”

Rune hums something curt. He looks over his shoulder to the short steps he came from, as though he’ll find a lurker there.

But we are alone, so as he turns back to me, he says, “Aleana won’t make it to the close of the Sacrament.”

This truth, I suspected already. I knew it in my heart. But still, to hear it spoken aloud is not unlike being struck with a sword.

“Daxeel will hurt,” Rune adds, low, and steps closer to me. “He, like all of us, knows it’s coming, but it will tear him open and bleed him dry.”

I flinch at the horrible truth of it, the wretchedness of the looming pain to plague him.

“If there was a way for you to save yourself,” Rune adds, “it would be that.”

My brow knits.

I stare at the rug that softens the stairs, but I chew on his words until, “You think I can change my fate?”

I hear Rune’s bitter smirk in his words, “What male wants to lose everything all at once? Use that boundary-less compassion of yours, force yourself into his space and offer the comfort. Love his ugliness as he loves yours. We have at least one week to climb that mountain—one week that you have to change his mind… if it isn’t changed already.”

I run my tongue over my teeth.

Such different advice to what Dare told me.

Suppose they are such different males though. But they both go out of their way to help.

Slumping against the banister, I fold my arms over my chest. “It’s a wonder why his friends encourage this. Shouldn’t you all loathe me?”

If he’s surprised by my insinuation that he’s not the only one to offer me advice on Daxeel, he doesn’t show it. Samick says little to me, nothing about Daxeel, so of course Rune understands it must be Dare who has helped me, or at least tried.

Dare would be the gossipy one between them.

“Loathe,” Rune scoffs, and that alone is a dismissal. “I propose a trade,” he says, and draws in my watchful gaze. “I say nothing about you interfering with Aleana and I. And you,” he says with a flick of his hand, “will ask nothing about what came of it.”

An eyebrow arches, tugs on my face, and his words skitter all around me.

‘What came of it…’

I almost, almost ask.

But that’s not the deal, that’s the opposite of the trade Rune wants from me.

My silence for his.

Help each other—and shut up about it.

He lets those words linger for a moment. An understanding to say nothing, and ask nothing, but to suspect that he will fulfil her wish.

I nod a single gesture, firm.

And that’s all he needs to leave me behind in the lobby.

I watch him go, and when he’s disappeared into the dusk of Hemlock House, I decide I will feel safe with Rune in the Sacrament. I will go to him if I see him, and I will seek safety in our familiarity.

Perhaps we have the young bud of a friendship, as I do with Dare, and maybe as I do with Ridge. And it’s all such a deflating shame, because in just a few phases, all of it will be taken from me, whether I survive or not, I will not have these friendships again.

That sadness is hollow in my chest.

I rush to Aleana’s bedchamber.

I tell her about Rune, about the knock on the door that she should expect later this phase.

Then I help her primp.

Perched on a chair’s whose seat is a velveteen button-tufted cushion, Aleana’s sharp eyes trace my movements in the gloss of the mirror.

I push a stool up beside hers then drop onto it with a soft thud.

I stroke my fingers down the carved wood handle of the hotbrush, triggering the enchantment. As it heats, I use my fingers to comb oils through Aleana’s hair. Its crisp, citrus smell is refreshing, and it perks me awake a little more.

Must be a soothing sensation, because her lashes are quick to flicker shut and her shoulders slump.

The hotbrush glows like embers in a hearth when it’s hot enough. I wipe my oiled hands on a cloth, then move for the polished blackwood handle.

I comb the searing bristles through her hair. Oils soak the strands, seal them from the enchanted brush. Stops her hair from roasting on her head, like a cooked bird in the hotbox.

Aleana turns her cheek to me.

She reaches down to the bottom drawer of the vanity table, fingers it open, then fishes around in its barely-open darkness.

I’m just about to abandon her smoothing locks to help her fight this drawer when the thick glass knocks on wood.

I look down as she pulls out a bottle of half-drunk honeywine.

The look I give her is plain at first. Then the guilty smile flushes her, and all I can do to bite down on my cheeks.

Figures.

Of all the things she can’t have and shouldn’t do, she has honeywine stashed away in her bedchamber, she has tonics to keep her up and going, she has trips to the human lands to find adventure.

And I would likely be the same in this subtle defiance if I was sickly. So I have no cross words for her.

Aleana tugs the cork out of the bottle.

The swig she guzzles is a generous one.

I watch her throat bob before she’s had enough.

The bottle pops from her lips with a sigh. She settles it on her lap where she nurses it.

I say, soft. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

She shakes her head.

“If you’ve changed your mind—”

“I want this.”

I draw my lips inwards for a moment, bite down on them, before I release with a sigh. “Ok.”

I run the brush down her oiled hair. The pieces are brittle still, but smoother, and it can’t take much more heat.

I swap the brush for the cup of face powder.

Her gaze traces my every move in the reflection of the vanity mirror. Silent, she watches as I pluck the thin powder brush from the pot.

I start on the glistened spots of her face. The soft bristles of the brush sweep over her fine nose, then flick across the point of her chin.

I falter.

Hesitation prickles through my hand, and I pause, the brush hovering near her face, but not quite touching.

I watch a fresh shine streak down her cheek.

A tear.

It falls as softly as the silence embraces us.

“What?” I whisper. “What is it?”

An icy trickle rains through me.

Finally, she tugs her gaze from the mirror and looks at me dead on.

Her pale lips crack into a flattened line. “I’m afraid.”

I almost think she means of bedding, of Rune, of regrets—

Until she adds, “Of dying.”

The wisp of a breath is tugged out of me.

I cut my gaze down.

“But not the way others think I am,” she says. “I’m afraid that if I leave this world too soon,” she pauses, and her voice trembles, it thins and threatens to break, “just days too soon, it will all fall apart. Daxeel is so close to pursuing his true wants.”

I swallow back a sudden thickness in my throat.

A tear rolls down my cheek, it finds a home in the curve of my jaw.

I force my stare to lift.

A sheath of dampness clings to my lashes. It warps my view of her, a milky film stretched over her inky hair; the paleness of her diamond eyes that look whitish now; smooths her ashy complexion into something muted.

I blink and the film is banished.

Diamonds glint at me. “He convinced himself over the years that his only draw to you is the evate bond. That without it, he will not love you. That belief is the only thing that kept him sane in your absence. If I leave…”

I lower the powder brush to my lap.

Quiet, I only watch her.

I let her speak her fears to me. And unlike the others around her, the ones who assure her that all will be alright, the ones who lie, I just weep silently.

“I’m afraid of what this will do to them.” Her shoulders sag with a deflating sigh. “Daxeel will hold onto all things ugly. After you shamed him, he was… ruthless. He drank in Kithe constantly. He got into all sorts of violence, killed males in street fights, he barely spoke to anyone, if at all.” She swallows, thick. “The iilra came and gave him purpose. And the others…”

Her loosened breath trembles.

She flexes her frail hands on her lap and looks down at them.

“Samick is always so cold. But he will feel the loss. It’s Dare I’m most worried about.”

The surprise flutters my lashes.

A frown turns down my mouth. “Not Rune?”

Not Caius. Not Eamon.

Dare.

Her smile is pained. She shakes her head ever so slowly, so frail. “Rune’s purpose is his career. He will hold onto that through the grief. Dare… He feels strongly. Like a litalf, maybe.” Her glance at me is fleeting. “Maybe more. Everything in him is amplified. After the Sacrament, after that purpose has gone, then what?”

I have no answer beyond the invasion. The extermination of the human lands.

I don’t offer it up as an answer because, now that I think on it, Dare never seems all that bloodthirsty about it. He simply believes it’s right. But his hunger for the destruction isn’t anything I’ve paid mind to. I’ve noticed more that he sketches suns onto his hand, that he seems so faraway in his mind, forever searching but never finding.

“I worry most of all for you,” she whispers.

My lashes shut on fresh tears.

I turn my cheek to her horrible confessions. Ugly truths that I wish we didn’t speak.

It’s not my grief she’s concerned about. It’s how the grief in others will affect me. Target me. Ruin me.

Kill me.

“I…” My words fail before they have even really begun.

How does one delicately ask their soul sister not to die?

How does say I am afraid for you without scaring her?

It’s impossible—this whole conversation is impossible.

“We all end up in the same place.” Those are the words I find, weak and drifting like a faint breeze. “I will find you there, sister. Whether soon, or centuries from now.” I look up at her. Wet lashes fringe my sight. “We will all find one another again.”

“I can hardly wait.” Her smile is so bitter, face tight. “That’s horrid, isn’t it? I only hold on for them. But I look forward to it. The moment I can finally let go of the tether I cling to.”

The chair creaks.

She shifts, reaches out for me. Her hand is a cold bite on mine.

Her grip firms, her gaze levelling with mine. “I’m grateful. If I hadn’t held on through these months, I wouldn’t have been blessed in the ways I have. You came into my life—and you opened up so much. Doors and windows and feelings. I have been freer with you than ever before.”

My gaze lands on our clasped hands.

I shake my head, a slight answer. “You speak like I gave you some light. Like you should be grateful for me. But Aleana,” I sigh and tighten my hold on hers, “I am the grateful one. To have met you, known you, loved you—it has been my absolute honour.”

My tongue doesn’t prickle.

My throat doesn’t tighten.

It’s no lie.

The sudden rattle of a tray shatters our moment.

I turn my chin to my shoulder just as the knock comes. Tris doesn’t wait to be called in. The door opens for her, and she balances a silver tray in her hands, stacked with sleep teas and biscuits and fruits.

I finish up with Aleana’s preening. A few more strokes of the powder over her face, some rogue to blot along her sharp cheekbones, then colour to paint on her lips, and it’s done.

Tris frowns at me, an unspoken question well out of her role as a slave here, and so I ignore it.

Whatever Aleana decides to tell Tris is her own business.

And I find I am tired of intruding on the business of others.

So I take my leave.

I fill the rest of my Quiet with honeywine in the gardens.

Eamon and Ridge murmur softly to each other on the creaky swing opposite me.

I spare them a glance before I return to watching Kalice over the fence. She sprawls out on a blanket and reads from an old, weathered book I suspect is from the human realm.

Later, I soak away the aches and pains in my muscles (courtesy of Dare kicking my ass in training) in the washtub.

Despite my looming fate, despite the fear that eats at me from the inside, that constant twist and coil of my gut, I’m starting to feel lighter in the routine I’ve developed at Hemlock House.

Every phase, I train with Dare. He doesn’t thaw. Not until the lanterns flash blue with time-turning flames, and we sit to share some fruit. That’s when he polishes the ateralum dagger littered with gold flecks, and he uncoils the razored whip from his forearm. That’s when he switches over to a friend, not an instructor.

I visit Aleana before the lessons.

Sometimes the healer is there, fussing over her, a brewer set up at the desk and concocting all sorts of tonics. Often, Melantha is perched on the edge of the bed just to brush Aleana’s hair. Hair that’s more brittle than ever.

Mostly, Aleana finds sleep.

I’m learning that those tonics are to keep her strength up, enough to power the beats of her heart, even if it is rotting the rest of her insides. But without them, her heart will simply fail—she’s already dead.

All she wants is to make it through to the end of the Sacrament—to see her brothers survive it. And then, as she said it, the time will come to “let go of the tether I cling to.”

Now, she is in her bedchamber, likely with Rune.

Daxeel is gone from the home. I don’t know where. I never do. He’s just gone much of the time.

If he returns, I’ll have to distract him, snare him with my company, maybe a spat, anything to stop him from going to visit Aleana. Anything to avoid him walking in on his sister and Rune.

I shudder to think how that would go.

But out here, in the serene softness of the gardens, Kalice’s nose tucked into the pages of a book, Eamon and Ridge snuggled on the bench across from me, the hounds prowling as quietly as this phase’s air—no one speaks.

No one says a word about the ugly sorrows coiled all around us.

Nothing about Eamon’s impending honour duel; my fate in the Sacrament; Daxeel and I at complete odds; and that Aleana won’t make it to the close of the week—she won’t make it through the next two phases when the second passage of the Sacrament begins.

It’s a lovely time to lie.

And poor time to die.

Those thoughts linger as, some time later, I leave the gardens behind for the washroom tucked away on the sixth floor, the one whose tub is as large as a pond.

I soak. I soak until my fingers wrinkle and my toes prune.

Then some more.

It’s well into the Quiet when I find enough time has passed. Rune has probably left Aleana now, and I might be safe to return to my bed.

I take the staircase to the seventh floor.

Hair wet from the washtub, it drips water down my back and dampens my chemise, and I feel the freshness lighten my steps.

My hand slaps down on the banister. Gripped on, I drag my weight around the landing to the next corridor, where my bedchamber door awaits.

I stumble right into a solid marble chest.

I stagger back a step.

Lifting my chin, I look up at the ocean eyes gleaming from shadows.

My throat tightens.

Daxeel is home. He is here in Hemlock—waiting for me.

The tired lull of his lashes eases me.

If he knew anything about Rune and Aleana, there would be rage. Not fatigue.

I loosen a soft breath.

Daxeel looks down at me.

I stare up at the exhausted lull of his kohled eyes.

He lifts his hand, a slight movement shielded by the dusk of Hemlock and his shadows, but I feel the brush of his touch on my damp arm.

My skin prickles, fast.

Then his hand firms around my wrist.

Gaze locked onto mine, he speaks that one word in a whisper, “Come.”

A command.

That’s all it takes for the muscles to bolt to my bones.

I follow him.