7. Adair

Chapter 7

Adair

The bond between Rain and the assassin—Kit Emrys, an alias if ever I'd heard one; wasn't it a name from a children's story?—fluctuated wildly during dinner. The base remained that warm plum that I knew was an abiding, familial sort of love. But there was orange, yellow, and bright hot red—shock, fear, and anger—in pulses as the meal passed.

Rain was surprised to see him, I realized. He hadn't known the man would be there. Perhaps hadn't even known he worked for Huxley Dawnchaser to begin with.

Oberon had a tiny, almost insignificant thread linking him to the man as well. Not white, like I was first expecting with dread, but a spindly little yellow thing that came and went, indicating that it was largely irrelevant to both men. Oberon was afraid of him. Not a surprise. He must know the name from somewhere, given how he'd shown actual emotion over the introduction.

Dawnchaser had quite enjoyed that, all of his threads pulsing with power and emotion. The man was...well, overwhelming would be a kind way of putting it .

It was strange, seeing them all together at one table. Oberon with his mass of slowly paling dark gray threads, shot through with the occasional angry red. Rain with his silver, broken up mostly by heavy familial plum. And Dawnchaser, like a Technicolor rainbow, constantly moving, some threads even changing color as I watched.

I could never work for him, I realized as I looked on.

I enjoyed trying to suss out what a color or thread meant, or even what a set of threads meant, but this was too much. Dawnchaser himself was sitting there eating a beautiful berry tart, and some dozen of his threads turned reddish as I watched. He was becoming angry with a dozen people while chewing. No one was speaking. None of the people he was angry with were present in the room. He was just angry with them.

No, that life wasn't for me.

There was a stabbing pain in my head, and I considered the bottle of painkillers back in my room. I'd asked the housekeeper to pick them up for me last week, assuming that being around so many important people was going to be hard on me. I hadn't been wrong, but in this moment, I couldn't have taken one anyway. Oberon wouldn't care, and Titania might be concerned—Rain too, from what I'd seen of him—but Huxley was the sticking point. I couldn't show weakness in front of him. It seemed silly, but I was sure it was true.

So instead of thinking about asking the server to get me one, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and steadied myself. I'd lived with pain before and I could do it now.

Sometimes, when I had a few moments to myself, I could unfocus my eyes and see not the world around me, but only the threads. I wondered if that was how Rhodri saw the world. A series of interconnected lines more than the actuality of people and objects. I couldn't have hoped to do that exercise in this room, with these three ridiculously powerful people, but there was something similar in the effect of simply sitting in the room with them.

When I'd done it before in Amalion City, I'd found that the city, overall, was made up of a lot of gray and red. I didn't know if that was because of Oberon, or if it was something "normal," but for the first time, I wondered just how much the head of a family affected the people around them. Their entire land. Was all of Dawnchaser lands this same riot of messy emotions? All of Moonstriker the same serene silver shot through with pockets of love and family?

There were always different things, of course. A single strand of fuchsia love in the middle of a black mass of misery could happen, but it was about patterns, overall. Gloombringer, it seemed, did indeed bring gloom. The dark gray of disdain colored everything around them.

After the tart, when the last plate had been removed, I excused myself from the table, making my escape to the garden. I usually walked through the hedges in the evening, but that night, I needed it more than ever. Needed to escape the stifling room full of so many threads that I worried it might burst.

How was I going to get through the next week for the summit?

My eyes hurt, and my head was starting to ache constantly. I took a quick detour to my room and swallowed one of the painkillers dry, now that I was alone, then went down to walk. Eventually the building pain was too distracting, so I sat on one of the garden benches and reached up to rub at my temples. Finally, I gave up and covered my eyes with my fingers. It was too fucking much.

The footsteps that I heard a moment later coming toward me were soft but not making any attempt at stealth. So that meant it wasn't the Gloombringer himself, who was always heavy-footed, or Dawnchaser's assassin, whom I suspected I'd never hear coming. I blinked a few times and didn't even need to look up to know who it was.

Silver, everywhere.

"Lord Moonstriker," I said with a sigh. A tired sigh, not a disgusted sigh or a schoolboy-in-love sigh. Probably. Not that I was in love with him. I didn't know him.

Except that I did know him.

Rhodri had always said that the sum of a person's relationships was the sum of the person, and over the years, I'd come to find that to be true. A person didn't have to have a lot of relationships to be someone special, just good ones. A person with three strands could be a better person than a person with three thousand, if the sum of those three was the plum-green-fuchsia of friendship and love.

And the sum of Rain Moonstriker was silver-plum. Both good colors. Happy colors. Colors that meant he was well-loved and loved those people in return. He even had a plum thread tying him to one of the two people who had accompanied him, the one he'd introduced as Tempest. She didn't look related to him, with dark hair rather than Moonstriker white or blonde. So likely, he was even capable of loving someone who wasn't related to him as though they were family. Odd.

I did look up at him, and his expression when he laid eyes on me was worry, but something about it changed as he looked at me. Softened. Blue-purple shot through the bond between us.

Concern. Concern for me?

"This is a lot, isn't it? You're used to being around the same people every day. Even Amalion City is the same city every day, even if things inside it change regularly. But this is...it's a lot to deal with, all at once, and you can't just turn it off." He sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about, and I couldn't help but wonder what his song did for him. If it was as overwhelming as mine was for me some days.

I gave another sigh, this one pure exhaustion. "It is a lot, yes. I wish I were any good at art and could show people what I see. It doesn't feel like much in the moment, but by the end of the day it hurts sometimes. Besides, we're barely at the end of the first day, and the Sunrunner isn't even here yet."

What in the hells was I going to do with all four of them? I could barely handle what I was already dealing with.

Maybe it was all a laughable mistake, everyone wanting to give me ridiculous amounts of money to hire me away from the Gloombringer. I could barely even sit in a room and have dinner with three powerful people, and I suspected that by the time I went to bed for the night, my headache was going to be a full-on migraine. I hadn't gotten one of those in years, not since my song had settled and I'd gotten used to it.

Before that, in my teens, the migraines had been terrible. Worse, they'd given me strange outlines in my vision like halos around people and objects, which interfered with being able to see the threads. So maybe I was going to be entirely useless to everyone.

Maybe the impressive power everyone had been seeking me out for since I was a kid, so rare, so in demand, was actually secretly awful and not going to do anyone any good when I was around more than one important person.

Hells, look at the situation with Oberon. I couldn't figure out why his threads were going white. Couldn't make him listen to me and take it seriously. What good was I doing there? The Gloombringer's right hand, and I couldn't save him. Couldn't make him save himself.

"Here," Rain said, his voice soft and smooth, like fucking black velvet, and he pulled himself onto the bench, taking my shoulders in his hands and turning our bodies until he was behind me. As lovely as he was, the relief of not looking directly at him was enormous in the moment.

He kneaded his fingers into my shoulders for a while, then up my neck, and I almost moaned aloud at the sensation. It was fucking incredible. No one had ever touched me like that in my life—people rarely touched in Gloombringer lands—and it was...clearly, I needed to find a masseuse. It was a professional touch, clinical and not sensual or lingering at all, but my cock was reacting anyway, because I hadn't been touched by anyone in so long.

"Just tell me to keep my hands to myself if you want me to stop," he said, sounding a little sheepish. "But you looked like you could use some help."

"Thank you," I said, and the words almost did come out as a moan, because the release of pressure was incredible. It was bringing literal tears to my eyes.

"Does it help if you close your eyes? That doesn't really work for me, but as I understand it, your ability is more visual."

"It—it does," I agreed. "But I can hardly go around closing my eyes while eating with people the Gloombringer is going to want me to report on. What if I missed something important?"

He sighed at that, and I felt his breath ghost over the back of my neck. "Fair, I suppose. But you can't be solely responsible for the information he gets on this situation. And you can't be responsible for the decisions he makes at all. Tempest can tell me the Gloombringer didn't recently add listening devices to the rooms he gave us, but she can't be responsible for whether they've been there since before she can see."

I almost laughed at the notion but shook my head. "He didn't. There are none. He's too...he'd never think of doing something like that."

"That was my impression as well, so I didn't bother looking into it further when Tempest said we were in the clear. If that turned out to be incorrect, it would be my fault for accepting that conclusion, though." He worked his way up my scalp, running his fingers through my hair and somehow hitting pockets of tension I hadn't even known existed on my body. I didn't even know there were muscles on the back of your head. The man was fucking magical. "That was my call to make. Because this whole trip is my responsibility. Not hers. Like the summit is Oberon's and not yours. It's not like he's going to give you credit for making peace if the summit works."

I had to hold back laughter at the very notion. Clearly, he understood Oberon very well. I didn't know where he'd gotten his information, but whoever had given it to him was good at their job.

"He's my brother," he said after a moment, without stopping the motion of his perfect, delicious hands. "I saw you heading out here and I...I followed you. I wanted to tell you that he's my brother. I had no idea he was going to be here. No idea what he was doing for a living until tonight. I'll understand if you need to tell the Gloombringer, but I promise you, it's not any plot I'm a part of."

And somehow, without even looking at the thread between us, I believed him. I never did that.

Just to be sure I wasn't losing my mind, I glanced down at the thread. Pink.

Not just from my end. From him as well.

Pink.

I tried to shake it off. Pink wasn't a real color, I told myself.

Of course it's a real color , Rhodri corrected. It's just not a finished color. It's a transition color .

Because no relationship ever settled into pink permanently. Pink was...romantic interest. Attraction. Infatuation. It could settle into the fuchsia of romantic love, the plum of familial love, or rather more often, the crimson of hatred.

The purple from before, the sexual interest, had been bad enough.

But there I was, supposed to be working to secure Gloombringer interests in a peace summit, and feeling all pink and gooey for one of the people Oberon was supposed to be negotiating with.

The man was rubbing my temples, for fuck's sake. He'd gone out of his way to find me and reassure me he wasn't plotting murder, when I'd already figured that out just from observing him with the duelist at dinner.

His brother, he'd said. One of Delta Moonstriker's other children, or a half brother from the other parent? Emrys had that white hair that seemed to be common in the Moonstriker family, but it also seemed strange that Delta Moonstriker would ever allow any of her children to run off and become a duelist, let alone one working for Huxley Dawnchaser.

It was possible it was a plot by her without Rain's knowledge, but then why send Rain to negotiate on the family's behalf? Perhaps precisely because he didn't know.

Either way, though, my read on Rain wasn't wrong. And Kit Emrys might be important—he had more threads than most people ever had in their lifetimes, and most of them weren't even the dangling threads of people he'd killed. But he wasn't going to be a head of family, and Rain was.

"I believe you," I told him. "And to be quite frank, I don't think it's a good idea to tell Oberon. He'll jump to the conclusion that the lot of you are conspiring against him. He's already afraid of your brother. I suppose he must have a reputation as a duelist. Oberon will assume the Moonstriker and the Dawnchaser are trying to kill him if I tell him."

"They might be," Rain admitted, voice quiet. Clearly, he didn't want to believe the idea any more than I did. "I'm not planning anyone's death, but I can't make promises like that on behalf of anyone else."

I rolled my neck, and it was loose and relaxed in a way it never was. The man was incredible with his hands. I turned on the bench to look at him, and he was so fucking earnest.

"I wouldn't expect you to make promises like that for anyone but yourself, and if you tried, I'd say you were either lying or hopelessly naive." His smile at that was self-deprecating, and I wondered if the idea hit closer to home than he'd like. He was very young, so naiveté couldn't be far behind him, if at all. "But I do appreciate you saying it for yourself. I'm not planning anyone's death either, for the record. I want to stop as many deaths as I can. That's always been my goal. "

"Then hopefully, assuming that's also the goal of the Gloombringer, even if not for the same reasons as yours, I think we'll be able to figure things out. Dawnchaser...well, that remains to be seen, I suppose."

I sighed. "To say nothing of the Sunrunner."

"Let's not assume anything about them until they show up. Or don't show up." He leaned in, and for a moment, I thought he would kiss me. I wasn't even sure if I'd stop him. If I wanted to stop him.

Instead, though, he picked up my hand where it lay between us, turned it over, and kissed my knuckles like I was the ingenue in an old movie or a storybook.

And then he stood and left me alone to my own thoughts. Somehow, I wanted both more and less from him. I wanted him to overwhelm me. To press me against a wall and demand a kiss. At the same time, I wanted him to leave me to my simple, bland, dark gray existence. I didn't want him to exist as a reminder that silver and plum was an option at all.

I'd been...if not happy, then mostly satisfied with my dark gray. Now, I didn't think I'd ever be able to get back to satisfied with my life as it had been.

When I finally made my way back to my room, it wasn't empty.

A small man in all black who resembled nothing so much as a rat was there on my bed, waiting for me, tied to me with a silvery-gray strand. I wondered if Ben had always looked like a rat, with his brushy little mustache and beady red-brown eyes, or if years of sharing a song with a tigereye, a song that allowed him to literally turn into a rat, had changed his very nature .

"Boss," he said, mustache twitching eagerly. He looked almost like he wanted to smile, and Ben Wallace never smiled.

I raised a brow. "You sound cheerful. Find something?"

He...he grinned. It was the strangest thing I'd seen in my life, almost more a feral baring of teeth than a smile, but he was clearly pleased. "I found her. Imri Sagara."

My heart leaped at the idea. I'd been trying to find this woman for almost ten years, but it had seemed as though she'd walked out of court when Oberon had broken off their relationship and disappeared into the ether. Her name hadn't shown up in any news, court paperwork, deeds, or literally anything I had the power to access since her disappearance. "That's great news. Where is she?"

His little mustache twitched again, and it might have been a frown. He pulled up his phone and flipped the screen so I could see. A gravestone. Imri Sagara. The end date was this year. She'd been dead less than four months.

Fuck. Fuck me entirely. I swiped a hand down my face and sat heavily on the edge of my bed. "Why is this good news, Ben?"

"Didn't you see?" He scooted closer to me, shoving the phone up to my face.

Imri Sagara.

Two dates about fifty years apart.

Beloved mother.

Mother .

Eyes wide, I turned to stare at him.

"Twenty-one," Ben told me. "The boy is twenty-one."

Imri and Oberon's relationship had ended twenty-one, almost twenty-two years earlier. Once more, my heart beat hard. Twenty-one.

Oberon might have a son .

"Destitute now," Ben added. "They were living in her family's old farmhouse in her mother's maiden name, but it's falling down. In poor repair. The town wants to knock it down, because it's going to collapse. It's all the way on the other end of Gloombringer lands."

That explained why I hadn't been able to find her. "The other end" of Gloombringer lands wasn't exactly a booming metropolis. It was rural and mostly quite depressed. There were entire towns abandoned in that part of the country. If they were living in a house that had been in someone else's name, that would have meant all my searches for her legal name were pointless.

"What's his name?"

"Aubrey," he said. "Aubrey Sagara. You want me to bring him? I can tell him what's happening. Or offer him a job if you don't want him to know. He'd take a job. He's broke as fuck."

Aubrey Sagara.

Aubrey Gloombringer, maybe.

"Yes," I agreed, not giving a single fuck what Oberon thought of the lack of warning. "Bring him. We don't want to tell him what's going on until we know for sure, but we need to bring him in. Before someone else does."

Before Oberon dies , Rhodri helpfully pointed out.

Yes. While there was still time, we needed to bring Oberon's possible heir home. I could handle a summit at the same time, right? No problem.

No problem at all.