Her expression is too hopeful. I can’t bear to see her disappointed in me. “Yes. But that promise involves you, you know.”
She nods. “Then I’ll do my part, too. It’s the bad luck from the flower you picked last summer. We have to share it evenly—the good and the bad.”
I feel a smile tugging at my face. A painful one. I can’t believe we’re basing our fate on a damn flower, that faraway garden in Etania, that moment when I should have just walked away or said the truth or abandoned my family forever. But I’ll take it. I need it.
“It’s a deal,” I say.
“Never forget it,” she replies, and she kisses me on the cheek, another kind of promise.
* * *
The first order of business, after food, is to get me clean clothes. I think I smell well enough, but I definitely look like I’ve come through seven weeks of campaign. Wrinkled and scuffed, my green uniform’s had the colour sapped by the sun, practically back to the grey I’m usually in. Ali sends the estate servants on a mission to secure me something that might fit. They return with too many fancy suits.
Apparently, the Havis family has high taste in fashion while profiting off wars.
They eventually produce brown pants, a short-sleeved shirt, and a cast-off leather coat from Havis’s brother. “Mountain wear,” they call it, unimpressed.
Which is just perfect as far as I’m concerned.
As I hand over my uniform to be properly washed for once, beginning with the jacket, I realize Ali hasn’t left the room. Her smile is teasing, and I’m honestly not afraid of stripping down in front of her—I’m more afraid of her getting her hands on the metal tags around my neck. They’re still hidden by my undershirt. And they need to stay that way.
I try to stall, but her expression changes, the smirk transforming to a frown.
“You’re rubbing your head again,” she points out.
“Am I?”
I hadn’t even noticed.
“Yes. You’ve hardly stopped since I first saw you.”
“Just a headache.”
She refuses to relent, as usual, reaching up to touch my forehead gently. “You also squint a lot in the light.”
“Because it’s sunny?”
“Please, Athan. You know it’s not normal.”
“Fine,” I admit. “Maybe not.”
“When did the headaches start?”
“I made a stupid move in my plane. Hit my head. They started after that.”
She sucks in air, a sound that makes me a bit weak because it’s so concerned on my behalf. Her hand is still touching me. Warmth across the steady thud of pain. “Headaches and light sensitivity,” she muses. “Any other symptoms? Trouble sleeping?”
I snort. “What’s sleep?”
“Irritability?”
“Ask Cyar.”
She shakes her head, taking her touch away. I miss it already. “It sounds like a concussion.”
“A concussion? I didn’t know you decided to study medicine at your university.”
Her smile is weak, lacking its usual luster. There’s no pride in her voice. “My uncle was a doctor and my aunt was a nurse. My cousin taught me a lot about the body last summer, and clearly it’s going to serve you well, because now I’ve diagnosed you. Why on earth didn’t you see a medic?”
I shrug. I don’t quite know how to tell her that medics hate being interrupted by headaches when they’ve got patients with gangrenous limbs and missing faces. Blinking a lot in the sun is rather low priority. “It wasn’t that bad,” I lie. “I didn’t want to bother them.”
She doesn’t look convinced. “You don’t have any medication for pain?”
“Used up the pills in my kit over a month ago.”
Now she looks horrified. “What have you been doing since then?”
Not sleeping. Hitting my head. Generally waiting for it to disappear on its own.
“Fighting a war,” I say honestly. “Is this ever going away, Doctor?”
“As long as you don’t hurt yourself again,” she instructs firmly. “You need to actually rest, let it heal. All of this stress likely exacerbated it.”
For a split second, I feel relieved, because this means I might still be a great pilot. It wasn’t me struggling in the sky. It was the concussion slowing me down.
Then I want to shoot myself for even thinking that.
Ali closes the few inches of distance between us, her face sad again. “I want you to smile,” she whispers, her hands moving to my chest.
“I want to give that to you,” I reply, losing my breath a bit.
“Perhaps you’re ticklish?”
“Clever. But not at all.”
“How else can I make you laugh?”
“Be yourself.”
“Perhaps like this?”
She’s impressively fast. She reaches to steal my metal tags and it’s only instinctive reflex that gives me the advantage. I hold her by the wrist, the chain in her hands, and she grins up at me, eyes alight.
“Come on,” she begs. “Let me try them on.”
“These are air force property,” I remind her, trying to grin, to not sound entirely panicked.
I shove them beneath my shirt again.
“So are you,” she teases. “Am I not allowed to hold you?”
The scent of her, this close, is like every late-night fantasy brought to perfect life. Her lips—and her question—lure all kinds of thoughts, inviting me to act on them, demanding it even, but I can’t, not until I’ve told her the truth. Not until she knows the person she’s kissing.
I wish my headaches were the worst secret I held.
“Maybe after I’m wearing something clean?” I suggest.
She relents, stepping back and heading for the door. She tosses me a last smile. “As long as you promise, Athan Erelis.”
“I swear it.”
As soon as she’s gone, I throw on the new clothes and tuck my stupid tags—and the name Dakar—back under my shirt.
Two days to convince her I’m a dream come true.
And now with a concussion!
36
AURELIA
Being with Athan again is the hardest and most wonderful thing at once.
Sorting through my bag, I find a few of my pamphlets tucked in a folder, the ones I’ve collected for this post-war period, and they taunt me cruelly. I glance out the window at Athan, waiting for me in the sun. I should tell him what I really did during this war. The incriminating leaflets I wrote against his own army—against him. I promised him, in the letter I never sent, that I would explain it all in person. But now that I have him right in front of me—wounded, tired, hollow—I find the words have disappeared.
They’re simply not helpful right now.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as I tuck them back into the folder, rejoining Athan outside. Together, the two of us wander the gardens, savouring each foot of earth that is ours to explore. I try to take him to visit the horses, but he refuses to go, even more apprehensive of them than he was last summer, so instead, we lie on the grass while he points out the Safire aeroplanes that fly overhead with droning regularity. I learn them all, the small details only he knows. Fighter. Reconnaissance. Light bomber. Transport. I have to ask questions, to fill the silence that he seems hesitant to disrupt, and I’m frightened of the truth surfacing before my eyes.
He isn’t the same.
Before, he was full of sunlight, eager to lead the way and explore the world round us. Now, that only shows in cracks, in startled moments when it’s almost an accident. A wry comment. A smile flickering to life when I tease him. He’s tired and full of weight, an invisible thing that makes him move more slowly, consider his words more closely. Perhaps it’s the lingering concussion. Lark said he fell off a horse once and earned himself the same injury—it kept him struggling to read for months afterwards.
On the second afternoon, after Athan’s taken something for the pain and enjoyed a good night’s sleep, he begin
s to shift slightly. His eyes are brighter. His words quicker. We swim together in the narrow stream that winds through the estate, diving for colourful rocks and whatever else we can discover below. It feels bolder in the wetness. His hand finds my ankle, dragging me along, and I push him from me, laughing, before I realize that I’m practically in his arms. The water feels safe, like we’re not actually touching. But we are touching—his shirt off, his arms and chest against me, and I commit to memory the way his sun-golden skin looks this close, a few freckles along his shoulders to match the ones on his nose. All of him firm to touch, yet too gentle, like fine-spun flesh ready to be snuffed out with a tiny puff of smoke.
The memory of fear still makes me ill.
By evening, stories finally trickle from his lips. Stories I don’t want to hear, but I must—for his sake. Planes burning up. Pilots on fire. A horse, shot in the head. His spirit is wounded in a place I can’t reach, and I remember my mother’s many lectures, that I don’t want a man who can be ordered and broken. But what if we’re all fractured? Every single one of us, struggling to hold the pieces in our hands? And perhaps the ones who can’t be broken—perhaps they’re the ones I want nothing to do with.
I want a heart that breaks. A soft heart.
“I just think too much,” Athan admits at the end. “I shouldn’t be telling you all this.”
“No, you should,” I assure him. “There’s nothing you can say that will frighten me.”
I wish I could say there’s nothing he’s done that would make me look at him differently, but I know that isn’t true. Wickedness has happened, and my heart begs him not to tell me anything that will destroy the perfect vision I hold of him.
He’s not like them.
He’s good.
“Do you think this invasion was wrong?” I venture, wanting to hear him say it aloud. Needing him to say it, now that he’s admitted these horrors. These things that clearly needle his sense of honour.
But he’s silent, still studying the sky above us.
I think of the photograph I saw, of General Dakar with the dog at his feet, beside my mother. I’ve wondered in sleepless nights since if perhaps the General once believed in the Nahir’s quest for independence. The theory isn’t as entirely preposterous as I might have imagined. I’ve always believed that Lark and Athan would have had much in common, had they ever had the chance to sit down and talk. But whatever the long-ago truth is, it’s doubtful Athan could imagine the possibility of an alliance with the ones who destroyed the bridges and trapped them. And that photograph would condemn Dakar as easily as it would my mother before the League.
“Perhaps what you told me last summer was right,” I suggest carefully. “You said we can’t force loyalty on others, that maybe the people of the South were right to resist, and now here we are yet again. Coming across the sea and thinking we know best. Perhaps all we do is make things worse.” I pause. “In fact, I think if you really thought about it, you’d realize you Safire have more in common with the Nahir than you’d like to admit. Your fire for change and independence. Your resistance to the old ways of monarchy. Maybe you—”
“You think we’re like them?” Athan interrupts sharply. He peers up at me as if I’m mad.
“Not entirely,” I clarify. “But perhaps a bit.”
He pulls himself to a sitting position, and gone is the shame and sorrow from his gaze. Now there is anger. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Ali. The Nahir, they’re … honestly, I don’t even think they know what they want. They just create chaos. Destroy things. That’s it.”
I stare at him, piqued by the fact he’s sounding like Jali Furswana. “But you haven’t seen what goes on in Thurn,” I rejoin. “There are photographs that—”
“Might be lies,” he finishes.
“You think pictures of dead children are lies?”
“Maybe.” He shrugs. “Maybe not. I haven’t seen them.”
We’re both thoroughly annoyed now, refusing to surrender, and the certainty in his voice frustrates me. I’m sure I sound equally unyielding, my dark secret taunting.
Yes, the man you’ve been fighting, the one who designed this war, who’s been burning up the whole world and spreading discord, is in fact my uncle, my own family, and my mother never even lifted a finger to stop him.
But I force a smile, a practiced smile from a lifetime of formal dinners, as if our disagreement doesn’t matter at all. I won’t let it sabotage our precious time together.
“Stay tomorrow?” I ask quietly instead. “One more day?”
He hesitates, then nods and leans closer.
“I believe in you, Ali. You alone are true.” His hand moves to my cheek. “And I will always try to be good for you.”
* * *
I find him doing sit-ups on the fourth morning—a wonderful sign, because it certainly means his head is feeling better. He’s always awake before me, sketching on the terrace with tea, soaking up the quiet of the gardens, the early sun still creeping in at the corners. But this morning, he’s shirtless on the lawn, and I watch for a long while, not wanting to disturb his rhythm.
Eventually, I can’t resist.
I kneel down beside him with a grin. “So, Lieutenant, how many of these do you have to do?”
He pauses briefly, panting. “Can’t stop … forty-one.”
“Does this help with flying? You look miserable.”
The teasing question works, and I’m beginning to enjoy how easily distractible he is, so quick to follow a shifting target. He sits up, sweat glistening on his bare chest only a foot from me. One simple breath of a foot away.
“I’m strengthening my core to avoid blackout while flying,” he explains, as if he really does need to justify this to me. “I wrote you a letter about it actually. I guess it’ll be waiting for you in Etania. One of our pilots went into a steep spin and blacked out, came out of it only a few hundred feet above ground. Lucky bastard. I’d rather not test my own luck.”
“Makes sense,” I say, shifting closer and copying his position on the grass. My arm brushes his. “Let’s do our sit-ups, then, so we don’t black out.”
“Forty-three,” he says, leaning back.
“Forty-three,” I agree, doing the same.
He grins. “Cheater.”
We do a few in quick succession and my stomach begins to burn like it’s being torn in half. I give up after six, and Athan pretends he was going to finish at fifty anyway.
“Next is push-ups,” he says cheerfully.
“Stars, no.”
“Come on, Pilot. That stick gets heavy in a dive.”
“Can’t I just watch you?” I ask slyly, because he’s on his hands now, his back exposed and glistening and I might as well simply state the truth. He has a lovely back. And lovely shoulders. The kind I can’t help but imagine lying beneath, his chest above me, strong and—
“Watching won’t save you from the enemy,” he interrupts seriously, his arms holding him up, ready to begin.
“All right, fine,” I say, and mimic him again.
Fantasies might help this go faster—and I can’t ignore a subtle challenge.
We make it through only two before I fall into the grass.
He looks down at me, amused. “Do they not make you do push-ups in the palace?”
“Can’t we at least eat breakfast first?”
“You might not even get breakfast on campaign.”
I laugh, because it dawns on me suddenly that maybe I should have been swimming laps in the pool with Jali all this time, instead of sitting round writing pamphlets and studying my Savien book.
Savien!
I jolt upwards, and Athan does the same. He raises a brow at my sporadic shift, but little does he know what a surprise I have. On my knees in the grass, I take a deep breath, preparing myself to slaughter a language I barely know. “How are you, Lieutenant?” I ask in Savien, the words sticky in my mouth. “It is a perfect day and I love the sun.”
T
he reaction is better than I could have dreamed. His eyes widen in astonishment, and then a smile stretches bright across his face—an entirely beautiful smile. “You…?”
“I’ve been learning from a book,” I admit, switching back to Landori. “But how do I sound?”
I test a few more silly phrases—basic words and greetings—and his smile grows even larger. “You sound amazing, Ali! Your accent. I love it!”
I feel myself blush, because I’ve never thought of myself as having an accent. He’s the one with that pleasant feature. But I suppose I must, to his ears, and the idea is unexpectedly satisfying.
I assume my position for another triumphant push-up. “Let’s try again?” I suggest, since I refuse to let him best me without a solid effort on my part. Surely, I can do at least ten. I place my hands back down and sharp pain stabs my left palm. “Ow!”
I snap back onto my knees. Red pricks my skin, and Athan immediately takes my hand in his own. “Ow,” I say stupidly again, because it’s all I can think of.
Athan stares at my palm. “Oh, God. A Resyan bramble.”
“A Resyan what?”
“One of our soldiers got this in his foot during the encirclement.”
“And?”
He looks up at me. “We had no choice. We had to get rid of it.”
“The thorn?”
“The foot.”
All of a sudden, my happiness dissipates. I don’t even know what the stars a Resyan bramble is. This is my kingdom—or was, so I thought—and I’ve never heard of a poisonous weed with thorns this dastardly!
“Athan.” I can’t hide my panic. “We need to get this out! I’ve never—”
I realize his face is contorting with pleasure. It lurks at the edges, then blossoms into the loudest laugh I’ve heard since he arrived. Joy, like pure sun, and I swat him on the shoulder—hard. “You’re truly awful!”
He smirks gleefully. “I couldn’t resist.” He reaches for his pack, pushing his charcoal pencil and paper aside. “I’ve got antiseptic and everything else—minus the painkillers, obviously,” he explains, “but I’m not really a medic. If you trust the air force training I had, though, I think I can handle this.”
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