But for all the peace surrounding us, my heart was wild within my chest, thundering blood through my shaky legs. Every doorway and window loomed menacingly, every undulating shadow twisted into snarling faces, ready to spit epithets at my glowing blue eyes. Barloc was quick, almost too quick, and I stumbled more than once trying to keep up with his pace. The third time I went down with a swallowed cry as my knee slammed into the rocky pathway and cut open.
“Quiet!” Barloc hissed a warning, pausing to glance back as I clambered back to my feet.
Halvor was there in an instant, gripping my elbow, helping me up, and even once I was standing he didn’t let go, sliding his hand down my arm to enfold my cold fingers in his warm ones.
“Are you all right?” he murmured, so low I barely heard him, let alone Barloc.
I nodded, too nervous to speak. Young girl rang through my mind again, but he didn’t look at me like I was nothing more than a young girl when I glanced up at him and our eyes met beneath the stars. His hand tightened over mine and something responded in my chest, hitching my breath somewhere between my lungs and throat.
Barloc made a small noise of impatience, and as one we both turned to face him.
“It’s right there.” He pointed to a house that stood across a larger pathway dividing two rows of homes. The house he indicated was encased in darkness, but burned with light from within, every window glowing, eerie shadows moving across them as the inhabitants rushed from room to room. Even from where we stood across the way, I could sense the panic, the desperation—it seeped out through cracks in the house’s mortar and slithered toward us, calling to me.
A flicker of fire awoke in my chest, reaching toward that home—to that injured person within.
I hadn’t even realized I’d begun walking until Halvor’s tug on my arm pulled me back to a halt. He quickly spun to place himself in front of me, our bodies mere inches apart. I’d never stood so close to anyone—let alone someone … male. It was … flustering. I could smell him—oak and ink and salt and a vague hint of something citrusy. I could feel the heat of him. His lips moved. “Someone’s coming.” His voice was barely audible, but it was enough. I stiffened, a rush of cold dousing the flicker of power urging me toward that home.
“Bit late to be out, Master Barloc.”
I didn’t recognize the female voice, but she didn’t sound accusatory.
“I was worried about the Dunlox boy. Came to see if there was any change.”
There was a clucking noise, followed by a sigh. “It doesn’t look good, not good at all. And she just lost the baby last year, too.”
“That poor woman.”
She’d lost her baby already and now her son was dying? No wonder she was willing to risk the punishment of stealing me from my cell to try and heal her boy. I had to get to her—to him—before it was too late for this one as well. Halvor must have sensed the urgency surging through my body, because he moved in even closer, holding me back, so that his thighs brushed mine, and my breasts pressed against his chest. He squeezed the hand he still held once—a warning. I had no choice but to wait for this woman to pass.
“What are you doing out so late?” Barloc queried, turning the focus from himself masterfully.
“Long night at the pub. There were a lot of upset townsfolk needing a drink before bed.”
“Ah, I see. Do you wish for me to accompany you home—make sure you arrive safely?”
“You’re too kind, Master Barloc, but these old bones know the way just fine. Thank you all the same.”
“Well, I will bid you goodnight then, Madam.”
There was the sound of shuffling feet, a returned farewell from the woman, and then silence. My heart beat so hard I was certain Halvor could feel it—partially from my desperation to get to the injured person in time, and partially because I had never stood like this with a boy before—with a man. And some strange, unknown corner of my heart not focused on the imminent healing urged me to ignore everything else and to inhale the scent of his skin more deeply, to tilt my chin up and look into his eyes once more, to let the curious cacophony of sensation in my belly grow and expand and encompass my entire body—
“She’s gone.” Barloc’s muttered announcement startled me. Halvor moved back so suddenly I stumbled forward a step at the loss of his body. I hadn’t even realized I was leaning into him. “Come on.”
I wasn’t sure if the note of irritation I heard in Barloc’s voice was real or only imagined because of my embarrassment, but regardless, I hurried after him without another glance at Halvor.
Instead of going to the front door, Barloc led us around the side to a door at the back. I followed, but each step that carried me closer to that door—to more strangers, more people, not my home—grew heavier, my feet slower. I was eager to help, I needed to help … there was just so much fear inside me, chewing through any courage I might have possessed, tearing away my foolish confidence that I could do this. What if I couldn’t save the son?
It was too late to turn back now.
The home bordered the forest, so there were no neighbors to witness him rapping softly twice and the door swinging open moments later to reveal a woman with wide eyes, a tear-streaked face, and a half-falling-out bun.
It was still a shock to see another face—too many new, different faces—than the only three I’d ever seen for fifteen years.
“She came?” The woman gasped, her eyes immediately moving past Barloc to find me, awkwardly hovering a few steps away.
“She wants to help,” Barloc answered before either Halvor or I could.
“Come in. Hurry. He’s not…” She broke off, her voice catching, and instead gestured while opening the door wider.
Barloc moved aside so I could precede him into the house. After a deep, fortifying breath, I stepped through the doorway into a kitchen where a fire burned. The overly hot air smelled of yeast and herbs and something else beneath it all, something putrid.
That panic—the desperation I’d felt seeping out toward me earlier festered within the home, filling it with a dread far greater than my paltry fears about facing strangers, entering a home I didn’t know, or even my concern that I might not be able to save him. My conviction to help—to at least try—returned tenfold, swelling within me, leaving no room for anything else.
“He’s in here.”
I followed her out into a small hallway, the scent of herbs fading and the putrid undertone taking precedence, toward another doorway, where a tall, thin man hovered. The woman brushed past him with a touch of her hand on his lower back, and he moved so I could follow. I felt his gaze trained on me but kept my focus on the woman, preparing myself, trying to summon that flicker of fire once more.
“He was one of the spearsmen,” the mother explained. “He hit the monster, but the monster swiped him with its claws and—”
Her words stopped computing when instead of the boy on the bed, my gaze landed on the man standing at the footboard, his arms folded across his chest, his dark eyes trained on mine.
Javan.
TWENTY-SIX
ZUHRA
My father opened the door to the castle and gestured to the opening with a flourish. I stood a few feet away, unmoving. I’d never set foot in any building besides the citadel in my life—unless the dilapidated stables counted. But beyond that doorway was so much more than just another threshold. It was the line between the life I’d lost and the new one here—in Soluselis, with the Paladin. Without Inara.
“Zuhra?”
I summoned a smile, tremulous but hopefully convincing, and forced my feet to carry me forward, to where my father waited, his own smile faltering a bit at my hesitation.
If I’d believed the grand entrance to the citadel to be large and ornate, it barely held a candle to this one. Everything there was stone, somewhat dark and imposing. Here, everything was so open, so bright.
“It’s pretty remarkable,” my father commented quietly from beside me.
I merel
y nodded, not sure what to think—or say. It was breathtaking and amazing and … not my home.
After a pause, he continued, “It might take a little getting used to.”
I followed him silently, attempting to take it all in. The walls and floor of the castle were made of polished white stones that gleamed like untouched snow. Pools of sunlight shimmered in perfectly spaced intervals from the skylights overhead.
“They’ve given you a room just up here.”
“I don’t need a room.” The same refrain I’d already repeated multiple times. Giving me a room implied my stay was anticipated to be long enough to require a bed. “We have to leave today—we have to go back.”
“We will,” Adelric assured me, as he had multiple times. “But you can at least get washed up and rest for a moment, while the council convenes. I was told there are clean clothes and a bath already drawn up for you.”
I bit back a reply that I didn’t have time for a bath or rest. The urgency of the situation didn’t matter; when word of my arrival with Adelric’s battalion—and how my arrival had happened in the first place—reached the right ears, they’d agreed the council needed to assemble to decide what to do next. But it took time to gather them all.
How much time, no one would tell me.
The one thing that had been made clear was that no decisions of this magnitude—choosing to open the gateway—were made without the entire council. And they were not all at the castle at that exact moment.
So I took step after step in my father’s wake, each press of the cool stone against my bare feet a reminder that I was walking away from my sister instead of toward her. He paused at a door, gave it a light rap, and then pushed it open.
“Here you go. I’ll be back for you as soon as I hear anything.” But he didn’t retreat, instead shifting his weight side to side, his gaze moving from my face to the ground to the empty room and back again.
My father.
In all the turmoil of the last several hours, that truth hadn’t had a chance to do more than skim the surface of cognizance. He’d saved me, hugged me, claimed to love and want me, brought me here, and was fighting to get his mother—and the council—to hear our plea to let us reopen the gateway. All these things I’d seen, felt, been a part of … and yet, in that moment, as we stood there in that beautiful hallway, just the two of us, it truly hit me.
This was my father. This man—this living, breathing Paladin—had once loved my mother. He’d once loved me. He’d given me my olive skin and Inara her burning eyes. He’d been a hissed curse in our home, the unseen ghost that dodged all our steps, and the aftermath of his supposed betrayal had obstructed every doomed attempt to learn more about who—and what—he was.
But Adelric was none of those things—not a curse, not a ghost, not even an aftermath. He was real and he had crinkles at the corners of his brilliant blue eyes from laughter and lines at the corners of his mouth from heartache, and a habit of talking too fast when he was nervous, and a scar near his left ear, and he’d cried when he realized who I was. He’d cried.
“What happened that night?”
The whispered question was out before I could think better of it; but I knew the events surrounding Inara’s birth, nearly sixteen years ago, were what had kept him standing near the door, his hands shoved into the pockets of his trousers, rather than immediately leaving me to my proffered bath and rest.
“Why were you even near the gateway and not with Mother?”
His eyes snapped to mine and the Paladin fire that made them burn guttered, smoky anguish and haze-smeared regret clouding the brilliant blue to smudged ink. “That night was … I never would have gone up there if I’d known—” His stumbling starts and stops only reinforced the realization that what my mother had assumed happened had been so very, very wrong. “Your sister … what is she like?”
“Inara is…” How to describe her? How to put into a few unworthy words all that made her who she was? “She’s … she’s everything.”
It would have to be enough, because my throat closed off and there were no more words. Inara. Her back arching, the blue fire racing through her veins, out of her hand, and into that door, opening a gateway and ripping our tiny world apart.
My father—our father—nodded and swallowed. “Inara,” he repeated, rolling her name over his tongue, the lilt of his accent turning the single word into music. He shut his eyes and tilted his face up to the edge of sunlight from the skylight above. But not before I saw the sheen of tears—for her, this time. For Inara. “I felt it that night—I felt her coming. I’d heard stories of such occurrences, but…” He paused, then restarted. “I was so young when the Five Banished found the gateway and reopened it, thrusting us into your world. I was very knowledgeable about some things, but sadly, not others. So when that swelling of imminent power gathered near your mother as her labor began—when I sensed the hedge responding, I wasn’t entirely certain what it meant, but I had my suspicions.”
Question after question piled upon the last as he spoke, until there were so many they filled my mouth entirely and I could do nothing except listen, silently choking on my lack of understanding. The Five Banished? The hedge responded—to Inara’s birth?
“My greatest fear was that if the birth sent that surge of power out into the world, as I’d vaguely remembered hearing was possible, that it would be enough to reopen the gateway again, since it was in such close proximity to us. I’d thought the citadel the only safe place to bring your mother when she decided she wished to marry me. It was … a dangerous time in Vamala for a Paladin. But there were many safeguards prepared by the Paladin who built the citadel that would protect our family from any of the king’s garrison if they were needed …
“I’d never thought until that moment that I might have actually put us in even greater danger from what could be lying in wait on the other side of that gateway in Visimperum.
“So I kissed your mother and told her I had to see to something and went to the Hall of Miracles. I had to protect my family. I only intended to create a barrier of some sort, to slow or stop whatever might come if the gateway was opened, and return immediately to the birthing room—but the baby came too fast. I felt the moment of her birth; the shock wave of her power entering the world hit just as I was climbing the stairs. It was like an explosion had gone off from behind me, knocking me into the door just as the wave of her power hit it. It did just as I feared and opened the gateway. But instead of something coming through into our world, I fell through it back into mine … and it shut behind me, trapping me here.”
“You … you were trying to protect us?”
My father rubbed a hand over his face, deep lines etched into his forehead revealing themselves when his brows drew together. “I have fought and pleaded for fifteen years to have the gateway reopened—even just for a moment—so that I could go back. And I have been refused every time. I never got to see Cinnia again … I missed watching you grow up … I never even met Inara … I—” His voice shattered, the shards of his grief impaling me, crushing every last preconceived notion I’d had forced on me, and when he lifted trembling, hesitant, terrified arms, I willingly and gratefully stepped into his embrace. “Zuhra,” he said, and my name was a shudder that started with him and ended with me. “Oh, my little girl. My little girl.”
The deep timbre of his voice, the sunshine and soap smell, the strength of his embrace—so unknown and yet achingly familiar all at once—brought a surge of memory that I had lost long ago. The name I had learned back then, back before Inara and the surge and his disappearance. This man—this Paladin—this father. He wasn’t just Father to me. “Papa,” I whispered, and his arms tightened even more as my own tears—of anger at the injustice of it all, the grief at the years stolen from us, and the hurt spread across us all—joined his.
* * *
The room they’d given me (who “they” were, I wasn’t sure—I just knew it couldn’t possibly have been Ederra, who I hadn’t seen a
gain) was smaller than my room in the citadel, but it was warm and bright, with the same glowing white walls and floors as the rest of the castle. Two large windows let in gobs of sunlight, making the cream and yellow curtains and bedding practically glow. A freestanding copper tub had been dragged in and set up in the corner near the armoire. The water was no longer hot, but it was clean and smelled of lavender and mint. Despite myself, I couldn’t pull my clothes off fast enough to sink into the fragrant bath. I didn’t sit in it long, as it was barely even warm to begin with and only continued to cool. I quickly scrubbed the dirt and blood from my skin, wishing the guilt and grief were as easy to remove.
As I passed the washcloth they’d provided me over each part of my body that had been ripped apart or shattered by the attack, the only physical reminder of what had happened was a shiver of memory, a blurry, smudged recollection of the pain I’d endured. I propped my foot up on the edge of the tub and inspected it—the skin was flawless, no bruising, no marks, not even a hint of scarring. Completely healed … because of Raidyn. The memory of his presence inside me sent a wave of gooseflesh over my skin. I’d never experienced anything like it. And then when he’d saved me from falling to my death … the way he’d held me, calmed me …
I shivered in the cool water and forced myself to stand, grabbing the towel folded neatly on the chair set next to the tub, and quickly rubbed myself dry. The clothes they’d left on the bed were softer than anything I’d ever owned—and they were obviously brand-new. I lifted the delicate white underclothes and fingered them reverently. They felt like clouds slipping over my body, silky and smooth and so clean. No matter how hard I tried, none of my clothes at the citadel were ever this fresh and spotless … years and years of wear were impossible to erase, no matter how much care I took with my washing and darning and attempts at embellishments.
The blouse and skirt were also unbelievably soft, and fit like a dream. Fitted enough to show the form of my body, but with enough room and flow to allow easy movement. They’d also left me a pair of trousers, but I’d opted for the skirt. I’d never worn pants before and I didn’t dare try them for the first time now, when I was planning on going before an entire council of powerful Paladin to plead with them to do something they’d refused to do for fifteen years.
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